Live • Learn • Create
Multi-Modal Milton Project
COVER LETTER
This project was hard. It started out with woeful procrastination; I kept pushing and pushing it off with that little voice in the back of my head saying “hmm, maybe you ought to start this soon.” I realized that this wasn’t the usual procrastination I am used to—it was procrastination out of fear. Though I’d had an inkling the whole time, the fact that my grasp of Paradise Lost was tenuous at best hit me like an 18-wheeler when this project came around. What was it all about? Why is it so impossible to read? Who is God, and why do we kind of like Satan? And WHO CARES? Yeah. It wasn’t a great place to be in. I actually started out my project with a paper in mind; I was going to write about light. It probably would’ve turned out to be a mediocrely-written paper with some fun insights (probably heaps of etymology too), but I knew it wasn’t going to be Good (yes with the capital G). And, my work with the word didn’t even seem to have any relevance to the project’s main objective: “capturing or demonstrating what you believe is the most central issue/s in the text.” So, I scrapped it. *If I could throw my hands up here, I would.* I racked my brain and CPB for tinges of “Milton at his most Miltonic,” hoping that his “bright effluence of bright essence” would shine through to me. I really don’t think that there is one grand issue of the text that is more important than the others, but I think justifying “the ways of God to men” is pretty big, so I chose that. It hit me out of the blue that I wanted to compose a piece on piano to go behind the readings, so I didn’t argue with intuition and went for it. I think I turned out pretty well, and I am certainly more happy with it than I would’ve been with a quasi-decent paper.
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Project Explanation
I wanted to tell the story of creation and the fall of man through my music. The piece begins with an ostinato, those two notes you hear at the beginning that are constant throughout the whole song. The notes are a perfect fifth apart, their harmony creating a magical and peaceful soundscape. This is God. Soon after, a melody enters. The notes are light and explorative. These are God’s creations: all perfect and in harmony, consonant. Specifically, this is man—Adam and Eve—enjoying the splendor of the garden, “reaping immortal fruits of joy and love” (III.67). This first movement coincides with lines 56-92 where Milton is painting a picture of God in heaven looking over his creations, Satan sneakily coming onto the scene.
At line 93 in the presentation—“by some false guile pervert; and shall pervert”—we have our first dissonant note (a Bb) that slyly slips in as does Satan from Hell. As the song continues, the density of dissonant notes grows larger and larger and there is a tension between the ostinato and the melody: between God and his humans. Suddenly, we hear a chord smack down, chock full of discordant notes followed swiftly by a series of other chords that impose a rhythm of their on top of the steady ostinato. This passage, mimicking lines 97-111, represents both the disobedience of man, having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as well as the feelings of God. It is difficult to tell from Milton’s poetry whether God is angry or sad, or both, so I tried to emulate this rhetorical strategy in these chords. The progression carries many accidentals, giving a feeling of disturbance and wrath, while at the same time it is descending, mirroring a fall in spirit and the fall of man, until finally it ends on a minor chord, like how a fight resolves in a sigh of woe.
In the next movement, we build again, until finally we are found teetering on two notes that then fall. This part is meant to mirror lines 122-129. God says “I formed them free, and free they must remain” (124), and so the notes freely express the full chromatic range, straying far away from the constancy of the ostinato. The rest of this movement is an exploration of the relationship between God, his angles, and man. The melody line stays quite chromatic and chordal structures (representing God) are thrown in, broken and expressing hurt, sorrow, and rage. The song ends with another round of descending chords, but instead of ending on a minor chord like last time, we end on a major chord. Major chords are supposed to represent joy and happiness, but here it feels misplaced and almost bittersweet. God is struggling with his “high decree / Unchangeable, eternal, which ordained / Their freedom” (126-9), but coming to terms with its resoluteness, realizing that “mercy first and last shall brightest shine” (134). God formed humans free, for what joy could he derive from their allegiance had they not been. Unfortunately for him, it did not go the way he hoped, something he’ll have to deal with eternally.