Mundane

When I thought of Mundane I was waiting in line at a coffee shop. I admired how earthly everything seemed, how simple, and how accustomed I was to ignore it, I was inspired by the beauty in that simplicity. So I decided to write music about that, about the “simple things.” I observed my interaction with the world for the next two weeks. During this time I went to New York, and I was surprised at how used I became to the noise, the rush, the flashing lights, the hecticity. I took a step back and remembered how overwhelmingly minuscule I felt the first time I visited. This feeling inspired the first movement of the cycle (I. NY.) During the composition of II. Coffee I decided to explore a simple piano language while also including some performative actions to accompany the incredibly superfluous text. The following anecdote is probably the most mundane of all, nonetheless, it fits the character, which is why I thought it would fit perfectly. I love to drink coffee, but not all cups of coffee like me. After a midday coffee run, I got really bad jitters: my head was bent in two, the music at the shop did not make sense, and everything was out of sync. This inspired III. Dizzy, the pedal in the electronics is written in a four/four metric while the piano is written in six to portray this sense of disjointedness. Finally, IV. Ignes Fatui serves as the contrasting movement. I drew the text as a collage from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself which spoke to me greatly during the time of this composition. The reason why I thought this would fit the narrative is that Whitman skillfully conveys the profound beauty of earthly things.

Whitman’s words elevated the feeling of something Mundane to something …special.