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Hi everyone, This is my latest piano work, written as a response to Theory 302a. I am definitely under the influence of Bartok's Mikrokosmos 141, in the sense that lots of reflection techniques and irregular time signatures are used in my work. To further explore the power of reflection, I use floating origins of reflections in each bar, with the hope not to stay in the same key for the same sentence. Thank you:) HoYin

I mean to what extent do you think there is a one-to-one correspondence between you as a person and your compositions? Thus, if you are a boring person, then your pieces would be boring. If you are immature and undeveloped as a person, then your pieces would be immature and undeveloped. And if you are a person who's exciting and bubbling with ideas, then your pieces would be exciting and bubbling with ideas. Do you think there is such a close (near one-to-one) correspondence between how one is as a person and how one's compositions sound, between how one is perceived as a person and how one's compositions are perceived by an audience? Or do you think, on the other hand, that there is no such close correspondence? That a composer of exciting pieces bubbling with novel ideas might well prove to be living a dull life and be a dull person in a personal encounter with them? That a socially or psychologically immature person could well produce mature masterpieces? Rephrased in another way, do you think one's life and experience are reflected in one's music? What is the raw material of music? Is it one's life and one's experiences or is it purely musical ideas on the abstract level that might not have anything to do with one's life and oneself as a person? An example of the former (one's life and experiences being the raw material of music) that comes to my mind is Beethoven. An example of the latter (music not being related to one's life but being purely mental musical ideas on the abstract level) that comes to my mind is, roughly speaking, all music before Beethoven, especially Bach. Rephrased in still another way, do you think you can write greater music than your greatness as a person? Or write music that is inferior to you as a person? Or do you feel that your music's greatness is necessarily a reflection of your greatness as a person and cannot be either greater or lesser than it? I think the answers to this question are of paramount importance because it is depending on them that we will decide whether composition constitutes truly an action - in the sense of having a clear and distinct subject and object - or whether its nature transcends the clear division into subject and object. If the latter be the case, then composition would be more than a simple action or activity, but something in which the division between subject and object is blurred and an activity in which the person as a subject may be changed and transformed in the very act of composition.