Gregory Miles Hoffman
composer
weltanschauung
As a composer, I am a photographer of wind. I evoke moods, images, and ideas through the representation of something absent or imagined. This requires an impalpable chain of almost ghostlike events: an intangible medium > travels through the ether > to communicate abstract ideas.
Music on the printed page, like a photograph, is nothing more than speed stripped of all motion. A musical score is a cipher, scripted in cryptic notation. But once the clockwork locks gears, each note floats into the atmosphere, only to begin its immediate attenuation. Music is forever poised in the moment, on the cusp of its near simultaneous life and death.
Because of this transience, my thoughts turn to the primeval and the infinite. The atomic and the galactic. I draw inspiration from elemental themes; the cycles of nature; birth and love and desire and death.
My music originates from a deeply personal place and emerges as luminous as nightwater’s strange, pulsing puzzle of light. Or like muted colors and shapes in fog. Or: immediate, rhythmic, visceral. I think of sub-oceanic stillness and volcanic turmoil. Of solitude and passion.
It is the representations of life that give life its richness. I hope that people who hear my music will plunge into this mystery of being, contemplate the impenetrable riddle. To realize the profundity of life through the simplicity of autumn leaves. I want people to feel that music is magical; that it haunts like a poem. Like something just beyond grasp. Like a photograph of wind.
The Weltanschauung of Gregory Miles Hoffman
Photo: Gwen Young
