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Tuesday, 9 March 2004
Burst ::
The piece I’ve been working on for 6 weeks now was weighing on me; after the cool piano solo, I was still stuck. I had three and half more minutes of synth improv, clearly restating and elaborating its earlier themes. But nothing more. I’d just gotten some really nice feedback on an earlier piece and this one seemed to be saying, “nice, but I might turn out even better.” I declined a chance to go out Friday night, and made no plans for Saturday.
I can’t remember a moment of breakthrough; all I know is that by 6 am Sunday morning, I’d gotten close to the end, and by midafternoon I was there. Repetition to the rescue again, but in many different ways: the first two sections of odd-metered sixteenth note phrases were both exactly 60 quarter notes long... 12 repeats of a variation on that 5/4 bass ostinato line grounds it... but it gets too odd in the second section, where there are lots of 6's, fine, another variation, 10 x 6/4. What’s missing here? Oh, the last time I used those sounds together I also used this one, let’s do that again but with more intensity—it’s the section before the climax. Where’s the melody? And, we’re getting near the end, it’s time to sum it up. How do those three melodic themes from earlier fit? Cool, I didn’t think I’d get to use the one from the intro again but it’s just right in the background under the beginning of the second half, and #2 flows perfectly into #3 over the climax. What to do with that noodling at the end, short, bursty riffs on the various themes? They’re anticlimactic... ah, if I bring back that loop, twice as loud, and fade out the bursty riffing, it becomes part of the melt-into-ambience ending.
References:
Surprising myself ( 8 April 2004)
Rework ( 7 December 2004)
| << Hassan Hakmoun | 2004 > March | Drama >> |