1.12 An Update, Dreams, and Hearing the Sea in Music

28th April 2020 — 20/20 vision about our lives — Something different again — 1. What I was doing today — Continued with music and writing — Better not share too much too early — A kind of jinx — Building up resources and tools — Being systematic — Tens of thousands of bars of music — Archiving — Also finished pieces — An Iceland Symphony — Aim to be drastically productive — Building a musical vocabulary — Philip Glass — Starting with a clean slate — From the simplest elements to an enormous range — Doing the math — 2. A dream about a Superman comic by José Luis García-López — Marvel and DC comics and films — A comic book album from the 1980s — A story told in two-page spreads — A car careens out of control in some sparsely populated area — An angle from the seashore toward the edge of the cliff where the car hangs perilously — Not an existing story — Studying and seeing the art in complete detail — What our minds can do — Learned to recognise and studied different pencillers, inkers, and colorists as well as writers — 3. Hearing or not hearing the sea in the music of different composers — Jean Sibelius — Widely recognised power to evoke nature — Forests, lakes, the sea — Inland composers such as Beethoven and Mozart — No suggestion of the sea — Indoors concerns — Nothing inherently reminiscent of the sea about the instruments of the symphony orchestra — Continued evolution of the symphony orchestra — Finnish landscapes — 4. Midsummer — Bonfires by the lakeside — Bright summer nights — Never yet experienced a perfect Midsummer in adulthood — Lakeside setting — Rowing on the lake — Staying in a cabin — Better not talk too directly about your dreams — 5. Watching a scene from The Lion King (1994) — A high resistance — A scene must feel heartfelt — A tear — Ray Bradbury on love — A person who can’t both laugh and cry freely is a sick person — Signs of a healthy person — To better times ahead