David Salminen

The October 27, 2012, 3 pm concert in Portland, Oregon

Concert musings re the 10/27/2012 event… For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading the book (published in 1993, Houghton Mifflin company) by Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi, entitled “The God Particle – if the universe is the answer, what is the question?” – which was the origin of the controversial “God Particle” nickname for the Higgs boson. I’ve been looking at a lot things, actually, in an effort to prepare my mind to do a musical exploration of “The Exploits of the incomparable Higgs boson” on October 27, 3 pm at the Sherman Clay Pianos recital hall in Portland, Oregon… Among the many things I’ve discovered is that Lederman is extremely funny – I recommend his book to anyone who enjoys literary humor. It’s the best funny bone book I’ve read since Robert Benchley’s “My Ten Years in a Quandary” (1936, Blue Ribbon books/Harper & Brothers). Many of the more recent books explaining particle physics take themselves too seriously… and this is how I would express it… As many artists know, a painting you are making, or a novel you are writing, takes on a life of its own. The first time this happened to me, with someone else’s composed music that I was performing for a live audience, I was really shocked. How could this music, in its actualization, seem to be more real than I am? How come it had a life of its own, and was expressing itself in ways quite different to the expressive ideas that had informed my preparatory rehearsal? If you remain totally serious about your manifestations, and imagine your rational self to be totally in control, the results are likely to fall flat… Well, enough said – please share this post with your Portland friends who are open to magic in the broadest sense. Based on certain peculiar experiences I have had over many years, all I do when I sit down to create or play music is “invoke magic”. As the great Amer-Indian folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie used to sing… God is alive, magic is afoot… and as her more irreverent friends used to sing… Magic is alive, God is a foot!

The Exploits of the Incomparable Higgs Boson

An exciting scientific announcement July 4, 2012, out of the CERN scientific facility in Geneva, Switzerland has brought fame, if not fortune, to our most incomparable worker for the masses, i.e. the Higgs Boson. In order to facilitate a creative contemplation of the significance of this scientific breakthrough, I am presenting an admission-free program of cosmic piano improvisations on Saturday, October 27, 2012 – 3 p.m. – at Sherman Clay Pianos on 131 NW 13th Ave, Portland, Oregon, USA 97209. In respect of some of the early work leading up to this recent accomplishment, I am dedicating the concert to the now famous Peter Higgs, who along with other contributors decades ago theorized the existence of the boson that is now named after him, and also to the memory of Satyendra Nath Bose, whose name is immortalized by the term “boson” but whose contributions are largely forgotten (except among physicists, of course).

This free concert (donations to support my artistic project are welcome) will be preceeded with a short digression into the history of the discovery of the Higgs boson and what it means or could mean, both in terms of scientific and philosophical speculation. Of course, there have already been many articles written about this discovery, as a simple web search will demonstrate – how it came about, where the science is going next, and even about what it means to the rest of us! Fun reading, and many cosmic repercussions!

This “boson” concert – musical investigations, if you will – aspires to be a worthy part of the artistic evolution that our increasingly technologized culture sorely needs in order to nurture and maintain a healthy, balanced, and resilient future civilization.

Music as an exercise in wholistic experience… and a manifestation of integration…

After years of creative work, a pianist may discover that the emergent metaphorical roles of the right hand vs. the left hand in piano playing (as opposed to what comes only from copying, training and tradition) take on or project quite different psychological forces. Regardless of whether we “like” what comes out of that collaboration… the aim is all! When the weaker partner (the other side of the brain, symbolized by the left hand, etc.) takes on a conscious role in our lives, equal and complementary to what is more typically dominant in our modern experience, new possibilities emerge. I see this developing in my own music making over time, as I get older and hopefully more mature… Some of my spontaneous improvisations go far beyond what I might have “planned” to create! The “Into the Dark” concert, especially Part Two, which you can find on the video part of this site (recorded by videographer and multi-instrumentalist John-Henry Dale) is a good example of the right/left integrative progress, when compared with my improvisations of some years ago. If you can observe examples of such progress in your own life – whether you play piano or find personal expression in other ways – please write… I’d love to develop this kind of evolving awareness and integration in collaboration with others.

celebrating Sonny Rollins

Sonny Rollins, the wonderful saxophonist and composer now in his 80’s, was announced last week along with several other great & famous performing artists like Yo Yo Ma, Meryl Streep and Neil Diamond, as a recipient of 2011 Kennedy Center Honors. For those of us believing in the positive and open-ended potentials of genuine spontaneity in improvisational work, Mr. Rollins represents a highly inspiring success in both theory and practice. As Eric Nisenson enthuses in his book Open Sky (page 213, published in 2000) “Listening to him play those long solos that can veer in any and every direction, solos that he has created on the spot, and that will never be heard again, is a deeply spiritual experience. It reminds us that we are living in the here and now, in this very moment even as I write these words or you read them. How many of us remain trapped by our past and spend so much time worried about the future, while life is flowing right through us?”

see also: http://www.stlamerican.com/entertainment/living_it/article_784ba790-1f7f-11e1-a2dd-001871e3ce6c.html

Vera Rubin

The October 29, 2011 concert is dedicated to astronomer Vera Rubin – really a legend in our time – who did some of the foundational research in the 1960’s and 1970’s that indicated unexpected galactic behavior and necessitated a complete re-assessment of where the bulk of the mass of the universe is to be located, along the lines of…  maybe there’s ‘dark matter’ out there!  Being a truly independent thinker, Rubin entertains a different explanation of her pioneer data collections than many of her colleagues…  At any rate, her overall attitude is truly inspirational: “The joy and fun of understanding the universe, we bequeath to our grandchildren – and to their grandchildren.”

about the music on this site:

“The Efficiency of Black Holes, part 1” – This is from a live concert in Portland, Oregon, USA – recorded at the Sherman Clay recital hall, February 20, 2011. The title was inspired by a contemplation of the wonders of modern astronomical research that has revealed, for instance, that “The conversion of energy by matter falling toward a black hole is much more efficient than nuclear or fossil fuels.” More information on this mysterious aspect of black holes can be found at this NASA – Chandra – Harvard website: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/bhcen/

Andromeda Galaxy – NASA IMAGE “Andromeda, part 2” – This is part 2 of the Oct 24, 2010 concert, inspired by a contemplation of  the powerful gravitational relationship between our own Milky Way spiral galaxy and Andromeda, the other great spiral galaxy in the neighborhood. The two galaxies are moving toward one another at about 300,000 miles per hour (500,000 km/h), and will meet each other within about 3-4 billion years. After the  3-4 billion year mutual attraction phase, there is expected to be, from the scientific point of view, a 1 billion year “circling dance”, followed by a complete merging together of the two galaxies. My poetic side imagines this as a love ritual on such a scale that it ought to cause us to think of our own human experience of romantic and other forms of personal love as mere metaphors for the cosmic mystery of  the universal  tendency labelled as gravity… Is it possible that gravity as currently understood is only a metaphor for “cosmic love” (for lack of a better term)? Does an ant crawling onto a picnic blanket comprehend the relationship between or amongst the humans who have spread the blanket out on the ground?

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