Shapes in Near Distance

In the moment, or now, if you prefer, and over the course of time, ideas and their expressions retain their force.

Certain perspectives have for centuries retained their visionary nature, while others, apparently revolutionary at first bloom, are ultimately revealed to be base, absurd, pointless, or worse.

Time past and time future, as revealed in the arts, are ever laden with possibilities.

Reason and Emotion

Impressions lend themselves to both sentiment and calculation.

Encountering the total effect of a work, the observer or listener will reference personal sensibilities as well.  This may involve emotional excitement or detatchment, intellectual interpretation, and varying degrees of perceptivity.

The composer-- or poet, musician, painter, sculptor, dancer, performer-- conveys thought and feeling to the medium of expression and brings into being a representation of experience, and by such means innumerable connections are made possible in the transmission of culture.

Sound and Word, Vision and Belief

Art moves inexorably in the direction of philosophy.

As reality is expressed, so it must be lived.

Heightened Awareness

Acutely developed senses detect subtle variations in the external world, including those reflecting nuance of mood.

As music for ceremony and ritual of various forms increases a sense of community, so music designed to enhance contemplative states may heighten perception and elevate consciousness.

Patterns, Movements, Changes

Sounds, perspectives, and perceptions change when moving through diverse environments.

One becomes more highly aware of the auditory landscape, more acutely focused upon subtle alterations in the atmosphere.  Organization and connectivity become apparent.  Sounds are differentiated according to various qualities of pitch, tone, meaning, and repetition. 

Among recurrences of the mundane and expected, the beautiful and the strange emerge with the clarity of lucid dreaming.   Such as these are the elements to capture and combine in composition.

Temporal Synthesis

Historical forces shape present and future perspectives, attitudes, and events.

In terms of recording technology, sound formats no longer limit the length of compositions in any significant way.  Works may be brought into being that expand and evolve over a substantial course of time, making changes in perspective as to the duration of musical pieces and the desirability of extended listening (and immersion in sound environments) inevitable.

Sound and time are aspects of the total effect of an aural composition, both contributing to meaning through experience and perception.  Black Mountain School compositions and recordings are designed to enhance atmospheres and produce conditions conducive to contemplative, aesthetically pleasing states of mind while being interesting in themselves in the way of ambient tone poems. 

The extended length of these works is a fundamental part of their nature, and of the listener's experience as well.

Music of the Twenty-First Century

Various forms of expression generate debate and sometimes confusion, not because of what they are, but because of the ways in which they are perceived.

The less one knows by way of reliable information or direct experience, the more narrow and limited one's perspective remains.  Definitions are inflexible.  Expression must be created to conform to specific tastes and genres.  All else is vague, alien, at best only tenuously real.

Equally untenable is the undiscriminating point of view.  An aesthetic sense, a sense of judgement and an appreciation of subtlety are characteristics of reason, self-knowledge, and regard for the arts and sciences as well.

The nature of reality is change, and the modern composer brings ideas and imagination to that reality.