Personal – Page 8 – An Echo That's Reversing

Suite for Turntables and Piano — Timbre and finishing the first movement

Composing this work has been no single process but rather an organic transition moving from process-to-process as I experiment to work out the challenges. I’ve had mixed success and the score has been more a battlefield than normal: I’ll need a new eraser for the next project. The only consistency in the compositional approaches is that I start with a general sketch of the turntables’ “phrasal intent” within a section and within the movement’s structure then, somewhat as a crutch, write the piano part with the vertical alignment of turntables and piano happening naturally.

Suite for Turntables and Piano — Approaching a new instrument

Once I’d heard about it, I looked far and wide for Ferneyhough’s book of essays and composer interviews but could only find it for $1,300+ used on Amazon (ik,r?) and listed elsewhere as out of stock. Some sites had PDFs but they were generally pay-to-view (Scribd is the main culprit, per usual). Several pages in to the Google results I found a very sketchy-looking site that had it for download. Cool with me. Pages are scanned with greater-or-lesser quality, some clean, some absurdly skewed as they were pressed against the copy machine but still readable. Later, I found a scan a bit cleaner but from an equally sketchy site. Also cool with me.

Suite for Turntables and Piano — Notation

Different from when I finished the symphony, near the end of finishing the string quartet I immediately had an idea for this next work. The in-between-time in this instance is not downtime, but rather a period spent on research.

For (manymany) years I’d had the idea but never had the resources–or perhaps commitment–to approach it. The concept was a natural result of a classical/modernist listener who early on listened to Qbert, Invisibl Skratch Piklz, Shadow, et al. Choosing a sonata-like approach was an equally natural result for something that lends itself best as a solo instrument.

String Quartet No. 1

Cover: Suzan Woodruff, *Monsoon I*, acrylic on panel, 2003

String Quartet No. 1 – Slow, and keeping my sanity

Today I spent an hour and a half writing three measures the second violin. The time I put towards composing each day is minimal but it also helps me reset. For the past month I’ve had to put in 12-hour days at work, so any time I can put towards composing is valuable. I don’t let my work life bleed into my music life and, ignoring all keen psychological analysis to the contrary, I feel that I’ve kept it separate.