The middle movement from the symphony I am working on is available as an
mp3 file at:

   http://www.mp3.com/ssn

- - -

It is hard writing about what one has written, I mean, unless your are
someone like William Saffire who does it for a living.  It is even harder
to find that pure expression of an idea which has taken several revolutions
round in different forms.

At the side of our sight, before we turn is the world our imaginations
would have us live in - it takes the smallest nuance and expands it to the
fullest of realisation.  When we stare ahead, a deer forages in the middle
of the city, a lost love beckons, a shining coin awaits eager hand.  We
turn to stare, and with blazing attention the vision vanishes before it
is looked at and perceived.

There is no painting photograph or sculpture of my aquaintance where
this world lives and breaths back at me from the canvas.  One would think
with a century of abstraction and free flight we would have found it.  Nor
does the half superimposed world that I understand from the sciences and
philosophy anywhere look back out from the canvas - the simplest of sights
- an image half seen reflection from a window, cast by candle light just
bright enough to couple the inner sanctum with a vision of the moon over
the trees cast in different hues, as if metal grew in the shape of trees.

It would seem this image - occasionally captured on film in a half life
sort of way - would preoccupy painters.  But instead the paint like glue
sticks in gobs to the canvas, and attempts at layer follow the modern rule
of pastiche - a rule obsolete by the time it was made, because it was the
phenomenology of the victorian who could not bear the noise.

It is this world which my music arises from, and grows organically out
of.  The world of superimposed states, patterns woven by the abstacts of
perception, so often naked in the modern concert hall, now clothed in the
shards of reality that cling to them as venus' foam protects her modesty.

In pursuit of this end the fragments of living colour are mere ends -
tonality like perspective and representation only powerful in so far as our
mind will place it there.  In this way by forcing a hyper tension of focus,
it becomes possible to mean the unspeakable without the slightest trace of
irony.

Stirling Newberry
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http://www.mp3.com/ssn