Motive - Week 5 T&P reflection.

I think it really took me the whole 4 hour class to figure out and absorb what the hell motive even meant. I felt pretty stuck in my ways after it all. I have definitely had plenty to focus on during the break as a result. The unfortunate thing is that I was still moving in to my new apartment during the week and we still don't have the internet on. I feel so disconnected. I've pretty much used the time to be distraction free and just focus on making stuff and using my notes from class as reference/points of focus. We've definitely listened to plenty of cool stuff again. Chion's Requiem has been massively in mind as I've been working on new pieces. I've been really thinking about the motivic development of my own work. I have put the big list of motif things we made in class next to my work space to give me something think about. It's helped a bit.

I am working on a series of pieces at the moment, 10 pieces in fact, 5 morning and 5 evening pieces. These will be 2 separate Glasfrosch EPs. Aubades and Nocturnes. The Aubades are nearly finished. and the Nocturnes are still in early development. The means of releasing them into the world will be via BandCamp, and then eventually as a double CD. Each track is around 10 mintues long and serves to capture some kind of early morning ambiguity/romance. The main motifs outside of the concept of the works are the use of polyrhythms, the reverse glockenspiel and toy piano textures that colour much of my work. Dynamics and colour are big focuses in this work, as always for me. There's an aquatic vibe about it all too, which is another common motif of my work. I tend to work with concepts of dreams and sleep, the sea, other nostalgic things. As I put each individual piece together, and focusing on each as a stand alone, live performable song, it's becoming increasingly pertinent to find ways to keep them tied together. Two tracks in particular have a lot in common musically - track 3 Water Tricks, and 5 Still Life (standing on the beach) are both built on similar musical foundations and stem from some really old ideas that have developed over about 10 years. the first track, Aubade/after each sentence another beautiful mystery connects to these other pieces less directly, but still uses some similar sounds and harmonic characteristics. Amphibian and Gyokuro are the even number tracks in the series and they stand out as the most different. Amphibian is a more forceful track with momentum to spare, it represents the monotony of the day and the double life we all tend to live to get through it. Gyokuro is probably the most diverse and is the Zen like alternative to Amphibian, focusing on the sweeter details of life, and nature, and finding a connection to it all. Between each track I'm composing little ambient segues, pieces that can be improvised live to join the music together. These segues will be another motif that repeats and serve to encapsulate the themes of the music.
When and as the Nocturnes form, the same process of connecting the music will occur, but this time I will be more conscious of how it all happens, and can compose the tracks to specifically mirror the Aubades, extending the same motives into new moods.