WFH: DAY 111. 8.15 am: As Michelle Obama commented recently, maintaining a personal routine during these uncertain times is crucial, not least for sustaining our own well-being. I’ve always lived by the clock and a plan. That discipline has proved a great help in recent months, particularly. It suits my temperament, and things get done. However, as importantly, I can turn-off the habit as readily as I can turn it on, in order to make time for spontaneous reckless abandon (occasionally). I rule the routine.

8.45 am: But today it must remain ‘on’. Postgraduate teaching and administration beckoned. First, I was into my inbox to acknowledge receipts and dispatch opinions. 9.30 am: A PhD pastoral-tutorial. These days, the highly professional and the deeply personal are never far apart. The capacity to work requires that certain optimum conditions prevail in our lives generally. The tutor and tutee have to direct a good deal of time and energy to this end for teaching to be possible. Before the seeds can be planted, the soil must be tilled:

11.00 am: A ‘virtual–coffee’ chat with a sound-enthusiastic colleague. Topics: reel-to-reel tape recorders; the problems of self-promotion; archiving work; good and bad chocolate; the morality of Facebook; guitar effects pedals; and the virtues of cassette-tape releases. Together, we ruminated upon the experience of reading the text and looking at the images on an album sleeve while listening to the recording. I’d forgotten how much these visual and textual preoccupations played into the auditory experience:

12.00 pm: An MA fine art tutorial with a globe-trotting returnee. Good to see them back on home soil again. 90% dark chocolate always feels very adult, and should be eaten a good ten hours before bedtime. It has an ‘alert-level’ equivalent to a double-espresso:

12.30 pm: On with postgraduate admin until lunchtime. 1.30 pm: I returned to the recording and composition of ‘Like Children in Bright Clothing’ [working title]. The process of relating the extracted samples that I’d made yesterday began. It was like building a Lego model without a plan. (Which was my preferred strategy as a child.) ‘Stay on the right-side of music, John!’ (By which he meant, I think: summon music, but without being musical.) ‘You’re not a musician, remember!’

My approach was to throw together, in an entirely arbitrary manner, the samples of notes, arranged in two parallel ‘voices’, very quickly, and edit out usable sections from whatever ensued.

4.30 pm: Walkabout:

7.30 pm: I continued where I’d left off. The less I deliberately intervened with the structure of the composition, the more compelling it sounded. Neither intervention nor non-intervention is the better way. However, combining the approaches can lead to a productive third way. While I was shaving this morning, I’d heard a choral work by an Estonian composer on Radio 3. Something of its spirit stayed with me for the remainder of the day. A question that has recurred throughout the compositional process: To what extent, if any, must I portray the sounds referred to in the accounts? My settled view is that I want to render the spirit (emotional and psychological) rather than the actuality of the narrative. Thus, while I acknowledge that the choir comprised the spirits of children, my intent is not to mimic the sound of young voices. Rather, it is to summon the sense of wonder and reverence experienced by the witness.