Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a Modern Marvel

When I sat down at this table earlier this evening, I had every intention of reinforcing some perceptions I received while lying in bed last night.  I knew I would not sleep. (without the aid of bourbon)  I am not drinking bourbon, because after having had a CT scan, an MRI, a colonoscopy, and hernia repair surgery in the short period of a few months, it disturbs my abdomen.  I have no answer, and I did not sleep.  While I laid in bed I made a decision, that this was the time I was going to reconnect with my composed piano music.  For several years after moving back home, I have lost touch with things that are important to me.  It has been a fair sacrifice, because the things upon which I have been focusing are immediate.  They are our house, our yard, and my mother.  While others may be suspect at the order of that list, it is accurate.  A fifty-two years old single adult male living with his mother may be unusual.  Then again since the ongoing financial crisis in America, many things have changed.  It is taking me some effort and resultant pain to accommodate these things.  The most important is one of the things I came to realize again last night while lying in the bed.  I made myself forget what was around me (my parent's house) and analyze musically two of my composed piano pieces.  I put on my Sennheiser noise reduction headphones and scrolled through four playlists of my own pieces.  Picking titles is rather easy, because one of the concepts of these pieces is that the title must be only one word.  I have forgotten in the field of commercial music (and by commercial I mean all music, because every musician would like to earn money from their craft) that there is a great amount of ignorance and verbosity.  There is a great amount of useless sentimentality.  There are a great amount of cliches.  Above all there is a stark, brutal, and incapacitating lack of Modernism.  By Modernism I mean an artistic aesthetic which attempts to reflect the hustle and bustle of a large, noisy, modern city.  My brain is too tired from lack of sleep to explain it much further, but I mean modernism as in the Modern Age where things are sleek, efficient, and free from unwanted emotion.  I mean modern in contrast to romantic.  I don't mean mechanical.  I don't mean robotic.  I don't mean cyborg.  I mean an aesthetic of intelligence and wisdom that chooses to live this way, uncluttered from the sentimental artifacts that kill us over time.  Modernism is a way of efficiently and cleanly expelling those habits which have become anachronistic and detrimental to our future existence.  A lack of Modernism is what has been plaguing me the last year.  I laid in bed and forced myself to forget what was around me (my parent's house) and listen musically to two of my works.  By musically I do not mean expressively.  I mean hearing past the expression and the message and listen to its vehicle.  What language was being used for my message, because I had forgotten.  I have been too busy dealing with a previous and archaic language to be able to remember one I invented for the sake of modernism.  It was rather simple, but having deduced the method I remembered.  
I remembered how I had composed these pieces.  The divide which separates Modernity from simple tonality is diatonicism.  It is what separates J.S. Bach from Stravinsky, Prokiev, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg.  It is a language, a language of which America knows nothing.  We are held captive in a musical world which bears no resemblance to any of the periods of music that should have influenced it.  America.  Not that long ago we recognized the jazz vernacular as America's musical voice.  That is legitimate.  Now jazz has fallen from grace and we are enslaved in children's nursery rhymes.  In the clearest sense politics are what drive a nation.  When politicians are intelligent, strong, and bold so is a nation.  When politicians are weak, stupid, and self-centered so is a nation.  What is causing this stagnation in America is being at war.  We do not really know if we are at war or not.  It has become so gray like the rest of our existence, politicians can do whatever they like with no transparency.  Truly we are in an American Dark Ages.  While we remain at war our nation will continue to pass time.  That is what we are doing.  I realized this yesterday, when I realized America no longer was modern.  We cannot get down to the business of being America, of inspiring our minds and our creations, until we stop being at war.  War is a distraction, and often it becomes our economy.  Our economy is in crisis, thus war is causing this crisis.  Until war stops our economy will not recover.  Only will we continue to pass time.