22 Dreams

Ludwig van Beethoven is King.  Beethoven is my hero.  Beethoven is my musical everything.  And I am Schroeder from the Peanuts cartoons, albeit a dark-haired version of the boy with the stripey shirt and toy piano. I love Mozart too but I tend to have qualifications about Mozart, he the sublime master who passed away a couple of months short of his 36 th birthday.  Mozart's music, at its very best, is absolutely first-class, and much of his later quintets and concertos read like an honour roll of great music.  I'm particularly fond of the master's piano concertos and his quintets for various instruments such as horn & clarinet.   The problem with Mozart for me is that, despite the easy  listenability of his music and the melodic and harmonic grace he bestows on upon his work, there is something essentially impenetrable about Mozart.  I find there is a steeliness to his music that's somewhat difficult to really warm to, or relate to on a deeply emotional level. ...

I rarely get around to listening to the radio these days.  However I've recently succumbed to the aural airwaves because the CD player in my car tends to chew out more CDs than it accepts. I enjoy listening to CDs in the car because that's usually the space where I can unobtrusively practice my singing, which I imagine, sounds invariably like a dog barking, or a coyote howling. So with my CD player playing up on me I tune into the radio where I hear what are likely to be new releases, but I'm so out of the loop now I wouldn't know which songs are new or which of those are five or so years old. What annoys me so much is that the songs I hear are hideously stupid. I can't believe that most of the tripe you hear passes off as "music", the lyrics are dumb and so is everything else. Perhaps I set too-high standards, or expect high standards from that which I listen to. The song that is really riling me at the moment is this thing called 'Raise the a...

I cracked open my first module today for the online creative writing course I joined up for.  I'm nervous and remain unsure of where to go with this.  It's difficult to concentrate on too much information in one sitting taking into account I've been at work all day.  I listened to the first two modules today.  One sentence that struck me in particular is that when one famous writer got asked what's the difference between a writer and a non-writer the answer is "writers write".  It's that simple, explained the module presenter.   I'm not comfortable with the word "writer".  I just enjoy writing without that tag being entrusted on me.  I mean, Dostoyevsky is a "writer", and yet so is Augusten Burroughs for that matter, and Andrew McGahan, both of whom reflect my style and attitude and experience in ways that the aged masters of tome could never do.  I suppose I don't see too far beyond my contemporary urban nihilism, unless we...