Darleen Mitchell

Piano Trio Violin, Cello, Piano

Composer's note: Some time ago I had read phenomenologist-poet Gaston Bachelard's book, The Poetics of Space (1994) (pp.183-184). This is where I first came across the idea "the space of elsewhere," in which Bachelard discusses the spatial aspects of poetic images, and from there the idea of immensity, dreaming and creativity. BacheIard said, "Immensity is within ourselves, It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense." I was very interested in this, as it seemed to suggest a composition. I put the idea aside, as I had other pressing work, as well as compositions to complete. More recently - this year - I read Matthew Fox's, book Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet, (2002) and was interested to see a discussion of imagination and creativity, along with quotes from Gaston Bachelard. "We become transported outside the immediate world to a world that bears a mark of infinity"¦Isn't imagination alone able to enlarge indefinitely the images of immensity? It takes us to the space of elsewhere." Fox continues with "Imagination takes us to nothingness, to emptiness, to what is not yet and therefore to what might still be." That is exactly where creativity emerges, in a "space of elsewhere' where the mind floats from one idea to another. In a state of musical creativity, musical ideas come and go, coalesce, merge, even ideas from previous works, especially if I have been practicing or rehearsing them for a performance. We all know what an "earworm' is -- music that you hear and then can't get it out of your mind. For composers, that music can be their own, and when working on a new piece, the melodies, harmonies and other musical aspects from the previous piece are still there. It's not exactly like "borrowing' or "mining' a previous work or a "variation' on a theme. Rather, these musical ideas are still active and want to become part of a new world, a new musical space. - Darleen Mitchell