Sunday, May 17. Three times around the Vicarage Field:
Monday, May 18. WFH: DAY 45:
House (detail) #25:
8.00 am: A communion (silence, waiting, anticipating). 8.30 am: Letters to write, thanks to give, advice to dispose, and feedback to render. During lockdown, grey days proceed sluggishly. There’s an inertia that requires a very tight agenda of ‘to dos’ to counter. Begin with small and eminently easy tasks and build towards larger and perplexing ones. And take time to stare blankly, and to look into someone else’s life, via their social-media presence. It’s company of sorts. I’ve a coterie of respondents with whom I ping-pong Tweets, messages, sillinesses, and links in order not to distract ourselves but, rather, to extend a conversation that we would’ve otherwise enjoyed in the studio, on the corridors, and before the office kettle at the School of Art.
11.00 am: Re-tea’d, I planned out this week’s assessment agenda, which will be centred on the MA Vocational practice module. I genuinely looked forward to it. 11.30 am: On the breeze, in the distance, I heard the train depart Aberystwyth station. Oh, to go somewhere! On with the writing.
House (detail) #26:
1.30 pm: I continued writing, having failed to achieve my word quota in the morning. 2.30 pm: A review of the current composition. Good. But not entirely resolved, by design. Not until I complete the sub-suite of pieces dealing with the sound of things being torn to pieces will each component be brought to its maximum potential. On the basis of an intuition (a felt, as opposed to a thought, idea), I put together a ‘play’- (in all senses of that word) station of oscillators and modulators. It would enable:
- action without predetermined intent;
- composition outside the bounds of my current sound project;
- sound-types outside the bounds of my current sound project;
- exploration with a high risk of failure;
- responsible carelessness;
- creative distraction;
- fun or its own sake.
4.30 pm: Twice around the Vicarage Field.
7.30 pm: On with assessments: MA Vocational Practice’s Criteria Assessment submission. (I heard again the dull clatter of the train as it departed, making its way to the level crossing and, then, onward to Borth.) A ‘Bermuda Triangle’-like mist was slowly gathering and travelling inland. I was impressed by the students’ commitment to the assessment project; it substitutes for the one-to-one teaching observation, which had to be cancelled due to the present crisis.
Tweet of the day: On the Mahavishu Orchestra’s swansong live album of 1974:
