New Earth V (In The Beginning, 2024)
“To awaken within the dream is our purpose now. When we are awake within the dream, the ego-created earth-drama comes to an end and a more benign and wondrous dream arises. This is the new earth.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Mama Do Wop (2024)
“I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.”
- Etta James
“Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.”
- Miles Davis
ADAPTATION Blues Rising
“Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
“To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.”
- Aaron Copland
Debora, Amora (single line augmentation #2)
“You know that I immerse myself in music, so to speak— that I think about it all day long— that I like experimenting— studying— reflecting.”
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time. ”
- Lady Gaga
MLK 2024 Augmentation #3 Alternate Version
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”
Hip-Bop
“We love music deeply, but why? Put simply: music makes lives, shapes lives, expresses all shades and
stages of life - and even saves lives.”
- Rasheed Ogunlaru
“Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.”
- Benjamin Disraeli
“To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?”
- Michael Jackson
MLK 2024 Augmentation #3 (The Arc Of The Moral Universe"
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”
ADAPTATION Blues Diminution - Part 3
“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
- Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Jazz Writings
“The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--”
- Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.”
- Plato, The Republic
MLK 2024 Augmentation - Part 2
“Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
ADAPTATION Blues (Four-Part)
“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.”
― James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues
Zulu Blues Diminution
“I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do."
-- Frederick Douglass
ADAPTATION Blues Diminution - Part 2 (for Orchestra, 2024)
“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.”
― H.G. Wells
