Today, I've come across some questions in my own head that I often have - brain projects, or brain wonderings, I guess you could call them. These are things that I think about in no regular intervals, but every time my brain wanders back to them (and it continues to do so over the years), I remember where I left of and continue to muse, even though for most of them I've never found an answer. I imagine that other people must have similar brain projects and today I thought I'd share the few that I've come across today.
1) There are so many things in my life that I am interested in. Is one lifetime really enough to experience all of the things I want to? I often feel like I am quite reasonable at a lot of things but not an expert in anything, and I want to be an expert in almost everything that I'm interested in. I want to live on a farm and grow my own food and ride horses every day, but I also want to go off into a jungle somewhere and discover something that no one else has before. But still more, I want to work for Apple and help design the newest and coolest piece of technology that is so cool none of us can even imagine it yet. But then again, I want to be fluent in six languages and work as an interpreter at the UN. And I want to inspire students in a calculus class and run a marathon. And somewhere in there, I want to go hanggliding, go into outer space, and be a dancer in a broadway show. Somehow I don't think there's enough time for all of that. But is there enough time for some of it? Should I choose one and just run with it? Or should I try to do six of them but only halfway? Right now, I've tried to do all of them and it's not even halfway - maybe a sixteenth- or twenty-fourth-way. And I feel like I'm letting myself down, but that's because I keep expecting to be able to do everything. Those expectations clearly have to go. But I can try to do as much as makes me happy, right? Right. Maybe I'll find something that I'm drawn to more than anything else in the future. Right now, it's just all too damn interesting.
2) This thought is a real brain addiction. Ready?
What must it be like to be inside the brain of a composer?
Okay, so if you don't know my taste in music and habits of listening to music, it might not make sense as to why this fascinates me so much. Basically, I love music - music music music. And being a musician and coming up with melodies and songs is foreign enough to me - I just play along to songs that I like, maybe combine three chords that sound nice and consider that a good day. When I think about the writing of pop music, somehow that seems reasonable. You have a team of people, someone likes these chords, someone else suggests these words - I can see how that would come about. But composers?
Let's put aside those giants of Debussy, Holst and Dvorak just for a second. What about even the people who compose music for movie soundtracks? I have just spent the last three hours listening to the soundtrack of the third Pirates of the Carribean on repeat while writing one of my papers. HOW do they do it? Someone says "this movie is about pirates and it needs music". And out of months of work, here come the melodies - the singing cellos and pounding drums, swelling chords and thundering crescendos - and to me, it's creating something out of nothing. It's moving your hands through the air in front of where you are sitting and somehow bringing a beautiful woman into being (yes, music to me is a woman). Out of nothingness.
I just can't imagine what it must be like to be inside those brains while at work. Do melodies pop up the way our thoughts do? And when our thoughts pop up (another thing I'm fascinated by), at least in my head, they aren't in words. They are pictures, sounds, ideas - when I start to talk I realize that I have words for them, but the words aren't in my head before I say them. Is it like that for composers? Do the melodies or themes appear without notes and the notes are just like words for our thoughts and appear only when we need to express our idea to someone else?
I just find it fascinating. :)
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