Dance Music

Shiva in flagrante

The Facts of Creation

The Facts Of Creation

Pastkual -  Rulo´s Broken Face (Original Mix)

Pastkual -  Lola´s Theme (Original Mix)

Sliegh Ride Eb Dec03 2022 T1 NV - 12:3:22, 5.10 PM

White Christmass Nov 15 2022 London T1 - 11:15:22, 4.36 PM

Winter Wonderland Dec 17 2022  T1 Cv  - 12:17:22, 4.02 PM

Reviews
“…very moving and original.” No Transmission
“a masterpiece!” Null
“You are one of the 2% of artists to whom Couleurs Jazz Média has made a promise to share... Congrats!” Couleurs Jazz Média
“amazed that you're composing pieces that are nothing short of classical genius work.” Sandhya Surendran
“an elegant and moving piano piece that features a unique combination of pulsating rhythm and emotive expressiveness. We'll feature your music on the 59th edition of our radio show "Noitinha Groove." Rádio Armazém


Debate has long-raged over the primacy of reason or emotion in music. Aesthetic theory is divided into two camps: emotionalism on one side, formalism and contextualism on the other. Named for the mathematician Giuseppe Peano (1858 – 1932), this piece proposes a conclusion to that debate.   

Peano made outstanding contributions to the fields of logic and mathematics. Among them, the standard set of axioms describing the phenomena of natural numbers known as the Peano Axioms. Logic relies on fundamentals like "subject" and "negation" to make sense, but also and significantly, on structural elements of form, for example, proposition, argument, and conclusion. Music is more than similar. It makes sense by using fundamentals like melody, harmony, and rhythm, and formal structures like exposition, development, and recapitulation.   

Logic is built to express reason, and music—most of it anyway—expresses emotion, but words used in logic, like "negation," carry emotional meaning. Music, like logic, must make sense, but inherently, there is powerful reason in emotion. We may fall in love or become angry based on an illogical fallacy, but that is, nevertheless, the reason for our feeling. Conversely, and despite our fantasy of being capable of emotionless reason, there is powerful emotion in reason. So often, reason and logic are overtaken, if not obliterated by the far more powerful phenomenon of emotion. We would like to think we're guided by reason, but pit reason against emotion and emotion wins every time.  

In place of the usual emotional expressions used in scores to guide performance, like "con calore" (with fervor), this score uses terms of logic like "predicate" and "conclusion" to argue the issues at hand. In this piece, my conclusion to the argument comes in the final section to be played in the manner heard in a sweaty Cuban nightclub where the piano player has hands too big to fit the keys and emotions too big to be bound by reason.

Score available at: 
https://www.scoreexchange.com/scores/84263.html

Chamber Music

The Peano Propositions

Reviews

“Oh, what a special masterpiece!” Null
“I think it is magical.” LaAbril Dávila
“Success!” Entre Acordes
“The graceful melody of your music fascinates.” Chaam Sound
“ …an incredibly nuanced composition.” Sandhya Surendran
“…surprising and creates a mystical and enveloping atmosphere. If you appreciate jazz and instrumental music, this is a work worth listening to. It's a unique opportunity to experience new musical horizons and let yourself be carried away by the author's creativity.” Rádio Armazém


On-going debate asks whether music can convey meaning, and if it can, how does it? Of course, these arguments devolve into semantics. What do we mean by meaning? Leaving conundrums aside, the question of “meaning” in music, as we commonly understand that word, fascinates me.

This piece wonders how meaning is made, especially as posed by Noam Chomsky’s now famous sentence, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” He purposely constructed that nonsensical sentence to research how we make meaning in things—even things intentionally devoid of meaning. Absolute music is an example. The composer intends it to be contemplated as pure music, as artistic abstraction without rational meaning, but I’m not sure that’s possible.

As Chomsky’s research showed, we seem compelled to discover or make meaning, intended or not. When we read Chomsky’s sentence, we can’t resist trying to figure out what it means. Is it emotional meaning as in a poem? Are “Colorless green ideas” and “sleep furiously” metaphors. perhaps for unresolved theories struggling for completion? Even from nonsense, we try to make meaning. It seems that besides meaning in the rational sense, e.g. the futility of war, or love conquers all, we also understand emotional or supra-rational meaning. “I don’t know what that piece is supposed say, but it really means something to me.”

  Even when a composer intends meaning, explicitly or implicitly, it seems to be no more valid or meaningful than what a listener may find—or invent. We may clearly understand what the composer intends to communicate from a program note or the music itself, but we aren’t simply receiving that information. Our minds compare, relate, and otherwise contemplate the music in many ways. Whatever the composer may have to say about it is only one of many aspects to which we respond and that determine whatever meaning we may or may not find.

As Chomsky’s sentence demonstrates so clearly, meaning is not solely conveyed by the composer’s intention. As listeners, we make it. Like composing, listening is a creative act.

The Dance
  A Maker in a sidewalk workshop builds various abstract objects and stands them outside, never interacting with passersby who enter singly and interact with each other in pairs or groups as they agree and disagree about the purpose or use of the objects. Social hierarchy, hubris, grief, sex, mysticism, etc. animate the dancers:
  A Maker who calmly, but fastidiously makes abstract objects, e.g. a pillar, an open triangle, a tall rectangular frame, etc.
  A naive and very curious Young Woman.
  A constantly confused and nearly naked Holy Man of unidentifiable origin and denomination.
  A middle-aged and harried Business Woman.
  A slick and overly confident Venture Capitalist.
  An irascible, but practically minded Bum.
  A sad young Genius whose great intellect always leads him back to where he began.
  After most have exited in frustration or confusion, the Maker sits down with his lunch box and thermos and eats his lunch, oblivious to the remaining dancers trapped in, or struggling with things he’s made.

The Maker for jazz orchestra

with Acidbat "Spider & The Bat"

My Heart Went Boom

Lotus

Written for dance, this piece explores the human compulsion to find or make meaning, exemplified by Noam Chomsky's now famous sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. For Solo Piano

We immediately associate Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater with church because, of course, it’s a contemplation of Mother Mary experiencing the Crucifixion of her son, a defining event of the Western world—in many respects, the defining event. But none of that story took place in a church. It took place in 1st-century Judea, a city that socially, was not really so different from our own. 

If we recount the events in plain language, without religious associations, it’s a story that occurs every day in every city around the world: a mother’s child is brutally, senselessly killed with a gun. More often than not, the child is innocent in every way—innocent of any crime, and still so young. We see images of this repeated on the news without end. A weeping mother cries out in unbearable pain, the “reason” for the killing pathetically meaningless and insignificant compared to the loss. 

By our inaction, we allow this to continue. We’re told, “You can’t save people from themselves,” but isn’t that the opposite of what Jesus told us? Isn’t that obviously wrong weighed against the eternal love and devotion of a mother? Their countless cries and prayers through the ages have not been answered. Our mannered sympathy and bizarre rationalizations do nothing to end this. We are as brutal as ever. That strikes me as hopelessly tragic. I would be overcome with despair, except for this: 

As these images and sounds come from my television, what I see every time is a mother standing as a pillar of strength, begging, demanding that we abandon antiquated ideas and uphold the fundamental ideals of civilization: co-operation, harmony, compassion. 

This dance marvels at the towering, inexhaustible strength of mothers—mine and yours—as yet another begs us to change.

Scenario
In a city, a mother walks 
toward her son in a playground. 
He waves.
She sees a man pull a gun.
He fires at someone. Vanishes.
The crowd slowly clears
as mother looks for her son.
He lies dying.

She lovingly cradles him.
He struggles for his last breaths. 
On-lookers gather. 
He dies in her arms.

She tenderly wipes his face,
neatens his hair,
then gathers her strength
to defy the pain
that would drive her insane.

Police arrive. 
The on-lookers offer sympathy. 
She is lucid, 
filled with fire, 
but also compassion.
She begs, pleads 
that we stop this senseless violence forever. 
Everyone leaves in shame.

She watches her son taken away. 

She is alone.
Where to go? What to do? How to live?
What for? With him, went her hopes, 
her dreams—her life.

Her son returns to inspire her love,
joy, and the strength to live. 

His memory begins to fade. 
She fights to stay with him, 
refuses to let him go.
He shows her he will always be with her.
She watches him vanish
into eternal bliss,
then faces us,
arms outstretched,
asking us to come to our senses.

Music For Dance

A Mother's Tears

An interpretation of JS Bach's Chaconne from Partita No. 2, arranged for solo piano

In the commoner’s graveyard in Cothen, Germany,
a freshly dug earthen grave, 
a clutch of wilted flowers on top left by children. 
No gravestone or other marker.

A strong and fit man of 35 
carrying a suitcase
runs to the grave. 
In panic and falls to his knees. 
This is Johann Sebastian Bach. 
The woman, the girl he adores, 
the mother of his children, 
lays buried at his feet. 

Rage erupts. 
His legs shake. 
His mind races through a thousand images. 

Her eyes. 
Her kiss. 
She bore him seven children. 
He remembers when they first met, 
their first embrace. 
They were married when he was just twenty-two, 
but now, 
only thirteen years later, 
in the prime of their life, 
she is gone.

Delirious with anger, 
he cannot understand. 
He's losing his mind.

A woman appears.
It’s her, his deceased love, 
Maria Barbara Bach, 
playful and flirtatious.

The dance,
as they loved to do.
Lustily, laughing, 
competing to down steins full of beer,
tricking each other.
She calms him. 
Fills his heart with peace.
It’s OK. It’s going to be OK.
He must care for their children. 
He must live. 

And he must let her go.
He says farewell. And she to him.

Farewell My Love for solo piano

Score: http://www.issuu.com/jacquesbailhepublishing
Video: https://youtu.be/-Hpb4KxaQec

Variations for Two Pianos and Two Cellos on Pawel Syzmanski's Dwie Etiudy na fortepian

How do we "get" jokes or understand metaphors—or understand both at the same time? For example, "The euphonious subtitles of this piece, Superior and Inferior Temporal Gyrus, roll right off the tongue!" Our ability to make sense of nonsense apparently resides in those two parts of the brain, just above the right ear.* When we respond to jokes and metaphors, our Temporal Gyri show high activity, but even more interesting, this is the area of the brain that lights up when we have epiphanies, or what we sometimes call a Eureka Moment: a sudden insight into something we previously could not understand. In formal scientific terminology, this is called the "Aha! Effect." No kidding.

Jokes, metaphors, and epiphanies, are each the result of finding connections and similarities between non-sensical abstractions. Abstractions are often maddening things: impenetrable riddles without clear answers and seemingly devoid of practical use—until we make sense of them. Most often, we do so not by beating our head against the wall and grinding out a solution. Epiphanies more often come when we're relaxed, floating in a dream-like state. Thoughts about unrelated things rattle around in our minds until our Temporal Gyri come up with something and we're suddenly snapped out of our dream state by a Eureka Moment.

Pawel Szymański's Dwie Etiudy for solo piano is, I suppose, what could be called abstract music, but that might be a mistake. It's filled with wit, similes, and references to music from hundreds of years ago, in particular,  the music of Bach. I was working on a piece by Bach when I first heard Dwie Etiudy, thanks to pianist Anna Von Urbans, and immediately imagined fragments of Bach's fugues and cantatas echoing back after hundreds of years floating around the cosmos. These fragments and oblique references apparently lit up my Temporal Gyri. The abstract aspect of Szymański's music vanished. His ingenious form, cadences, and melody became clear and I was suddenly filled with ideas.

And that's what these variations are about—the nether world of floating in relaxation and then out of nowhere, that sudden burst of Aha!

*Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

Aha!

Composer - California, USA
View Scores at:
http://www.issuu.com/jacquesbailhepublishing
Buy Scores at:
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/jacquesbailhe
ASCAP

Farewell My Love for solo piano

Jacques Bailhé

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Anomon

Torumtay Altan | Composer

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