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Thursday, 15 April 2004
Criticism and rewriting ::
It seems I used the Brahms quote about not altering a piece once it’s finished as an excuse for laziness. On Saturday I made another mix of “don’t know i know”, fixing the way the second mood faded back into the first and then back into the second at the end, and decided I liked this best. For now.
A friend and I listened to all 4 of my demoed pieces later that day, and she liked that one most. Just listening with another person and hearing what they like is the gentlest kind of criticism—why didn’t she like the other pieces as much? As I listened to my favorite with her, following her appreciation of the sounds I’d used in the one she liked, I noticed that, beneath the obvious technical problems with the mix, some of the sounds were weak and static. I improved several of them the other night.
But more troubling was that I’d used the way that the first layer’s oscillators are tuned in a fifth as an excuse to harmonize the main statement of the theme in parallel fifths. 25 years ago I dogmatically rejected the rules of counterpoint involving parallel fifths and octaves in Music 151—because they were too dogmatic. But last night Fux’s The Study of Counterpoint was sitting on the floor with a bookmark in the page where the rule is mentioned and I was confronted with some crucial phrases without any interesting harmonic motion. It took 2 hours to find and get my fingers around some more interesting intervals—a fifth sounds even more like a fifth following a major seventh—and I recorded the new part this morning.
I don’t know if my friend will like the improved version any better; it just might not be her cup of tea. But I’m liking it better, that’s what matters.
So not altering a piece once it’s finished is one thing, but not altering a piece when it’s unfinished is another. I have a deadline: I leave for NY tomorrow and Peter has volunteered to replace my plonky bass patches with the real thing—I have to redo some more MIDI tracks and at least temporarily commit them to audio tonight.
(I can’t believe it only took two hours to do taxes last night, and that what was a big pile of papers 15 years ago is now a folder of PDFs from Quicken and various financial institutions. It also helped that the Web version of TurboTax imported a lot of data from last year.)
| << Many strings (Shoghaken Ensemble and League of Crafty Guitarists) | 2004 > April | On the dot and unprepared >> |