RonPrice

A STRONG ATMOSPHERE

The septuagenarian Finnish composer, A. Yohani Raftavana, discussed how he composed contemporary classical music. He said it all begins in the existence of a strong atmosphere, idea or sound. The composer’s task is to find musical material to correspond to that atmosphere. Sometimes there is a ripening of a tendency, a memory, some aspect of his personality or his history which contributes to, or creates, that atmosphere. There is a universe of experience from your life that stays in your mind, Raftavana said, and, at some unpredictable time, it seeks translation into a sound world. He also refered to what he called ‘a metaphysical Will’ that wants to use the composer as an instrument or vessel for creation. In conclusion, he emphasized that if his music ever became popular it would be banalized. -Ron Price, “The Music Hour,” ABC Radio National, 10:05-12:00, 12 August 2000.

Some atmosphere comes, like a feeling
in my bones, from so many sources,
feels like a hybrid, a playful, surprising
thing that tries to penetrate, aims for
the exquisite through dissection, analysis,
part of the fevered temper, the turmoil
of my age,1 but cooling at last in a luxuriance
by the side of sweet-scented streams,
where I taste the fruits of a tree of being,
where I roam in meadows of a nearness,
while some breath passes over me, inexplicably.

The past is new here, a new tradition,
a new openness, new roots and it’s
happening everywhere,2 especially
since the Plan began,3 since He wrote
It down.4 Now I’m putting it down.

1 The poetry critic Louis Untermyer, on the last page of his 760 page analysis of “One Thousand Years of English and American Poetry,” wrote that poets of our time felt “a fevered temper,” sounded “a sense of turmoil,” a “despair of the present” and a “fear of the future.”(1959).

2 W.H. Auden wrote this of America, his new home. I feel it is equally true of Australia and Canada, my national roots, where I have lived my life; and the Baha’i Faith growing everywhere around the planet.

3 Untermeyer writes that “More than two hundred modern writers of verse have appeared in the last two decades”(p.680)-since the Plan began in 1937 and there have been hundreds and hundreds more writers of verse in the last forty years.

4 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, TDP: 1916-1917.

Ron Price
12 August 2000