Coffee, music, and artsy thoughts

I feel a little sick to my stomach, as well as a little jittery. It's like I can't sit still; I'm tired, but I don't feel like I can rest. It's probably the coffee I had earlier. Maybe I need to eat something, or drink some water.

One of my new favorite stations on Pandora is my "Philip Glass" Radio, especially as background music for doing homework. Last semester at Biola, Paul Barnes, a musician/composer and monasticism advocate, came and did a lecture about minimalist music and monasticism. I have the notes from it somewhere, but at the moment I can't remember much of what he said. I do remember being incredibly impressed by his preview performances of some pieces he'd be playing at a concert later that night, which I couldn't go to because I had to read Dante's "Purgatory" for class, and I was visiting my sister Rebekah in L.A. He had some really cool stuff to say about minimalism; I'll try to dig up my notes and post some more about it later.

Anyway, it's Paul Barnes' lecture that introduced me to Philip Glass, because Barnes and Glass have been collaborating on some huge composition project for something like eleven years now. If you're a fan of excellent piano/orchestra music, and if you get tired of the typical classics like I do, check it out on Pandora. I get tired of the normal, and sometimes I need something a little more abstract to keep me refreshed and interested.

I haven't sat down to play the piano in a long time, which is sad because I have a piano all to myself here at my parents' house. When I'm not taking lessons, it's so hard to keep in practice. But Philip Glass' music makes me want to drop what I'm doing and go play piano. And to me, that's a mark of good music - that is, music that makes you want to hear/play/create music.

The same goes for any kind of art form, really. I think that art - be it music, literature, studio, theatre - should inspire the study and creation of more art. And it seems like it always does, because the thing about art is that there's never just one way to do or interpret something, so people are always coming up with something new and different.

It can be frustrating; I think we've all had times where we throw our hands up and say, "It's so subjective! What the hell is art, anyway?" That's a real aspect of it. But what I love about the subjectivity of art is that it means the conversation will never end, the creation will never cease. Artistic expression will never be exhausted. Humanity will never come to a point where we say, "That's it. We've seen and learned and said everything there is to say, and we have expressed it in every way that we can. We have completed our endeavors in art."