As I mentioned yesterday, today is FAoL’s birthday.

It all began as a way to keep my mind fresh, to fight off the mid-life blahs and boredom: one post a day, 300 words maximum, for one year.

I’m under no illusions that I have more than a dozen or so readers, but that’s ok. If you’re reading this, please accept my humble thanks for taking time out of your life to read my ramblings, whether it was every day (thank you, my wonderful supportive wife) or only when Facebook was so miserably boring that you decided to click my daily spam. I do get the occasional note from a perfect stranger, thanking me for the blog, which is always uplifting.

At first, I wasn’t sure I could find 365 pieces worth writing about; ironically, I have a long list of pieces I still want to feature. Then I was concerned about finding something interesting to say; I’m proud of many posts, though certainly some are just “meh”. The future? I’ll be reposting stuff I’ve already written, and writing new content on occasion.

For FAoL’s half-birthday, I had a (musical) champagne toast. For its actual birthday, something more sincere and contemplative: Franz Schubert‘s setting of An die Musik. It’s one of Schubert’s 600+ art songs for solo voice and piano. For me, the spirit of the piece is better captured when sung by a choir – music is so much more glorious when it is shared!

Translation from Wikipedia:

You, noble Art, in how many grey hours,
When life’s mad tumult wraps around me,
Have you kindled my heart to warm love,
Have you transported me into a better world,
Transported into a better world!

Often has a sigh flowing out from your harp,
A sweet, divine harmony from you
Unlocked to me the heaven of better times,
You, noble Art, I thank you for it!!
You, noble Art, I thank you!

You know how in Star Wars, there’s this little tiny Rebellion fighting against a big nasty Empire? And you know how a dozen little space ships destroy that big scary death star? Well, it doesn’t always happen that way – sometimes, the Empire strikes back.

Back in 1830, Poland and the other Baltic states rebelled against Russia. Russia sent a big army over and crushed the rebellion, subjugated the people, and maintained its control over that region. And Chopin was maaaaaaaaaaddddd …

He poured his emotions into music – his Revolutionary Etude is a force to be reckoned with. This is a great piece for getting rage and fury off your chest – the only problem is, you have to be an amazing pianist to play it, even at a slow speed. Take that, Imperial scum!

Everyone seems to agree that this presidential election is unpleasant, depressing, stressful, etc. So if you’re sick of listening to all the political bullshit, allow me to give you some very different bullshit for your listening pleasure!

If you’ve taken a music appreciation class, you’ve probably had some John Cage forced on you. I should point out that I like the guy, and I like musing over and talking about his ideas. At the same time, I don’t actually enjoy listening to his music; I think it’s main value is not aesthetic but philosophical.

Among the many cool ideas he had (I say “cool” because I don’t think it’s necessarily “good”) was to remove the human composer from the act of composing as much as possible. From here he began exploring other ways to challenge our ideas about music composition and creation (and, about ourselves and our social interactions). His piece Indeterminacy is a recording of Cage reading random sentences from selected stories, while his friend David Tudor makes random musical sounds with various instruments.

If the music were more typical, and the spoken words made sense, this recording would be same-old-stuff, perhaps something akin to a children’s story accompanied by music. But since both music and words are nonsensical, our initial response is “what the hell is this?” But, to a non-human, both same-old-stuff and the nonsensical-stuff might sound exactly the same. Who gets to define what is music and what isn’t, anyway?