October 2020 – An Echo That's Reversing

Symphony No. 1 – Before everything changes

The 2nd movement (I am now), interlude (“Everything was forever until it was no more”), and 3rd movement (an occupying army) are done.

I have this fear that when everything changes on Tuesday I’ll no longer be able to look at this work, the work that’s left, in the same light. No matter the outcome.

I finished the interlude and it feels very good that there’s a stopping point. I don’t know what our state of mind will be on Wednesday. Being in mid-music would be at the very least fragmenting.

I can’t say that the oncoming anguish helps or hurts or strips any possibility of creative expression because of a fight-or-flight panic.

Musical observations feel less-than-important right now. Here they are from the last few days:

Coronavirus – 25 Oct 2020

I had abandoned these updates almost exactly three months ago (24 Jul 2020) and it’s been nagging me. My process had been to slowly build a list of notes over days and weeks and to review liked tweets that were my bookmarks of useful information. I would then try to organize it. When I stopped posting, I had very little new that I was experiencing and so updates and observations began to stagnate. From the start, I wanted this to be a way to remember each moment of a world that could radically change within weeks or days. Even though my July experiences were anemic, much still happened in the three months since then, and those months will be a dark age when I look back a year/years from now.

Antonio Margheriti’s “Gamma One” quadrilogy

In 1966 and 1967, Margheriti made these four sci-fi films loosely connected by the same space station (Gamma One), the same sets, and the same characters. (Margheriti also directed, among many other films, Devil of the Desert Against the Son of Hercules (1964) which was part of my sword and sandal obsession over the past couple of months). Ivan Reiner wrote the screenplay for all four movies.

Symphony No. 1 – Reassessments and confessions

I was cleaning up the 2nd movement and, more and more, it started feeling alien to me. It was another me, another person, that wrote it and I no longer had any ownership or control. With distance you leave the work and become the listener. In some phrases I knew, for example, a trombone would add to the depth or rolled cymbals would provide that “radio static” sound, but I was really only giving editorial notes after-the-fact. Even if it wasn’t perfect or complete, I had to leave it.

Side observation: From the start of these notes I had been afraid that documentation would soil the creative process (the social media affect: you become the performative you instead of the intentional you). So far, I don’t feel that’s the case. The fear of exhibitionism would come from posting each movement as it’s complete but not from documenting the battlefield of creating each.

Sword and sandal resources

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