Composing Today

29 January 2007

Worked out the second section today and I’m rather pleased with it. The percussion has moved from wood sonorities to membrane sonorities – in this case, I’ve got a bass drum, two congas and a bongo. Perhaps I should consider a tighter headed drum than the bass drum. I was thinking today about the tension that results from what is a very complicated structure whose surface details are remarkably free compositionally. In some cases the rules laid down by the structure are ignored by the instruments or only followed slightly throughout. There are tempo layers, but this is not an early Nono strict mapping, instead it’s a rule that in practice is avoided. Consider again the chaotic streets of a third-world city. There are traffic rules, it is only that the rules are avoided or else there are so many conditional to the rules that they are effectively not rules at all. Perhaps then the conflict between the rules ad the instruments choosing to follow them or not is another aspect of this piece, though I don’t think its an aspect that can have much narrative import. Rather, the simple fact that the structure has been prepared makes adherence to it itself a narrative element and vice versa. I recall how Schoenberg was asked about notes that didn’t match up with his rows and he accepted the “wrong” notes as the “right” notes, not for a narrative sense – as in this anomaly is a key to a structurally important moment – but rather in the play of inspiration inside the work.