I gotta admit I'm blocked on this organ piece. I'm really struggling to find something I like. I don't like notes anymore. I'm getting really bored of music. I'm going to spend all day tomorrow developing my existing ideas into something, but I don't have much, and I don't know how or where it's going to go at this point.
The organ music we listened to in class was cool. The Ligeti piece in particular, although we can't get access to the pipes to do the weird stuff he was doing there. I did really like the way he uses the organ as one big mass of sound, rather than separating the voices and playing various melodies/counterpoint etc. I have composed a lot of disparate ideas so far, and I'm thinking of just taking one of them and approaching it the Ligeti way. The thing I liked the most about the Ligeti pieces was the way he blends the colours together, the way he sculpts the volume and timbre to create a gorgeous sound painting. I'd realy like to try to do something like this. So far my piece uses 3 different polyrhythms, and segues from being a kind of ambient piece/ballad into a progressive, Zappaesque jam. I think I can do without the prog bit, it's starting to bore me.
Like the Cargle piece, my organ piece has additional sounds. I've been up to the engine room with Ariel, and I recorded the sound of the motors running. It's pretty much just noise, but it's a particularly interesting noise, with a direct relationship to the sound hear at idle in the auditorium. I want to slowly fade the engine sound up through the sound system before the organ plays, and I've set up some processing, rhythmically panning and filtering the noise, eventually cutting it up into a "musical" texture to accompany the piece as it progresses.
I'll also be using drums, baritone guitar, and vocals.
I've started working on my score for Ash. I hope I wasn't misunderstood in class. I think that an image can be music. I think that non traditional scores are awesome. I merely wanted to express that it bugs me when people make a visual/graphic score out of context, that doesn't communicate anything. I think that a graphic score, or a painting, or whatever can communicate music. I think that composing with loose musical instructions that depend on the performers interpretation is totally the way to go. I was merely commenting that there's a lot of shit scores and I hate them when they don't come with instructions. I think the debate got a little out of hand. Part of the problem is that many graphic scores have been composed for specific performers/ensembles, and workshopped with the composer, so the performers understand the parameters. Someone picking up a score like that after the fact would need to do their research on the context of the piece before just diving into it and playing whatever. It bugs me when someone just throws some ink on a page and says that's my piece, when they've no idea who's going to play it, and therefore no idea of what they're doing. I think maybe I haven't existed in the composer/score area for so long, I don't really know what I like or hate about it anymore. I pretty much chose this course over others, like VCA composition, because I didn't want to study music composition in a score writing way. I don't know if I'm really interested in doing it. I prefer to play the music myself, or to communicate it through a score if I need other players, but I don't think of my work being written down for someone else to play without my involvement. That sort of thing doesn't really interest me at the moment. Maybe this project will develop that interest.
My piece for Ash is called Blue, and is a tone row based piece, building in 5ths from E-Bb. There is instruction for how to integrate the pitch material. I'm debating whether or not to include the pitch on the score, or not, but ultimately, the navigation of the form is totally interpretive. The scores are a series of watercolour paintings I've been making, abstract shapes that fade and morph together. There are instructions for how to use the colour, tone, hue, density etc as metaphor for register and dynamic and gesture. All these things are up to the performer to navigate through the shapes. I want my notes to be brief, but informative. I don't want to write an essay, and kill the improvised nature of the music, I want to give the necessary information to get Ash to perform the music I'm hearing in my ears. I think that any guitarist could play this music, regardless of fx, or electric/acoustic sounds. The sparseness of the score opens itself to options. I've been playing it myself to make sure the ideas work, and I get a lot out of it so far. I think I'll probably record it at some stage, perhaps with Ash, as a duo. I like the idea of it being a piece for any number of instruments (as long as those instruments are guitars, dammit).
I've been trying to find a copy of the Alvin Lucier Still Lives music. I loved that stuff. I really want to listen to it over and over again. It's just such a beautiful and simply idea, and it works on such an intuitive human level. Maybe it's the piano too, I love piano. I don't really know what to say about the piece other than I loved it. The simplicity is really what gets me. The meditative nature of it too. I've been writing a kind of Still Life piece recently. It's a sort of serenade at the same time. Mine is pretty different, obviously this has a unique idea at play, but the piece I'm working on does evoke a similar mood, just with different sounds. I've been trying to avoid the use of drums in it until absolutely the end of the piece. I think I'll use the Lucier music as a reference to how "still" my piece is..
Finally I wanted to comment on how much I responded to the article Explaining My Music by Tom Johnson. I really liked his style. "The truth isn't always beautiful, but beautiful things can't be untrue". I love his ideas. Not being autobiographical is hard. It was weird, because that morning Alice and I had been talking about atheism and logic, and the logical absolutes that form the universe, and how these absolutes form a beautiful system. To some people, logic and science take all the "magic" out of living, to some people, the spiritual is what gives beauty to life. But to that I think blah. The truth is much more interesting and beautiful. I think there's more magic in understanding the truth than there is in any form of "spirituality".
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