This is another dichotomy that is in evidence in the XXI century. While music during the Romantic era tried to appeal to our emotions and to make us feel our humanity, music became more interested in appealing to the intellect in the XX century. Schoenberg and his music based on numerical sequences was trying to develop a system that would make people listen to his sequences of pitches in a different way than they were used to, guided by a concept of series of numbers, trying to follow that sequence of numbers throughout a piece, regardless of past usage of thos pitches or of conventions. This, I think, was an attempt of breaking our emotional bonds with the musical structures of the past through the use of our intellect. I think Schoenberg might have been trying to develop different conventions and have certain series of notes mean something emotionally different that they had meant up to that point. However, I think that the effort, in general, failed. That type of music has not changed popular music to any marked degree. Maybe it has expanded the chords that one can use. Maybe it has allowed us to envision a different music but we are still in a tonal universe, where major and minor scales are used all the time. Which leads me to another dichotomy:
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It is now the Winter of 2024. I finished several new works at the end of last year: Overcoming, for the John Muir High School Choir, Hineni (Here I Am) for the San Fernando Valley Master Chorale and Jarocho L.A. for the Centennial High School Band. In December, my work Echoes of Mexico was premiered by the Pierce College Band. I am involved with the Helfman Composers Group in the setting of poetry by Israeli authors about the October 7 attack. Additionally, I am at the research phase of a new work for choir called Galut (Exile), a cantata which will portray the Jewish exile from the year 70 A.D. to the present. Right now I am looking for original writings, including diaries, poems, letters, describing the different Jewish communities in Europe and Asia after the fall of the Second Temple. And I’m trying to get The Nightmare and the Dream; Herzl and the Creation of Israel, in the hands of a small group that can perform the work at low expense in different venues.