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Tuesday, 23 December 2003
Toltec ::
Last night V told me she’d just read a book about the Toltecs. I asked if it was The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (the only author I could name of books on Toltec wisdom). She said, yes it was. ...
Repetition ::
Around 1 am I finished a rough arrangement of the first two minutes of the improvisation I’ve been composing over. I liked the way I’d repeated and varied just a couple of themes. But listening back, it struck me that it was jumping too quickly from one thing to the next. The introduction/main theme and some other connecting passages felt like they only wanted to happen once. But several other times, when reaching a section where I’d composed 1-3 more layers on top, it felt like it arrived too suddenly and left too quickly. My child has attention deficit disorder! I experimented with Logic’s looping mode and muting/unmuting parts and discovered four or five segments that could stand repetition, where omitting some of the additional parts the first time, adding more during repetitions worked well. Slow down, let it unfold. I remembered examples from Bach to Joplin of pieces where every single section happens exactly twice. And cool, the repetitions don’t have to be exactly the same, in a couple of particularly rhythmically quirky and free-flowing spots, I can use the quirky version once and add a new, straighter version.