Maitrayaniya

This is the second hammer blow of a prank on the spirit of Arnold Schoenberg, father of the 12-tone method of composition, that began with my Triskaidecatet, Op.13, published on Friday, the 13th of May 2011. Maestro Schoenberg - for all his erudition and talent - unfortunately suffered his whole life from triskaidekaphobia, an irrational fear of the number 13: so much so that he actually died at 13 minutes to midnight on Friday, the 13th of July 1951, apparently just because he felt it was the right thing to do. The second part of this prank involves two parts: first, my most recent previous work, published on 8 May last, was my 13th String Quartet; second, this current work, is the 13th and final contribution to my series of chamber works devoted to the Vedantic Upanishads. I have delayed its publication a couple weeks specifically in order to unveil it on Friday, the 13th of June in this year. After that, I plan to leave poor Arnold's spirit in peace; though definitely intend to continue writing using a 12-tone method.

As for this current piece, it suffers IMVHO from too much metrical and temporal variation, as well as structural mirroring, and seriously lacks enough melodic and rhythmic variation. With my OCD to always thoroughly represent every possible iteration of the row within each step in the scheme of tonal centers, I spent too much time squeezing the mathematics of the process into the 12-minute plan and neglected to nurture the freedom of the art. Not saying it's necessarily a bad piece - just admitting the compositional process suffered from a certain imbalance.

For the uninitiated, the Maitrayaniya Upanishad is one of the noblest and most ancient Hindu scriptures:

"Mind alone is the Samsara, man should strive to purify his thoughts, what a man thinks that he becomes, this is the eternal mystery." [6.34]