It's coming in February 2010.
If you can make it to the Southwest United States, there will be an interesting week-long conference about Unidentified Flying Objects (aka UFOs).
The International UFO Congress will be holding their 19th annual convention along with a UFO-related film festival. It's going to be 7 days and 8 nights of out-of-this-world adventure. The organizers expect to attract 30 enthusiastic speakers, 40 exhibitors, and perhaps a 1000 attendees from all over the world (and beyond).
Mark your calendar. It's all happening from February 21st to the 27th, 2010 in Laughlin, Nevada at the Aquarius Casino and Resort.
I think it's great. I'd love to spend my February with hip Alienologists in sunny-Nevada rather than hang with dry and boring academic Musicologists in cold and icy-Boston (The Farmer's Almanac predicts a particularly rotten Winter this year).
Perhaps I can bring my Theremin and compose/perform a new composition for the occasion: a UFO Suite, or an Area 51 Sonata. In fact, I've always been inspired by the modern musical soundtracks of 1950's era Sci-Fi movies, and this assortment of people at the UFO Congress could be a ripe, receptive, and open-minded (if not captive) audience for my odd-ball creative expression.
There probably is a large degree of similarity between experiencing alien life-forms, and listening to a brand new experimental music composition. Both experiences are forms of encounter that force carbon-based humanoids such as ourselves to think outside of the box and flex our bio-electrical brains. It forces our primitive minds to explore totally new dimensions of thought.
I don't think this analogy is a too much of a stretch. Any worthy piece of new music should result in an out-of-body experience, and any great musical work should rate as paranormal event.
Music transcends the physics of ordinary sound. It creates multi-dimensional layers of meaning that go beyond Einstein's standard space-time continuum. Music is a form of communication that humans speculate about, but don't fully understand. Music seems to work like telepathy, or time-travel, or according to the rules of fractals in chaos theory, or like the "transporter" on Star Trek.
Beam me up Scottie!
We don't know when, how, or where music started. Perhaps it was a gift from benevolent Aliens (photo above) who brought the mysterious science of music to Earth as a gift sometime near the dawn of civilization. It's time we explored music as a potential medium for inter-stellar, inter-galactic, and inter-universe communication. NASA needs to get on board pronto and learn this technology. Space shuttles are low tech, mucho expensive, and pollute the environment. Experimental music is sustainable, cutting-edge, and ethereal. I wouldn't care to venture into the event horizon of a Black Hole without my electric piano and plenty of J.S. Bach.
Biologists have long wondered why humans have the capacity for music. Could it be that we will need it someday to communicate (or jam) with our planetarily remote visitors? Is that what Arnold Schoenberg meant when he selected poetic text for his Second String Quartet (1908) that reads: "Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten" (I feel wind from other planets). This visionary text came from a poem titled "Entrückung" (Rapture) by Alien wannabe Stefan George.
I have never seen a UFO up close. Nor do I have any current or residual memories of an encounter with intelligent life from an origin other than the planet Earth (e.g. I've never met R. Buckminster Fuller in person).
But, I have met people who believe that they have had these types of encounters. These people seem to have a special gift, and I have always been a little envious of their unique experiences. The UFO Congress Convention has a forum for these people. They call it "Experiencer Sessions."
The Experiencer Sessions take place in a private room that is set aside four times during the week. It is hosted by a trained counselors who moderate and facilitate individuals who want to share their anomalous experiences. Participants are invited to come together and interact with one another, and also receive guidance and insight form the group moderator. These sessions are open to registered members of the conference, but not open to the press, and not allowed to be recorded.
That too sounds like a good model for contemporary music performance. If recordings and public ridicule were banned, more people would attend concerts. Experiencing live music would once again take on its long forgotten function as a ritual of communally-based transcendental elation. People would reclaim their in alienated rights to utilize music as a method of inter-dimensional communication within the cracks of the multi-verse. Not only would we be able to better converse with little green men, but with our human brethren as well.
If the likes of NASA and the International UFO Congress come to recognise the vital importance of music, it will create a surge of demand for the under-valued art form. Conservatories will start offering classes in "Alien Harmony." Already, some notes in standard music must be labeled as "unidentified non-harmonic tones." There will be graduate-level seminars in the music of Saturn-born space-age jazzer Sun Ra and about the music of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen who once said he came to Earth from a planet circling the star Sirius (not Modrath, Germany as previously reported).
Hey, wait a minute. Conservatories already ofter those classes. That must prove that Aliens are already among us!
And it's not just flaky musicians who are leading the charge. Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of Japan's premier-in-waiting wrote this in her book: "While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus."
I rest my case.
See you at the UFO Convention.
Link:
http://ufocongress.com/
