Above Dawson Pass, Continental Divide, Glacier National Park

Perhaps empty time has structure,
just as wood has a grain.

The central moments of the natural year
manifest much like springs chanced
upon in a journey of a thousand miles.

How shall we rediscover
and celebrate such things?

Above is an arrangement I've made for my OCTET
PROJECT of one of Mozart's most beautiful chamber
music compositions, the sonata for violin & piano in
e minor, K. 304. The soloist here is a B-flat clarinet,
who leads the ensemble.

I'm very concerned about protecting the soundscape,
or sonosphere, as an integral part of our fragile biosphere.
We make the mistake of thinking that the life-layer of
the Earth is infinite, I suppose, largely because a blue
sky seems to go on forever. Whereas, in actual fact, it
is but a gossamer thin layer which makes life as we
know it possible. With the sonosphere, the formative
metaphor is not a line or road running on without limit,
but rather a space which is to varying degrees empty
or full. Like a room. An empty space, is a silent space.

Music in its broadest and most general sense has its
origin, I think, in this empty space of silence. Sounds
appear as living presences, and then return into the
background of non-being.

Are musical sounds—chords, harmonies, rhythms—
merely inventions of the human mind? Or are they like
mathematics, relationships inherent in the nature of
reality itself that we discover? Or a bit of both? Mozart
frequently said that his compositions came to him all
at once, that is to say, fully formed, outside of time. The
above sonata movement was undoubtedly written in
a single sitting. That means, he simply sat down and
without hesitation wrote down the whole, without
stopping, as if in a single breath. This gives the
music as we hear it a remarkable wholeness.

This is how music, just like beautiful images of the
natural world, heals. Perhaps more than we can
ever know.