Just had my exam yesterday and I guess I can’t complain how it went. Felt pretty good about how I played everything, there was the one wrong note but other than that, pretty smooth sailing. It’s taking a while to get the audio footage from the guitar festival so I am thinking to just put up another one of my exam pieces. After that next video should have another original up. Probably another duo kind of piece. I have two originals in mind that I’m thinking of uploading. One is a more upbeat and the other more contemplative. The upbeat one has a bit of a spanish feel to it as opposed to the more relaxed one where I have a classical and electric guitar kind of reciting a poem. Anyway stay tuned for those two and my next video.
So a part of my university degree requires me to do a an architecture unit and so if you’ve been wondering where i’ve been, it has been doing a ridiculous amount of drawings and sketches. I rather be playing guitar honestly but oh well. Such is life. Surprisingly though I have found the subject quite interesting, and as I do with most things I somehow find a way to relate it to music. The piece of architecture we have been looking at is the ‘Farnsworth house‘ by Mies Van de Rohe. It’s one of those ‘you don’t know the name, but you would have seen it before‘ buildings. I don’t plan on analyzing the building here (done enough of that already) but I am interested in the philosophy behind it. The principle is basically ‘Less is More’. To most people, it is just a glass box on a platform, with 8 columns holding it up, but like any great artist this architect has managed to make his master piece look effortless. It is so simple that it simply blends in with it’s surroundings. My understanding of architecture before hand was to fill up as much space as possible and to make the building as complex as one could. Same was my conception of music. I always tried to make songs complicated and technically difficult but overtime I began to see that making something hard for the sake of making something hard only takes away from the piece. In that case, more is less.
What this guy did was just to let the space be. He understands the utility of absence, of the void. He knows what will be used the most. Namely nothing. In a similar kind of way I have tried to adapt this into a musical context. We should appreciate the spaces between the notes as much as the notes themselves. Filling only what is necessary to the piece itself for it is the silence that gives birth to sound. This whole ideology reminds of a little bit of chinese philosophy my dad once told me when I was younger, I think it is quite appropriate to this scenario and definitely to musical composition.
‘We take and mould clay to form a bowl, yet is the space where there is nothing that the utility of the bowl depends.
We put bricks together to make a house, yet it is the space where there is nothing, that the utility of the house depends.
So just as we take advantage of what is, so should we recognize the utility of what is not.’
Might give it a try.
JL
