06 October 2008

Composing Today

A full day of work on the guitar/mandolin piece. I was exploring more the concept of translation today – how can we make it work with a musical experience. Sure, with a physical experience I can take the essence of it and morph it into a structure or concept. With this piece, I want to reflect on the blind man of Urumqi playing his erhu down the street. The idea translates to the ensemble here in the concept of blindness – the surroundings may change but he will still remain walking the changing streets of China and playing the beggar’s fiddle, one of the oldest instruments in the country. To create the blindness, I retuned the guitar and mandolin to create an instrument that is the same physically (the alleys and anes that he walks) but that has a different existence – the pitches here are different though the streets are the same – to mix several metaphors simultaneously. Let’s go further and reflect on a musical experience, to translate the musical experience I can reflect on what works for me in the piece musically and then do something with those to create something new based on the musical parameters of something else. In this case, I’m not particularly interested in the musical parameters – he plays a relatively simple pentatonic song, with the addition of one grace note and a slide. It is his feeling that is what is interesting. Instead, I’ve decided to transcribe the gestures of the player – he has six positions on the instrument, plus the open string, that he moves between depending on the note he’s playing. I mapped this geography onto the instruments I’m writing for and from there chose little figures duplicating the rhythm – so the players here are playing his song on their new instruments, or at least the gestures of his song.
I’ve been playing around with the piece for a few hours today and have about a minute and a half of music – very rhythmic making full use of the open strings. I still don’t have much sense of the piece. The erhu player plays a song that is ABA, with the first and last phrases essentially duplicating each other. Perhaps I should simply map this structure onto the guitar/mandolin piece, which would mean that I have an A section and need to simply develop a B section and another A section and the piece is finished except for the crazy remapping of it back onto the guitar/mandolin. We’ll see where it goes.
In other news, I’ve found that the best way for me to hear it fully is to save it as a midi version on one track – this keeps similar sounds and the quarter-tones, which I’ve beenhaving a hell of a time getting on my nasty-looking four-staff finale version.

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