New Music: “Tales of the Laughing Dragon”

With this piece I’m just having too much fun with a symphony orchestra!

The second section of the piece, by the way, is a ‘canon’, which is fancy music-jargon for a ’round’ like “Row Row Row Your Boat” (although ‘canons’ can also take other pretty interesting forms). For you music readers, music world has a ‘shorthand’ for notating canons—’Row Row Row Your Boat’ would look like this:

In other words, the first group starts with line 1. When group 1 reaches the end of the first line, they continue with line 2, at which point group 2 starts with line 1, and so on. When the first group reaches the end of the last line, they continue with the first line.

Here is my canon (in the second section of the piece) in this standard canon notation (with my apologies for the alto clef but with either the treble or bass clef there are WAY too many ledger lines):

• Here's the the whole piece (6:26)
• Here's the the first 30 seconds

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Inner Alchemy

In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, much was written about ‘Alchemy’—best known for its attempts to convert lead into gold. But really, alchemy in general was more ‘proto-science’—these alchemists laid much of the practical groundwork for modern chemistry, metallurgy, and medicine which was to follow.

(And alchemy was not a purely Western concern—there is also Islamic and Chinese alchemy.)

But in addition to these practical concerns, many alchemical writers used the metaphors of alchemy as a way to talk about the Spiritual Path under the radar of the Inquisition and other unsympathetic religious authorities. (You were just as likely to be burned at the stake by the Protestants as the Catholics). For example, for these writers, turning lead into gold was a metaphor for turning the Human Heart from Lead into Gold—in other words, the path to Enlightenment. This has come to be known as “Inner Alchemy”. One of the first researchers to significantly explore this field was Carl Jung.

These “inner alchemists” left behind an enormous body of literature—and images. I have found this literature, and its images, to be marvelous metaphors for my own Life Path, and an empowering source of inspiration for composing music.