2008 Woodie Awards
CO2-Induced Bubbles and the Eternity of Music
Alex BetGeorge '11
Issue date: 10/2/08 Section: Portfolio
A plastic bottle of sparkling water sits on my windowsill, its bubbles rising in intermittent bursts, as the sallow headlights from passing cars outside glide over their multitudinous concave / convex hemispheres. A blaring horn initiates a marvelous nocturnal symphony.
[A song will end, leaving its listener in some pit of despondency (silence) at its conclusion. The structure of a tune's elusive beat seeks to create the unattainable degree of infinite perfection, unfurling an oscillating beauty into someone's ears only to paralyze them with an illusional cloud of wholeness. This is the great duplicity of composed music: It fabricates an infinite existence of perfection, with conclusions to all beginnings, made possible through the repetition of a static note pattern, but then ceases to sound.
By intrinsic definition, the perfect absolute of an immortal string of notes cannot be attained intentionally by a mortal creator.
And so the song ends, leaving screeching sounds that tear through the brain's gray matter, with no subsequent notes to harmonize their severity. Yet such a sound is one event in a world containing an interminable number. If one were to listen to many sounds at once, one could see that they blend together. According to the law of eternity, an event or sound is bound to recur, creating in the space of random increments of time, an unpleasant, but concluded melody. But since eternity is defined as a boundless dimension of time, all possibilities inevitably occur, such that a pleasant outcome will eventually result. Thus, sequences of consonant notes sound themselves to no end, producing the perfect melody.
As finite beings, we are not satisfied with the melodies of eternity, spanning over some sparrow's shrill whistle on some March morning in the front yard, continued perhaps by a doorbell's ring for Easter some fortnight later, accompanied all the while by the bass of alternately revving engines as automobiles climb the neighborhood street's hill. And sadly, we find the music of organized chaos not nearly as pleasing a perfection as a composed melody were it possible for it to play forever. Composed music has a finite degree of perfection that is too extreme to leave the listener satisfied with the sporadic melodies of eternity.
[A song will end, leaving its listener in some pit of despondency (silence) at its conclusion. The structure of a tune's elusive beat seeks to create the unattainable degree of infinite perfection, unfurling an oscillating beauty into someone's ears only to paralyze them with an illusional cloud of wholeness. This is the great duplicity of composed music: It fabricates an infinite existence of perfection, with conclusions to all beginnings, made possible through the repetition of a static note pattern, but then ceases to sound.
By intrinsic definition, the perfect absolute of an immortal string of notes cannot be attained intentionally by a mortal creator.
And so the song ends, leaving screeching sounds that tear through the brain's gray matter, with no subsequent notes to harmonize their severity. Yet such a sound is one event in a world containing an interminable number. If one were to listen to many sounds at once, one could see that they blend together. According to the law of eternity, an event or sound is bound to recur, creating in the space of random increments of time, an unpleasant, but concluded melody. But since eternity is defined as a boundless dimension of time, all possibilities inevitably occur, such that a pleasant outcome will eventually result. Thus, sequences of consonant notes sound themselves to no end, producing the perfect melody.
As finite beings, we are not satisfied with the melodies of eternity, spanning over some sparrow's shrill whistle on some March morning in the front yard, continued perhaps by a doorbell's ring for Easter some fortnight later, accompanied all the while by the bass of alternately revving engines as automobiles climb the neighborhood street's hill. And sadly, we find the music of organized chaos not nearly as pleasing a perfection as a composed melody were it possible for it to play forever. Composed music has a finite degree of perfection that is too extreme to leave the listener satisfied with the sporadic melodies of eternity.
Be the first to comment on this story