photo credit: Matthew Shelley

Spotty week.  Lousy energy, minimal time, and extreme heat were not exactly motivating factors.  Yet in all of this, I did see some promise – in philosophy and in practice.

I’m resolute that there is a place for improvisation in my writing now.  However, I pulled back a bit on exactly when and where it should prove useful.  I now believe its a good means at finding and extracting textures, and general overall ideas on how a section should sound.  Its also a good precipitous for playing with the materials of composition – meaning the sets or motives or rhythms of a work – to see how they might fair in construction.  And its also a good tool for writing fluid non-deterministic long veiled ideas using the same material, or even free materials for a work.  However, I absolutely shy away that the work should be highly skewed on improvisation and cognitive flow, whereas I had a leaning that it should maybe contain 50-90% before, my feeling now is perhaps only 40%.

After playing around with the opening materials this way earlier in the week, I suddenly had the idea I should probably look at what I have under a microscope of analysis.  This I did on the BART in my small graph sketchbook.  What I discovered was an incredible stratification of structure I didn’t know existed in the sets I chose and the voicing and registers I allowed during my improv sessions.  Four tretrachords which are apart of two transformed hexachords that are alike in classification and sound.  These four are divided and interchanged to create a pentachord and a hexachord – each larger set contains a prime and an inversion of the original tetrachords.  The effect is what I wanted,  In the opening of the work, there is a veiling and ambiguity of where we are on two contrapuntal planes.  The violin enters to introduce another transposition of the original hexachord and its T and TIn tetrachords in a central theme to let us know.  A slow transformation occurs to bring these divisions back together to create the original hexachords in the accompaniment.  The violin then freely and non-deterministally  outines all of the hexachords and the tetrachords for the nexus or proto set of the work.  Then, a transition occurs using this nexus set to the next idea.

I concur, that the larger structure of this opening is not really very original.  Many pieces have been written before using a veiling leading to a focus of idea and moving on.  However, the execution of the materials is very original and personal in my opinion, and well found.  Improvisation helped here to breakdown elements into sonically useful parts, but analysis of what I did in these sessions helped find the underlining meaning of the materials so that a clear focused plot and story could be told with it.  Improvisation also helped with the melody and flow of the non-deterministic conclusion (which could also be reversed and act as an intro to an idea), but actual usage in the work itself is really very small.  The real point is in the session, but the better point now is that it is there, whereas before I would not think of loosening up the work in this way.

It takes a lot of work to bring these unconscious improvisational ideas into conscious ones, so that you know exactly what is going on and what needs to be done – in alignment to what you know.  Moreover, if I approached it in reverse, and started with clear logical concrete ideas, I doubt I would have found it half as interesting – at least for this particular work for soloist, which is more traditionally structured, and which demands it.  There were other alternative ideas that I also found to use in other sections.  This I wrote down on paper to come back later.  I have enough for a start.  Now to have the courage, and more importantly unbounded time and energy to do it what with everything else going on.

So, it was a good composition week despite the distractions.

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I continue to enjoy this turkey book and will share it with you when I am done.  The turkeys themselves were light in touch yesterday.  Although it was hot, they generally stayed away.  In the evening more so.  I think they were very disturbed by loud road construction down the street.  I saw four females and the poults heading into the hills last evening.  I tried to call them back using assorted sounds I have been practicing.  It got their attention and they stopped and looked at each other, but they had other ideas about where they needed to safely be. These dinosaurs are amazing.