my first blog!!...and an explanation

I am entering the blogosphere! I was amazed at the number of LDS gay bloggers, which really helped normalize everything for me. So I decided to add my voice, share my stories, and do a little self-therapy too.

But first, let me explain my blog title...

I LOVE music! I love listening to music (especially musicals). I love performing music (piano, musical theater). I love the way music can completely change the way I feel. I love everything about music. So, I thought it was only appropriate to use it as part of my blog title. I decided to use two words from music: dissonance and diapason.

Dissonance (lack of harmony, conflict, discord) represents how disjointed and compartmentalized I feel sometimes dealing with my faith, my attractions, my family, my values, etc.

Diapason (harmony, using the entire range or full potential of an instrument or voice) explains how I am working towards integrating and harmonizing the many different, conflicting parts of who I am.

I found this great excerpt on the web:

Harmony is generally understood to suggest agreement, accord, congruity, while Dissonance is thought of as harmony's opposite - discord, cacophony, harsh disagreement. The truth, though, is that dissonance - or what is heard as dissonance - acts upon harmony, changing over time our conception of both what is discordant, and what is pleasingly concordant. Clashes of difference - in music, in politics, in social relations, in our perceptions of the world around us - reveal new kinds of complexity and call upon us to ask ourselves, Do I still believe what I used to? Have I changed my mind? Richer and more complex harmonies often emerge from moments of dissonance.

The modernist composer Arnold Schönberg drew attention to this relationship when he used atonality to "emancipate dissonance." Rejecting the sweetness of consonance, he used chords that were unresolved, that produced tension, in order to celebrate quest over comfort, action over respite, inquiry over satisfied knowing. Dissonance, he maintained, would shake us out of complacency and demand that we hear with new ears, see with new eyes, think with new perspectives, and reach toward new harmonies rendered more intricate and more true by inclusion of the sounds of difference.

...consider the role of dissonance in creating new harmonies.

So, there you have it. My first blog....