5th recipe cooked out of my Greek cookbook – chicken with fresh oregano (although I had to do it with dried) – very tasty. I also made some more progress on the Whitman interlude.
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Very excited! I was hoping to find a composer group in London and this one does – it sounds – pretty much what I want: meetups to talk through new works and problems and occasional special events focusing on a particular topic. Yay!
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It wants to be a long piece. I want it to be super-short. I am determined to prevail.
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I had a relevation last night – after 2 years of quietly fretting, in dribs and drabs (NOT continuously) about the wide range in the first Whitman song, I suddenly realised I was dead wrong – I’ve written it in the tenor clef, so while the low C I knew was at the end was indeed a low C, the high A-flats were in fact not high A-flats at all, but middle-of-the-treble-stave A-flats. Which meant I had about a 6th’s worth of space to move upwards. Which I have now done. The winning key is F minor (as opposed to C minor), and the whole thing sits much better, and especially with the tessitura of the second two pieces. Once that was done though, the second song still felt a bit off. I think it’s because it doesn’t have an accompaniment rather than anything inherently wonky with it, so I tried inventing one, but nothing wants to stick to this melody, so I’ve now moved on to the approach of inserting a tiny piano solo before it. Just to create a little padding between the moderately lush (for me) movement of the first song and the brittle sparseness of the second. A piano equivalent to the second song, really, that will bridge the gap between keys and balance the two instruments. And it’s half-written already! All in all, I think I probably put in about 2 or 3 hours’ composition today – a huge leap forward from what I was achieving even a few months ago when it felt like things were starting to be on a roll. Feeling really good about this. And even more so about the fact that I didn’t write on Wednesday (very big day at work – I was completely exhausted when I got home) but made myself get back to it on Thursday, and have had no trouble carrying on every day since.
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For consideration for the Borealis Festival in Norway in March – they wanted solo pieces of less than a minute long, and as I almost seem to specialise in the miniature, it wasn’t too hard to find something – even though I only found the call at about 10pm and the deadline was today. Thank heavens for email submission! So I’ve sent Egg the Eighth (one of the 2 by 4 two-part inventions) and the second Whitman song off to them – with the Festival so soon, I guess I won’t have long to wait to see if they like them!
A bonus with this is that I get to strike another thing off my 2010 goals list. Woot!
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Peggy Glanville-Hicks’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, a disc of Poulenc & Britten songs, performed by the composers and some Reynaldo Hahn songs. Hunting for a clear way through the transposition mire for the Whitman set.
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Messed about with the Pianist app on the train – discovered you can record one line, then record another directly over the top, so you can do chords in 2 or 3 passes rather than trying to crush your fingers. Also had a look at ranges in the Whitman songs. If I move everything up or down a bit in every song, I can get them all to fit within my range at least, if that’s suitable (problem being a composer with a not-so-common voicetype – i’m a true contralto, bordering on female tenor) – but now they’ve all shifted away from the same basic related keys, it feels a bit haphazard and like it needs some glue to fill in the cracks *sigh* Might have to try another tactic.
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… and typed the song up into Finale. Not many changes to make actually – I think it’s going to stay sketchy. I put in an extra note, changed the timing of another one, but otherwise I think the accompaniment’s going to stay quite sparse. It’s a song that’s all about tone and touch, really. Quiet and precise – the sort that people look at on paper and say “oh, that’s easy” but may be actually quite tricky to grasp exactly the right feel for, even if the notes aren’t hard. Still really pleased with it. I think the whole set’s going to be for alto – tenor wasn’t quite fitting it, but I suspect I’m going to have to work on an alternate section in the first song somewhere – the range is just too wide to be reasonable.
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and I’m loving it, really loving it – it’s fitting together so well and it’s so simple and delicate it’s almost like it isn’t there at all. Can’t wait to get back to it tomorrow.
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Sat down at the piano, not really expecting much to happen – and next thing I know, I have the framework for half the final Walt Whitman song down!
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