Dear friends.
Still a couple of days to go, but let me already wish you an outstanding 2018.
Iris and I are just back from Athens, where Katerina Konstantourou magnificently played my Sonata 1B ‘Bruna Husky’.
Walking around the Akropolis in December with your coat lightly wrapped around your arm, while a friendly sun shines upon the still green trees, it imbued us with an almost guilty happiness.
We couldn’t stop ourselves thinking “Is this normal, this super mild weather in December?” (“It isn’t”, said our Greek friends).
Climate change, and presidents ignoring it, made us remember McKibben’s book ‘The end of Nature’ which was the inspiration for Book 2 for the first incarnation of Hardscore. This was already twenty years ago…Then too I was worried about our planet and the people, the animals and the plants inhabiting it.
Not much seems to have changed nowadays. Maybe more people are now aware of the problems. But the fleet of cars is growing exponentially, coal is dug out manically and burnt as if Ba’al is back in business. Rivers are poisoned, mountains blown away, while plastics are suffocating sea live. The list is endless. All this combined with an incredible amount of people who currently have to leave their homes because of war, economic strategies, religious zealotry and other kinds of human shortsightedness… Again an endless list.
Anyway, let’s hope we all find the strength to stop in extremis, what seems to have become inevitable. We all love beauty in whichever form. Mercifully, humans have not lost this incredible ability. Beauty is not necessarily an apartment filled with objects coated in gold and silver. Beauty might be a single tree giving us cleansed air. Beauty might be the smile of people whom you managed to help. Beauty might be a great and life-changing discovery in science. And why not, beauty also might be the result of the never-ending work of artists trying to discover truth where formerly there only was ignorance or indifference.
Let’s hope that next year, I’ll be able too to add at least one more score to enhance the world’s happiness.