Life Unlimited post 5 Music Composition

Today I met with my group in order to start filming two of our interviews for the documentary project. We interviewed two people today one was a composer that Jackie knew and the other was Noelle's fiance. We interview them on two different subjects which were the ideas and composing of music and the idea of this meta physical concept called the "Octave". I wanted to use this blog post to relate the two to Orfeo and what I had learned today. First there is the "Octave" which in a metaphysical sense and how I understood it was like a set of stairs to life. Each note is supposed to represent a different step in our life at different Octaves or stages. An example of such would be birth to the age of eighteen when a person becomes an adult. One of the notes in the octave would be Do or my birth another say Mi would be puberty and the final Do would be me turning eighteen which would be me starting another chapter in my life. This can be applied to anything that changes stages I supposed or anything that has an order of events like the example that we will probably use in our documentary was ordering food at a restaurant. I compare this to Els's life in the story as it flashes back to the days of his youth and his journeying off towards his world of music. He begins with clarinet, meeting Clara, breaking up with Clara and meeting Bonner. All of these things changing who he is and how he had thought about music and then starting the cycle all over again when he had his daughter and again with the losing his home and bacteria (note I have not made it that far into the book). These things have changed him and I would like to think that the idea of the "Octave" is a good representation of how not only Els's in the story has grown, but of how we all change and grow. As for composition of music we interview a man by the name Christopher Rudolf who Jackie had know as he talked about the life cycles of a composition, the purpose of a composition, and how he would explain the feeling of composition to those who don't know much about music. The things that interested me the most was what he said about the life cycle of compositions and how he had composed things. He had said that each composition will have different life spans and examples that he had used were Bach, the Beatles and your average pop song. Bach's music he had called eternal, the Beatles he had said have had a good life span for the past forty to fifty years and most pop songs he had said die out kinda quickly. This kinda reminded me of Els's goal of wanting to create a song that people would remember or change their views on music. Rudolf when talking about writing music had said that his goal was to make people smile, but that the ideas for creating music can come at any time be based off of any emotion and take various times to write. Which I assume the Richard Powers was trying to convey through Els in the book. At least those are my thoughts on what the subject of composition.