Hundreds of times I have felt the need to comment on the tragic issues of everyday life worldwide that surpass all fiction, dramas that a human being cannot even imagine, let alone capture or ‘comment on’, criticize or analyze.
In my case, the lack of ‘speech’, and my involvement with orchestral music place me in an area where few can perhaps ‘read’ my political thought if I do not express it ‘outside of my art’, and only as posts on social networks.
But does my speech ultimately matter outside of my art? And why should an artist speak ‘beyond his art’? As a wise man of his time? As an expert? But everyone is an expert now. What good is one more?
Some people have gone all out and identified those who don’t speak out as cowards, ‘don’t dare fearing the authorities – as if they’ve ever helped us…’ And I wonder if they believe all this or if they just want even more toxicity on social media.
But does it make sense for an artist to be preoccupied with current affairs? We all know about propaganda works in the history of music, about commissions that composers undertook for many reasons, and I certainly have no right to judge. But if any of these works have survived, it is because of their artistic value and not because of their ‘instructive’ mission to society.
Even autobiographical writing itself is deeply questionable to me, if a work does not speak in a broader way concerning the audience. Otherwise, why should I engage an audience with a personal problem, pain, desire, dream, fear if this feeling cannot become part of it?
I recently read in Orhan Pamuk’s ‘Museum of Innocence’ a character saying that the pain of love goes underground and sits at the base of all other pains, and even if you hurt for the death of your father, for the injustice that is committed before your eyes every time a child goes hungry, your personal pain hurts deeply along with the other pains, for yourself, and for your own love. How pain is transformed into something universal, how we cry for our own pain every time something external moves us or saddens us…
I am writing these thoughts now as I compose a work about extreme love, about pain and redemption beyond common feelings, and I feel that I am ‘stealing’, that I am using all this pain and sadness that I feel for so many reasons, channeling them and making them one with the emotions of my music, even if they are not purely romantic.
I cry for the mother who loses her children, for the little girl who will never know what it’s like to be loved, for the man who couldn’t protect his children, for the anger of the one trapped in fate, about the hope that you cannot kill even if you leave it paralyzed, and I am ashamed that some will think ‘here, the world is lost and he tells us about his loves…’ without of course suspecting that an artist may not only be talking about his own experiences… But how else can you exorcise such evil? How else can you find the courage to believe that there can be a new bright day? How else can you name hope with a word other than utopia? I can only say love, love for life… but it’s better to speak with music notes because there we can unite with our deepest pains without baptizing them, without characterizing them, without looking for reasons to be misunderstood…
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