harmony

there is a fantastic sunrise out my window, crimson. yesterday, i seem to have killed my computer. i have a cold of some sort, yucky throat. today is election day. my car goes into the shop this morning. i have many unfinished jobs.

this morning i awoke with a micro-epiphany: i'm attracted to music because there is little harmony in my life. music fulfills a deep need for me and suggests to me that i might one day find harmony. i grew up in a dissonant family. we all had good qualities and individually we excelled in our own ways but as a family we chafed. coherent dinner conversations were rare. more typically they were fragmented and occasionally upsetting. perhaps because of growing up in this environment, or for some other reason, i can count on one hand the times i've felt completely at ease, harmonious. they have all been after intense experiences which exhausted me, brought me back to an essential self that was profoundly harmonious.

so, as i'm learning about how music works, i feel i'm learning a big life lesson i somehow missed. i'm learning how harmony is built. for whatever reason, as a child i was much more inclined to chaos, and since then have always enjoyed disaster. my first drawings were about rockets exploding, houses catching fire (dad & mom?). in pre school i would paint a nice house, decorate it, the flames would erupt from a window, smoke poured out in the form of black paint and filled the paper as if it were a container until the entire sheet was black. i accompanied my painting with sound effects. i remember the amusement of my teacher. but as true as this state of mind feels to me (in that the world i grew up in felt chaotic and threatening) i have always recognized (sometimes with fear and loathing, sometimes with sappy abandon) the peaceful. deep down beneath all my armor, i am attracted to harmony. it moves me. i can be brought to tears when i turn on the news and hear about nations resolving deep tensions, people making up, an animal being saved.

i see all this tension, resolution, dissonance, and harmony reflected in music in a profound way. i see how that if you start with a note, a fundamental, and build upon that with certain relationships, you get a something that sounds harmonious. and when you put things together that have no particular relationship to each other you get chaos (noise). if i had a fundamental notion about my bedroom or my desk there might be the possibility of some harmony. but as they are, if you could turn them into sound, they would at best be an ugly chord tending toward static.

my advisor in college said to me after i'd had trouble with an architectural design, "you can really only have one or maybe two ideas in a building." he was speaking of a fundamental. i remember watching picasso in a movie create a painting. what impressed me most was how he never contradicted his own moves. he only built on what he'd done, harmonized with himself. i'm learning from music to consider my own fundamentals, listen for them, build upon them and harmonize.