from my music journal
September 28
I consider the interval of a fifth and wonder what is at the edge of sound. The fifth is a magic interval, circular and round, empty and full. It has an eerie hollowness to it. I am reminded of the soul. Without having actual form or substance, it is the heart of existence.
Where does pitch begin? Where does rhythm, which is circular, start to spiral up? Must I always write in rhythms, or can I slow the upward turning? What is beauty?
October 12
“When you sing,” says Saint Augustine, “You pray twice.” Crickets chirp with candor and cars swoosh by. Sound is sacred in all its manifestations. The voice comes out of the dark, dank breath, truth warmed by my core. My vision is that we all find ourselves as the music and song.
July 7
How do I write of death and connection? The last section of the orchestra piece is clear, starting as the still point. Slowly circling, moving up, the last notes breath into an ecstasy of sound—the kind I love and can hardly bear not to write – swirling blissful love. But how do I get there? The first two thirds of the piece are blank.
The image of the laundry keeps appearing in my eye, a white dazzling continuous curl of fabric. I hear the wind rushing down the mountains, around my face, in my ears, glancing off my legs, stopping. Then picking up again. The rush of life, at its apex, almost a distortion.
December 15
My music is always my guide. The long rhythmic passages I write in most of my pieces are a marathon run of the soul, the process of surrendering to the larger unnamable whole.
At first I run light-footed, and the rhythms are enthusiastic and playful. My intellect enjoys the gait, the wind, and the smell of the earth. I begin to tire a bit, and I am absorbed in the pounding of my soles on the ground, the intricacies and overlaps. But soon my mind weakens to the muscular fatigue, and the rhythms swell.
Now there is no energy left, I can go no further. As I start to fall, there is a moment of pure supplication; my heart leaves my body and lifts upward to the divine – to the color and sound that is beyond words. There is no hesitation, no intellectual chatter, just a slow, graceful fall upward.
Excerpted from Let Your Heart Be Broken, Life and Music from a Classical Composer © Tina Davidson, 2022.
Listen: Paper, Glass, String and Wood, for two string quartets. I. Paper:
It is My Heart Singing, music by Tina Davidson, Albany Records, TROY842, 2006
Performed by the Cassatt Quartet (Muneko Otani, Jennifer Leshnower, Tawnya Popoff, Nicole Johnson), Stephen Manes and Caroline Stinson
Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/My-Heart-Singing-Tina-Davidson/dp/B000FO443K