i also love the movie, by the way

He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness.

At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays - especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare - or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them.

So he switched to opera - usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The "Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more.

Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart.

And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.


from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

The blog's been dormant for a while now.

Not for lack of trying, though... I have four or five entries sitting in my drafts folder that will never be posted. While this space has mostly been reserved for bitterness and cynicism, even I have limits on what I'm willing to subject others to. Typically I will start an entry, and then partway through realize that it is way too depressing to post, and so it gets abandoned.

So, instead you get a quote. Without context. If you really want to know where it comes from, go read the book.

Mr. Clarke and I could have had an interesting discussion about music, it seems. I note that there is no mention of any modern music (which is slightly hilarious, since Ligeti shows up all throughout the movie score).

That being said, while I am currently torturing myself with working on the Schumann Romances once again, I have also returned to the Bach cello suites. It was necessary.

I will probably return to my excerpts soon, and once again devote my energy to exploring all the ways in which the Romantic composers chose to make my life difficult as a trombonist. The thundering declarations and overexuberant marches; the doom and angst and fire and endless adolescence that mark my repertoire; all these things that make the trombone both fun and exhausting to play.

But not just yet.