Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Le travail du rêve ne pense pas

Solitude in Music has up a post on becoming conscious of music that has randomly started playing in your mind. And that post got me to thinking: I usually have the opposite problem. I usually get things stuck in my head and it tends to be the same pieces.

They don't really bother me. They just, well, insist like a sore thumb. Recently it was Prince's "Little Red Corvette".(But in my head it's always the Sandra Bernhard version). Before that I was obsessed with Melanie's "Brand New Key". So much that I spent an inordinate amount time trying to work out an elaborate piano solo version. With classical music it's a fairly limited pile of ear worms. The Brahms 2nd piano concerto is one of them. And usually it is the 2nd movement that leaps out unannounced. I'll just be riding an elevator or slicing veggies or whatever and suddenly I'll realize I'm humming it. Or bits of Beethoven's 6th symphony, or some Bach chorale. Is it so random?

At the piano, a different kind of "limited randomness" takes place. What I mean is this: when I sit down at a piano I've not played before, I think it's a bit like shaking hands. And usually it's going to something from a very small archipelago of works leaping without thought from my hands. Why those specific works? I don't know. I don't have any special or inordinate fondness for them. They just insist in and at the moment when hand touches key. Ca parle.

"..a new dimension of the human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but that in man and through man it speaks (ça parle), that his nature is woven by effects in which is to be found the structure of language, of which he becomes the material, and that therefore resounds in him..." (Lacan)

Currently listening to: John Cage - Solo for Cello (1957-58)

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