An Interior Garden
Dear Friend,
I am hoping to generate funds with this site both to fund projects, such as a performance and recording of my full length piece for chorus and orchestra, Canticle in Praise of the Divine Feminine; and to help me keep body, soul and teeth in one place a little while longer! And I also would like to use this site to share with interested souls stories, music compositions for Western voice and ensembles, art, a novel, thoughts, and ideas in progress.
I like simple, and have a rather simple-oriented mind, but this is rather complex thing for me to do. Just organizing the site, and writing this note to you, there are numerous things to explain, and to try to work out. I have so many things, in progress. This is for both good reasons and bad reasons - unfinished due to personal fault, unfinished due to cultural causes, and unfinished due to calamity. I have certain propensities and convictions my whole life, from a very young age. I remember. It might be called an urge to extreme privacy. It may be perhaps be a collection of acronyms. I think in many ways I would have been happier, have found things less difficult and fit in better, born into medieval Europe, or India.
Peristylion, is ancient Greek for an interior columned courtyard that houses a garden. The modern Greek term for this is esoterikos kepos, which contains the root, esoteric. The word esoteric is good in that it of course means, inner. But not quite right in that I am trying my hardest to bring them out. I like the resonance evoked by the ancient Greek. But in hope of making sense and being understood, I will call it by its denuded, modern English equivalent, Interior Garden. I love plants, and I like the idea that these compositions and stories and idea are growing still. And I can invite you in here. It strikes me that this is not all that different from show and tell, in elementary school. But I am seventy-two.
My primary interest in life has been at the fore, music. But behind and coincident with my interest in different kinds of music, and particularly the music of my inspiration and sitar teacher, Vilayat Khan, is the meaning and function of style. I feel that if we could understand style in all of it many functions, we would understand life much better. And I am interested in story. Story works upon us in many ways, and we live and breathe in story our whole lives. I also feel that the German Romantics were in large part responsible for what happened in Germany in the 1930s. A timely topic, given what is happening in the world. This caused me to decide that words, the specificity of words, was vitally important. And that drama was the ultimate art form. Sitar music at its best is metaphorical drama, with two characters: the self, and the divine. All art is identity art. And perhaps identity is what life is all about. I understand what Rilke meant, when he said somewhere that he wished he had less heart, and more brains. Not that I feel well or deeply, but I live most naturally in feeling. And I understand King Lear’s daughter. When I near that which is of the very most importance to me, I stutter and feel overwhelmed. I never went to college, and I am not all that bright. I think I know what to chew on, but have a heck of a time doing so. In my defense, it is very hard to have a new thought. But I think that Solomon was wrong. There are new things under the sun.
So you will find here, sitar, original operas, a mass, an oratorio, chamber music, a novel, ideas, poetry, art, maybe even a bit of guitar playing. And I am thinking, possibly, a new kind of autobiographical essay, Born Romantic.
I am painfully aware that writing here is rather like putting a note into a bottle and casting it into the ocean. If you are reading this, you have found my bottle, and it would be wonderful and I would love to hear from you what you feel and think about anything here.
~David