I create relatively short compositions because they don’t need to be any longer.
Sunday, March 8. 11.15 am: The Church in Wales advice was: no wine at Communion and no physical contact during the ‘Peace’. The services’ proceedings sped along as a consequence. 1.30 pm: Having ‘hugged’ my younger son and sent him off on his train home, I took to the roads for a much overdue jog:
Monday, March 9. 8.00 am: A busying with research related admin and readjustments to my teaching timetable for the week. 9.30 am: The discipline is that of switching off to everything that plagues the mind and concentrating on the one thing that’s needful. Back to the composition. The first 14 seconds were now complete. ‘It’s only good, if it’s appropriate!’, the voice insisted. Quite right, too. There’s no beauty in arbitrariness.
11.00 am: The mixdown of the 0.25-second sequences was complete. It remained for them to be equalized, compressed, adjusted for stereo-field and delay, and inserted. I knew how the piece ought to end. The logic of the concept and composition determined it. There was no choice, in that respect. The logic of the beginning and of the end would, to a great extent, determine the options available for composing the middle section.
Over lunch, I caught up on admin and equipment sourcing before returning to the centre. Two of the attributes that are hardest to inject into a composition are intensity and energy. They are reciprocally linked. In church yesterday morning, I saw a butterfly in extremis. Its wings flapped rapidly — desperately — against the floor. Something of that sound invaded the composition during the afternoon. The hissy-crackling of the rain upon the studio’s window panes also found a way into the piece.
By the close of the afternoon, the structure of the whole was 90% resolved. More importantly, the sound that I’d had in my mind’s-ear was now in the world.
7.20 pm: I returned to my home church, St Padarn’s, to hear:
Wind and rain didn’t dissuade the committed group of listeners. This is a church with a fairly flat ambience. Sound reflection would be manageable, therefore. I enjoy the anticipation before improvised performance. Something remarkable could take place. But even if it doesn’t, the reasons why it didn’t would be interesting. The wind that rushed around the outside of the building was the unacknowledged fifth and invisible member of the ensemble within. Improvisation is performers talking together through instrumentation. Each must be both a good listener and a good talker. And we, the audience, are obliged to pay attention just as carefully, but without utterance.
