“Meadows” is the first of a series of electroacoustic music and video compositions intentionally produced for meditative, mindful, and prayerful moments to be experienced through concert or exhibition audiences, small group therapy, educational or corporate climate improvement, or individual personal practice. The series will feature a variety of captured moments from visually compelling scenes composed with minimal sound sets for the purpose of facilitating focus on breath and inward presence within a simple slice of time.
For me, dissonance demonstrates innate resilience. Most people cannot listen to anything discordant. If one looks up definitions for dissonance and discordant, they will find two meanings for each. Both are defined musically as tension, being harsh, or lacking harmony. Unfortunately, these words carry on the same meanings in the context of humanity’s inability to be together in peace and harmony.
Sometimes, whether it be industrial thrash metal or European serialism, listening to harsh music allows me to release my tension by embracing it like a child scribbling finger paint on a wall-sized canvas or thinking like a poet writing in a stream-of-consciousness modality. But music can also be passively dissonant as experienced when listening to very ancient motets composed in the middle ages. There is nothing like a Gesualdo madrigal resolution from a tense harmony melting the soul in your stomach from your auditory command center!
Allow yourself to embrace what you at first may perceive as clashing discordance. Breath with the flow of the voices. Stare into the movement. Become one with the pulse of the wind. Air knows no dissonance.