Strange day.

11.30am
I'm hanging out my washing to the beautifully restless melodic arcs of Brahms Symphony No. 4, 1st movement. This music could just about make me forget my own name. The weather is strange, sunny and cloudy at the same time, the threat of rain hovering in the distance. It isn't warm, but it isn't cold. I look up at the sky and think how much the indecisive sky reflects my own mood today, and most of the time, and momentarily I soar up above the Hills Hoist, happy for a moment, cushioned by Brahms and the comforting routine of pegging underwear and towels on the line.

1pm
I'm heading into the Conservatorium for my meeting with the degree transfer information officer. I'm no longer taken aback by the wire fencing, although it disturbs me still. I discover that I'm unable to cross the road at the corner of Bridge and Macquarie Streets; the intersection is guarded by ten cops and a giant police bus. I'm running late, I'm out of breath, I just want to go to uni. I stick my face through the fence and ask a cop how I can get into the con. I have to walk all the way back up to the Mitchell Library and cross the road there, he says. The sound of the helicopters overhead bores slowly into my brain as I retrace my steps. I'm late.

2pm
I'm sitting in the Conservatorium cafe when the sound of helicopters grows suddenly louder. I wander outside, munching on my burnt raisin toast (it's all that's left to eat, pretty much; no deliveries can get through to the Con cafe, apparently). I join the small cluster of staff and students standing against the metal barrier, staring up at the sky. Helicopters swarm like giant black flies, and I start to feel sick. I run into David Papp, and we go back into the cafe for a coffee, nursing hangovers and cursing Apec. We talk about David's performance of the Martinu oboe concerto last night. He's happy with the way he played (he was brilliant), which is nice to see. Anthony wanders over and we start criticising the performance of the Mozart last night (piano concerto no. 18, I think). Too heavy, sluggish, turgid, Romantic, boring.

3pm
I'm in the library at uni, feeling stranger and stranger by the minute. Enter John. He wants me to come have tea with him but I can't. I have to go to Dulwich Hill post office to pick up my modem. We go to the admin office, wandering through the vocal department in the old building, singing made-up songs in silly opera voices as we walk, from a musical that we made up on the spot, called 'Gender Bender', stemming from my announcement in the library that I should be a gay man. 'Make Me A Penis' is sure to be a chart topper. We're giggling like silly kids.

4pm
I'm on the bus and I'm not laughing any more as it crawls through thrombosed streets. I think I'm losing my mind. I'm exhausted, tired of seeing wire fences and bins taped up with police tape, hearing the caustic drone of the helicopters, seeing familiar streets transformed into strange wastelands. I try to read The Wire, but I can't concentrate on a single sentence, and I can't stand to listen to music either. I'm suddenly bleak and desperate, trapped here on this bus, completely alone.


It all turned out OK in the end, though.

-You’re smiling. What did I do to make you smile?
-Exist.



I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, waking up at 4am unable to drift off again, lying awake, staring at the ceiling in the dark, thinking too much. I know it’s a classic depression symptom, one that psychiatrists scribble enthusiastically down on their notepads, but I am not sure if that’s why it keeps happening. Last night I could hear rustling and munching sounds in my kitchen; I crept down from my loft bed and flicked on the light, convinced that I would be met with the skin-crawling sight of a rodent fleeing at lightning-speed (a sight that I am unfortunately quite familiar with). But my kitchen was still, quiet, exactly as I had left it. As soon as I returned to bed the noises resumed, as did my sleepless vigil over my dark house. I don’t know how long I lay awake. Strange things happen to time, when you’re unable to sleep, and it’s dark, and all external markers of time’s passage are taken away. Time becomes all-important and irrelevant at the same time. How long have you been lying there for, awake, your mind over-active, performing elaborate calculations of how long until you will have to get up and rejoin the world? Minutes can seem like hours, stretched into eternities; at the same time, hours can slip by unnoticed, because you’ve dozed off without realising it. Either way, it doesn’t matter at all.

This idea is one that’s particularly relevant to me at the moment, as I am currently in the process of writing program notes for Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet For The End Of Time (1941). (This work is being performed at the Sydney Conservatorium on 23rd September; I highly recommend going to see it. I’ll be ushering, so come say hello). While the work is ostensibly based upon a biblical passage from Revelations, about angels and columns of fire and apocalyptic madness, ‘the end of time’ in this work is really the cessation of measured time, and the celebration of endlessness, infinity, eternity. As Messiaen puts it, ‘I did not in any sense want to comment upon the Apocalypse. My only wish was to articulate my desire for the dissolution of time’.*

In the eight-movement work, Messiaen manages to make ‘time’ both all-important, and meaningless; he does this with his own stubbornly unique musical language, which, through the application of obsessively precise and measured processes of rhythmic (and harmonic) organisation, creates a sense of ‘timelessness’, a negation of forward movement. How does he do this? One procedure that I find particularly fascinating is his application of medieval isorhythmic musical processes, which is particularly apparent in the first movement, ‘Liturgie de cristal’. (An isorhythm is a rhythmic sequence overlaid on a melodic shape, each recurring continuously but independently of one another. The overall effect is one of a dissociation of melody, harmony and rhythm). Here, isorhythmic proceses are layered; the cello’s 5 note melodic shape is superimposed over a rhythmic ostinato of 15 values, while the piano’s pitch material consists of a 29-chord sequence over a rhythm of 17 values.** Four ostinati are thus layered; musical ‘change’ in this movement, therefore, occurs only as result of the existence of differing combinations of repeated patterns at any given moment. It’s a paradox that I find endlessly fascinating; the idea of creating perceived ‘change’ from essentially static, non-developing, repeated musical elements. And it’s just one of several ways in which Messiaen’s obsessive attention to rhythmic detail contributes to a blissful abandonment of measured ‘time’ as a perceived organisational principle in much of this work.

Over & out. I've got washing to do, and pictures to stick up on my bare walls.

*Olivier Messiaen, cited in Iain Matheson, ‘The End of Time:a Biblical Theme in Messisan’s Quatuor’. In The Messiaen Companion, ed. by Peter Hill. London:Faber & Faber, 1995, pp. 234-248.
** I got these figures from Iain’s article. I’d love to say that I went through and analysed it myself, but I didn’t, and frankly, why bother when someone else has already been through and counted the chords?