Dream #1: Choir of Wind-Blown Voices

It seemed to be a kind of music festival, but with band members milling about aimlessly, some in blue and gold uniforms, others in street clothes, some holding brass or woodwind instruments or drums, others empty-handed. In the background voices were singing. But was a choir performing or practicing? 

Either the piece was experimental — I found the music jarring and irritating and wanted only to get away from it or have it stop or at the very least cover my ears — or the conductor and various sections had completely lost track of each other. Musical phrases that sounded as if they should be sung in interlocking beats and measures were ahead of or behind each other, so that instead of harmonies the sounds came in unexpected, overlapping discords.

In a moment, then, my hearing of the choir changed, and the music came to me like ocean waves in a storm, each wave crashing over another before that other had reached the shore, although these waves of sound, being airborne, while still commanded by the winds as are ocean waves, were being blown about yet more haphazardly, and I realized that this was the intention of the music. And now I wanted the voices never to stop and never to sort themselves out and come together, because for now they were an entire universe of breezes and zephyrs, trying out what worlds they might make, and for now all was possibility, all was freedom, all was whirl, and no beauties had been foreclosed by the actualization of any others.

11/19/2019