C-F#-B

I am eating sugar from a jar. I used to never put sugar in my tea, but now it's just so enjoyable. Plus, really, at 6-7 cups a day it is basically how I drink water, since the tap is never warm and kind of funny tasting. Sometimes I have the sugar for my tea, then just take a little extra spoonful for myself. (If you're wondering: brown sugar)

I've been struggling for the last two weeks with music composition. It's a minuscule credit-weighting, but the work in it is just so unending that it's a good "what do I do now" activity. Anyway, I haven't had a piano but I just bought a 2-octave USB/MIDI keyboard for 100 euros. After wrestling with technology I still had no inspiration, nothing that I could see as "new music," nothing that I feel drawn to add to the West's distended canon.

I thought about my dreams of becoming an ex-pat writer; I thought about Joyce and Hemingway. I thought, how is writing music any different from writing words? I've been writing and listening to this manic Dublin music from Donnacha (comp teacher, Gra Augus Bas), or the minimalism of John Adams (Nixon in China) or Steve Reich (Music for 18 Musicians); it drew me in, but I could never see myself writing that. I wanted to be able to convey a sense of place just as they do.

Now, whenever I sit down to write or revise or piece together ideas, I put myself in the desert (shrub-steppe, if you will). I've found one chord (C-F#-B, roughly) that hits me. I can't get away from it; no matter what voicing I try it in it gives this sense of nothing, openness, no structure yet some clear coherency. It could be put into a tonal idiom but it doesn't fit there either. It is a wasteland. Wish me luck.

I'm going to name the piece (really, 10 short pieces for string quartet) "Wallace," after both the street where I live and Wallace Stevens. As it's a bit presumptuous naming something after a Pulitzer Prize winner, I'll back this up by giving one specific poem that made me take this on:

Wallace Stevens
The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.