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Thursday, 8 April 2004
Surprising myself ::
Last week I was determined to compose and spent some hours casting about for new ideas. I recorded some improvisations, and maybe they’ll grab me later, but they didn’t grab me immediately.
Then I opened another of the improvisations I did in Prague in November. One of them had already turned into a full-length piece and so I was confronting my superstitions about inspiration rarely striking twice in the same sitting. I was glad to be wrong. After a couple of 2-hour sessions, I’d overdubbed three tracks and had a nice three and half minute piece. A second long-time assumption bit the dust—the piano and Indian-violin-like tracks were moderately rhythmic and yet were recorded independently, without hearing the other. They each had their own rhythm (and the whole section had a loose, flowing feel), so it only took a couple of minor edits to reconcile them.
And then what? The original improv went on for another 5 minutes, but I didn’t like it enough to try to make rhythmic sense of it. Snip. Where to now? I played one chord on the JV-1080, using its patch from the first part, held down the sustain pedal, and played with the filters and waveforms for 4 minutes. The end of the first segment reminded me a little of something I wrote in 1989; I played with the chords a little, trying to remember the old piece. Suddenly I had a simple 2-bar 4/4 guitar loop. The ES2 patch from the original improv sounded great as a subtle percussion part, and I just happened to have hit Record in an “ah what the hell” moment before beginning playing. Another ES2 patch I’d been messing with in my earlier casting-about formed a nice counterpoint to the guitar loop. I found another complementary line on the piano, abandoned it and played a nice solo. Fade.
I couldn’t believe I finished a piece in 3 days after 2 months of working on my last one.
The first half is atemporal, very loose, and the second half has a steady pulse. So I tentatively named it “don’t know i know.”
The first friend I played it for suggested returning to the “don’t know” mood of the first half. So I spent a few hours making the “i know” section fade into a wash of looped reverb before a short restatement of the beginning, fading out.
Then on Tuesday, a second friend who’d heard the original version of the piece told me how much he loved the ending, so I tried extending the piece yet a little further, going back to “i know” after the brief restatement of “i don’t know.”
Yeah, I don’t know. Today all this mucking with the ending sounds forced. Sometimes our first instincts are the best. Brahms said (composition, #16) that once a piece is finished, it rarely improves with alteration. I’m inclined to go back to the simpler, shorter ending, without going back to the beginning. But in the process of mucking with it, I did find a really cool way to use the Emagic EVOC to occasionally amplify some cool vocal qualities in the 4-minute pad.
References:
Criticism and rewriting (15 April 2004)
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