I’ve used this approach–or I guess mental construct–for a while. Since the second string quartet probably, when I started adopting a compositional style from Finnissy’s music. I’ll write on paper lengthy, lucid polyphonic phrases that are intended to stretch for many measures (several minutew) with each note elongated. I’ll enter them into the Dorico app with only a suggestion of aligning note changes across staffs. Precision is not important.
I haven’t been writing much (generally every Friday night while I drink a Manhattan but not at all with the frequency that I should) so I haven’t had much to think or write about the Barbarella suite. My distraction has been in general The Year of Italy and in particular the absolute hell it has been to rent an apartment (spoiler: I finally have rented an apartment as of two days ago and so this post). However it hasn’t just been the apartment but the entire process of helplessness trying to obtain a digital nomad visa. Jesus Christ I can see my white privilege. (Still, the stress is real and so accept my truth. Others’ existential uncertainty does not negate my personal bureaucratic chaos yadda yadda.)
I hope I can commit more time to composition now that a certain hurdle has been … jumped over (?). Alternately I hope that I’m not at a point where composition has left me. There was three years from first rock opera to second and eight from second to third. The shame of non-creativity stays with you.
(Listen to Midsummer Morn here. It is very beautiful.)
Comments or lessons or revelations from teachers can stay with you, and neither you nor they will know which ones are those that will resonate. I’m sure that the educators have favorites, but I’m equally sure that they know it’s a crap-shoot as to what will break through and inspire. I think it was my art history teacher, and not my sculpture teacher, who quoted either correctly or incorrectly from (either my memory or their lesson) that Michalangelo, when sculpting, felt that the stone block had within it the shape that they were manifesting.
That’s very much how I approach extended polyphonic phrases.
The current movement I’m working on is where the world is empty save for a single, brave scientist. I’m not fully sure how that narrative chapter came to me. It was part the science-is-lonely trope and also part the expressing Barbarella’s intelligence and her respect for knowledge. It is painfully fucking resonant today. It–that movement, that music–has become more anguished than I expected.