On Friday evening I went to hear the Toronto-based 'Tokai' string quartet. It was the fourth or fifth time that I've heard them, and they always play well. This time we had Purcell, Britten, Dvorak, and also a brand new work, commissioned—heaven help us—by the Art Council of Ontario. It was a formless succession of scraping willy-nilly and scratching hitty-missy. The composer had simply thumbed through the catalogue of special effects, from A to Z, and written them in as they came. There were openhand violin slaps, and savate strikes to the body of the cello. ('Let's report them for cruelty to instruments,' whispered my companion afterwards.)
Hackwork makes me fidgety. I can't then be patient with my own life-task. And I say to myself: Alright I'm no master, but I can do far better than that. (Plus, the Art Council's $6,775 would do me material good, wretched indigent that I am, living on weak tea and sawdust.) But, then, I'm not ready. Yes, I can here and now write music in most any historical style, from academic fugues with crab-canons to sugarsweet salon romanzas, and even rigorous serial works. But to step out of history and into the present—no, I'm not ready. For I, too, live with the unanswered 'what now?' that troubles so many. (But more on that later.)
And there's so much to do. And it's easy for me with my singlemindedness to be altogether taken up with asides (literature, philosophy, whatever). My time needs governance. I need to spend as much time reading scores as I do books. It's not much, but I've determined to log 1,000 hours of study in the next twelve months. See, here's a moleskin logbook to make it official. To work!
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