Program Note
Small larpers do cultural appropriation; I do serial life appropriation. This album consists of recycled melodies and ongoing projects, which I’ve turned into electronic pieces. I’ve shifted toward a more classical direction, rejecting superficial avant-trends-garde, but I still appreciate many genuinely avant-garde ideas and methods that I’ve explored over the past two years. I call this style referential experimental music, where each piece must reference something meaningful.
I first began this project during Professor Jeryl’s Jazz class, continuing to explore intriguing concepts with Professor Cohen on Stockhausen, including some highly extreme and debatable ideas. I enjoyed that electronic class very much, so I decided to preserve some of my compositional methods while integrating them into my musical palette.
Pixeled Prelude is a piece where I transformed an old composition into a pixel-style/chiptune music piece.
Pixelated Clandestine Candy Seller features the main melody I composed for the first edition of my Little Red Riding Hood headcanon parody story. I later recycled the melody to create a pixel chiptune version. It also captures a headcanon scenario where the little match girl sells candy to people.
Serial Life Appropriation: Mint Green blends recycled melodies and blueprints created for my upcoming string orchestra piece, Mint Green, Squirreling Street, along with Ashin, an unrecognizable version of the wind quintet I am currently composing. Ashin is one of the most hilarious and adorable characters in my upcoming indie game design and ongoing serial life appropriation projects.
Originally, Little Red Riding Hood had only three main characters: the protagonist, two parallel Riding Hoods, and a bunch of mushrooms. But then, I began adding more parallel pairs. You’ll see!
GesamkunstWahnsinn is a term I coined this year, borrowing from the concept of Gesamkunstwerk. It’s an ideology of abandoning sanity—throwing caution to the wind when creating art or music. This album reflects my attitude that I no longer care about sanity. I’m going to role-play Hector Berlioz for the next three years, and with the previous three years, it will total six years. During this enigmatic six-year period, if I’m lucky, I might finally graduate from my nearly 12-year college journey and move on to a master’s degree, if I ever get in.
However, being insane and carefree has consequences. I’ve realized there’s a chance I may never get into a master’s program or may be rejected by academic communities if I continue my lone journey. I might have to invent some tradecrafts to bypass the bureaucratic system.
The reason I switched to Professor Polina sooner than planned was because I feared that a major life shift might cut off all future opportunities. I wanted to complete that 6th piece of this album, which Professor Jeryl helped inspire by providing her favorite color for the fifth piece and the first motif of the entire album.
I was very concerned about how to approach both Professor Polina and Professor Cohen on this new, yet old, musical journey. I considered sending a casual, funny email, something like: “Hey, do you want some symmetrical experiences? Since you already taught my classmate Chris, who is technically a child prodigy that everyone loves, meanwhile, I’ve been in college for over 11 years on a failed computer science major with a music degree as my GPA-lifting cover.” Or should I have sent some of my best portfolios? But when you sell something as it is, it’s best not to show too many pictures of the broken parts.
In the end, I decided to be quite honest, with enthusiasm and some plans. To my surprise, it wasn’t as bureaucratic as I thought. Professor Polina was very supportive, and I also received best wishes from Professor Cohen, who has taught me so much over the past few years. Not only did he change my perceptions of many musical ideas outside the scope of what I was familiar with—such as Stockhausen, Rzewski, John Cage, and many others—but I also started seeing things differently, even when I had confrontations with the music director, coordinator, and professors.
I believe Professor Cohen made more of an impact than some of those big-named avant-trends-garde advocates who preach social change but don’t actually accomplish much. Anyway, I call this “augmented truth” type of unguarded honesty Mystery Blackbag as part of my future tradecraft development. The concept comes from a story about Jeffrey Dahmer. When an officer stopped him and asked what he was doing, Dahmer made small talk and told the officer he was about to throw away a human body. The officer laughed and let him go. What surprised everyone later was that there really was a human body inside that bag. The dark moral here is that sometimes, being unguarded honest works out in your favor—if it’s not your time to face consequences, then fate will send you a lucky officer.
In my case, of course, my problems aren’t as extreme as Dahmer’s black bag, but they are chaotic enough for anyone to struggle with. So this “unopened” honesty has become part of my art. As I’ve said before, art and music, while universal, are not universal languages. They are bridges to entirely different universes. Art and music can express what words cannot.
Being different isn’t about using an extended technique, special chords, or Gesamtkunstwerk in intermedia works that ignore history or process. Being different is about the daily challenge of trying to express things that aren’t allowed to be expressed. And in my opinion, that has nothing to do with talent, practice, or being “open-minded.”
We invent things to validate our artistic and musical universes through a combination of mathematical, geometric formulas created by God. Most importantly, these things must synchronize with our own experiences and interpretations of an indeterminate worldview. This is my current aesthetic, which may change one day, but for now, I just want to paint or compose what’s in my mind.
So GesamkunstWahnsinn is not just a fancy term for my musical ideas—it represents my mental state right now and how far I’m willing to go to defend my universe, a universe that, perhaps, shouldn’t even exist.
