scott blasco, compositeur

Fr. Alvin Kimel, whom some readers may know from his former blog Pontifications, has written a new post discussing why he does not believe in absolute predestination. It is, as are all writings of Fr. Kimel, excellent and well worth the time for those with interest in such things.

More specifically, it voices with much greater precision the same somewhat unformed impulse behind my own rejection of my former Calvinism. It was a revulsed impulse, and though I have not put the concentration into formulating precisely why that is (beyond a sense that it profoundly offends God’s justice and love and, hence, God’s core character), Fr. Al has: the doctrine of absolute predestination makes God capricious and unreliable–it makes of God a horror from which humanity needs salvation! It is responsible for the unhealthy fear in which at least Western Christians hold God (not the fear which more precisely signifies awe, and which is itself proper). This, in turn, lies at the root of the Medieval theological troubles which lead up to the Protestant Reformation–which unfortunately kept the same poison for itself, but dressed it in new clothes (I’m lookin’ at you, Calvin). Of course, Fr. Kimel spells all of this out in much greater detail.

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One semester, that is.

Exam week is officially and finally over! The last bits were an exam for Psychology of Music on Thursday evening and a counterpoint project and analysis due last night. That project was a four-voice fugue, which I wrote for wind quartet, and on which I actually started over mid-week after a while of struggling with too many loose ends. The end product is, I believe, considerably better. Tracy and I have joked recently about the Dirt Devil “Kone” commercials, and how I should do my own (with equal pretension, of course): “I’m Scott Blasco, and this is Fugue.”

De Profundis is very nearly done. I have a tentative final barline, but not everything up to it is entirely complete. It will be soon, though, and I have some performers interested in it already. I’m hoping for a March performance. Feedback from people who have heard what I have has been pretty uniformly positive, and I have one person down in Texas waiting for the final product to consider for his new music ensemble (more on that when/if it materializes).

That’s my story. Where I have been out of communication when I should have been in, that would be why. Sorry about that.

I just read (two days late) that composer Karlheinz Stockhausen died on Wednesday. I’m not about to get all “Ye sacred Muses” here or anything, but he was an important (if controversial) composer. I remember being distinctly weirded out by his vocal works as an undergrad, along with the peculiar mystico-universalist sort of spiritual leanings he wrote into many of his works (Stimmung, for example, calls out by name to a plethora of gods–”magic names,” as Stockhausen called them). His recently completed 7-opera cycle, Licht, was structured after the days of the week (employing all sorts of symbolism and [mis?-]appropriating spiritual and ritual traditions from all over the world), and the (to my knowledge) in-progress (and hence, now, incomplete) cycle of instrumental chamber works, Klang, similarly took their bases from the hours of the day. It remains to be seen what importance these rather ambitious projects will hold in the future (it is my guess that Licht in particular may have been intended as a modern take-off from Stockhausen’s long-departed fellow countryman’s most famous work).

Regardless, he will be remembered (for better or for worse) as an innovator in electronic music, and in odd sorts of performance practice (as in the Helicopter Quartet). He had fascinating, if unrealistic, ideas about performance space and time, specifying that some parts of music should be performed simultaneously with others, but completely removed from one another geographically. It was like a music-drama to fill the world–an extension of Wagner’s Gesamptkunstwerk?–rather than merely the concert hall. Over the years I have come to a limited appreciation of some of his works, although I’ve never devoted the time and attention to him that I have to Messiaen or Ligeti (who died last year).

It appears the old guard is leaving us.