Boy

I think I have my next script in mind. The last one was about death and sex. I might reconsider recording that in a Catholic chapel. I mean God is no idiot. S/He knows all about our tawdry thoughts and actions, and could not be unrealistc enough to think they do not pass through our minds while in church. But then evil and sin are defined by actions. Not thoughts. So actually uttering words like cunt and orgasm in God’s house might be wrong. And it would certainly be interpreted as such by some listeners. But to me all the smut and glory exist in the same continuum. And the church itself is not without its gruseomness. Christ on the cross would be considered offensive today if the image was adapted to modern times. This would place Christ in an electric chair, or being injected with poisons.

Anyway, the next script might actually be the first one to play. It’s about me. It’s called boy. It will go something like this:

I am a boy.
I say this with no embarrassment or apprehension.
The voice you hear is different from what I hear in my head. I hear the tinny, high-pitched voice of an 8-year old.
Like a lot of things it reminds of something my mother once asked me. It was a curious question made moreso by the earnestness with which she pursued the matter. She wanted to know if I could still feel like I was 8 years old. I was in college when she asked this. She wanted to know if I thought that earlier stages of life were still available in your consciousness. I didn’t have an answer at the time. She asked because she wanted very badly to revive that feeling of being a child.
Truth be told I don’t the child inside ever drowns in the lava of adulthood. And my mother, as I came to understand in later years, was every bit the little girl she said she wished she could be again. I remember the one time she talked about her father.  Her voice changed. I had never heard her talk like this, with this cooing voice. It sounded like an owl. It was the voice of a little girl talking about her father with a mix of awe and trepidation. She was afraid to talk of him. I don’t know the cause of that fear but it sounded so much like the voice of a little girl that I could barely recognize the words as coming from my mother. It was the voice of a little girl afraid that daddy was coming home, and so she had to clean up her room or do something that he expected of her. This voice lasted  several minutes, and I never heard it again.
I’ve been hearing my voice in the music of Mozart. I spent hours the last several days playing the C Major Sonata, K. 330. It is not new to me but I’ve never practiced it seriously until the last week. The seeming effortlessness of Mozart’s work belies the quantity of revisions and just hard work that went in to it. But that’s for another discussion. The music sounds like it comes from the mind of a child. That is meant as praise, not that Mozart needs any of mine. But the voice I hear in Mozart, and this C Major Sonata in particular, is the guileless, flailing innocence of a child.
Many musicians, the greatest among them even, have conceded that they just never “got” Mozart. Richter, toward the end of his life, lamented that he had simply never cracked the code. I am not saying that I have but it came as something of a revelation to think that everything Mozart wrote was opera. It’s true what Horowitz said. If you want to understand the work of a composer you must know all their work, not just the piano music. And from there when you understand that composer’s greatest work or the genre in which they did their best work then the piano music makes all the more sense. This may be more true of Mozart than any other composer simply because he wrote so fluently for every instrument and every genre. But his operas are clearly the crown of his oeuvre (love that word). Beethoven’s greatest genre was the symphony. Schumann and Schubert’s were the song. Brahms… Idunno offhand. Chamber music, I guess. Bach’s greatest works were the masses and sacred works. It’s been too long since I’ve listened to that stuff.

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Hmm.. That script should go somewhere. It gets too brainy with the composer summary analysis.

Oh and a funny, kind of dystopian thing happened after I recorded that Mozart sonata. I posted the video to YouTube and promptly received claims of copyright infringement. YouTube has algorithms that scan uploaded videos for copyrighted content. I think they call it the audio fingerprint, which is what Shazam uses to name songs played into it. Apparently YouTube thought I sounded a little too much like not just one but two commercial recordings of the same Mozart Sonata. When this happens they automatically place ads on the video and the copyright holder receives royalties from the ad revenue.

I filed an appeal saying this is obviously not anything but my own performance of Mozart. Human beings looked at the video and apparently they agreed. The claims of infringement were withdrawn. So, happy ending, right? Except it made me wonder how many record companies earn royalties off content that is not even theirs? I mean a little kid could post their video of a Mozart sonata and, if they got the same infringement claim as I did, they might not understand it or they simply might not care. So they just let the ads run and the company YouTube claimed owned the rights to it stands to make money off a performance they had nothing to do with.

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