Stravinksy and inspiration

Yesterday evening, I went to do something I love and have not done in a long time. I went to the orchestra. The performance was of one of my favorite pieces of music: Stravinsky's the Rite of Spring. It was a piece so controversial in its day it managed to start both a riot (at its first performance in conjunction with Diaghilev's ballet), and a standing ovation (when performed as a standalone piece a few years later). Even now, after nearly one hundred years, there are few repertoire pieces like it. It is a stew of ideas that would influence all the major currents of classical music in the 20th century (minimalist composition, dissonance, even elements of serialism). And it inspired one of the greatest, strangest meetings of high art, popular culture, and science: the magnificent Rite of Spring sequence from (of all people) Walt Disney's bizarre flawed masterpiece Fantasia:

That sequence is, for obvious reasons, close to my heart. And in its daring combination of science, imagination, and revolutionary music, let it be my inspiration for the coming months.

Learning Bach to play Beethoven

I'm back on a piano playing kick. The urge has taken me and I feel the need to do something productive, but non work related. So I've dusted off the ivories and am trying to get a good half hour to an hour's practice in a day.
My long term goal is, as it has been for the past decade, to play the entirety of Beethoven's Moonlight sonata. It's been some years now that I've been able to play the first two movements passably to well (depending on time of day, phase of the move, and state of my motor neurons). But the third movement is this:

Technically, it's a very different beast to the previous two. Rapid finger movements in both the right and left hands, and essentially a style that is more baroque (and reminiscent of the harpsichord) then the other two movements. From a simple physical performance stand point, my hands cannot yet handle that sort of athleticism.
A few years later my mother sent me some pieces to practice that her piano teacher had recommended for me. One was a book of basic exercises I was familiar with, and hated. The other was Bach prelude #2 in C minor from his Well Tempered Clavier series, which is a series of preludes and  fugues written, in part, as exercises for the harpsichord. Unlike the other book of exercises however, these pieces are actually fun and pretty on their own.

So I'm putting aside the Beethoven, and focusing on this prelude (at quarter tempo, let's be honest). And while my aim is to be able to play the whole prelude, I'm also using it as a learning tool. I'm focusing on my finger work, and practicing my sight reading (which is terrible). I'm working on strengthening the little finger on my left hand, and making my movements quick and precise. These are all skills that will be vital for eventually tackling the 3rd movement of the Moonlight, but I'm working on them in a context that brings more immediate rewards.
In many ways, much of what I'm doing as a postdoc (though not all), is playing Bach. I'm funded out of my PIs R01 for now, so that means I didn't design this project. And my long term goals (by definition, as a postdoc is a training position of determinate length), are not going to be realised here. So much of what I am doing here is learning skills that I will need to fulfill my long term goals. Yet, on the other hand, I am also doing something that is important and interesting in and of itself in the science I am doing here. If that were not the case I would be as bored and resentful as I was playing scales on the violin. Finding the balance here, between learning what is needed for the future, and doing what is needed for the project now, is key.
Ultimately, I will move on from the Bach when I feel there is nothing more for me to learn from it, and I will tackle what I planned. But I will enjoy learning to play Bach (and who knows, maybe I'll take another detour, and another). And ultimately, I will move on from this postdoc and do my own, other thing. But I will enjoy doing this science while I learn. 

Reinvention

I came to David Bowie late in life. Growing up in the UK in the 90s', he'd already transitioned to Elder Statesmen of music stage. His classics were all pervasive, and as a cultural icon he was instantly recognisable, but like Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and the Beatles, an intimate knowledge of his work was not required as a teenager. It doesn't help that all his musical offerings were judged by the critics to be inferior to his heyday, dismissed as the restlessness of an artist growing irrelevant. Listening to Heathen today, I have to wonder how world changing his 70s work must have been for anyone to dismiss that album as sub par. From any other musician, it would have been exceptional.
It was through his greatest hits CD that I came to a deeper appreciation of Bowie, and a greater interest in his work and career. It turns out I have a liking for restlessly inventive musicians that has over the years lead me to dive through the discographies of the likes of Tori Amos and Bjork. But, of course, Bowie laid the ground work, the basic template for these artists. Both Amos and Bjork play with his interest in personas, syncretic music styles, and vocal acrobatics.
Bowie has become synonymous with his continuous reinvention of himself, which pre dates his famous retiring of Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy, after all, was his second or third persona. There's been a lot written about the personas trick, and it's mostly been viewed as device by which Bowie could continually reinvent his music, to anticipate changes and trends from glam rock to psychedelia to electro soul to straight up electro. But I think there's more to it than just that. At least since the Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane change, Bowie's re-iterating transformations have been part of his appeal. The .gif of Helen Green's illustrations of David Bowie's changing faces that has been going around highlights our fascination with his reinventions.
Such free wheeling transformation is fascinating because, well, most of us don't get to deliberately reinvent ourselves all that much. There are a few moments in life when change is accepted (puberty, going to university), but by and large, we're expected to settle into some sort of stability, or at least of smooth continuity. Try coming into work with changed hair and a completely new style to test this out. And larger changes are more traumatic.
And yet, on the other hand, change, as Bowie himself noted in one of his most famous songs, is inevitable. Sometimes, life forces us into situations in which we must re-invent ourselves, construct new personas. Entering or leaving a long term relationship, becoming a parent, becoming an orphan. Becoming old.. Such events require some degree of reinvention, because some of the modes of existence  from our previous forms are no longer adequate. We can approach these changes more or less consciously, or more or less explicitly. Sometimes, we are unaware that we are transforming, until we realise that we are no longer who we once were. The risk here is that we change, but our image of ourself does not, and so one day we are strangers to ourselves.
As he was mulling over his affair with Albertine, Marcel Proust's narrator in the remembrance of things past realised how difficult it was for the version of him that was no longer in love with Albertine to understand the past him that was, or even to accurately remember what that person felt like. Memory is an active process, not a passive replay of the past, and so our current selves will tend to overwrite our past selves, declare them less authentic, less true versions of us. We are constantly engaged in a revisionist Whig history of ourselves.
The process of 'coming out' that gays such as myself go through in our modern western societies is an example of this process of active re-invention. In the standard narrative, the version of us before the coming out is incomplete, untrue, a cypher of the true self. And yet, this narrative never allows the actual pre-coming out version of the self (or several versions, I can count at least three for myself) to speak their truth, their experience.
I started writing a diary when I was 18 for precisely that reason: I felt my memories becoming less reliable as my adolescence ended and adulthood began. I wanted to leave a record of myself to myself. And sometimes, those old entries are like reading the notes of stranger. Things that are now trivial loom large, and dead ends of thought and growth long abandoned and forgotten are suddenly pressing and current.
In David Bowie's continuous re-inventions, we see a performance of our own lives, our own transformations. We have our equivalents of the man who fell to earth, Aladdin Sane, and even the Thin White Duke in our own lives. What Bowie allowed us to see was that we could be conscious of this change, and perhaps shape it at key junctures.
Our lives are being and becoming, until we become no more.
RIP David Bowie