Barbarella the Smuggler – An Echo That's Reversing

Barbarella the Smuggler–Losing the thread

My writing has been inconsistent.

This is not unprecedented and not without cause. Many time before I’ve involuntarily, shamefully, paused on an idea I’ve loved, the story, returned, and finished. I’d thought that I would compose more while in Italy but stress and uncertainty from different directions has slowed not the ideas but the manifestation of those. I still have that “voice in my head” that elaborates on the story and the melodies and the structure as they should be, but… don’t act on it.

verse 5, where the people show her their most cherished possession: a map that can tell the future

Barbarella the Smuggler–Carving from a block of stone

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 minutes) 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.

Barbarella the Smuggler–That tonality thing

Work on the piece has been slow but satisfying. Well, unsatisfyingly slow but what little has been produced lets me see a way forward. I’ve become much more tonal but am using the structural and procedural techniques that I used in Figures to organize that tonality. And I have better headphones good god the sound was awful for several years.

An empty Manhattan, some scribbled sheet music, and a somewhat constrictive work space. Why am I not getting more work done?!?

The Ballad of Barbarella the Smuggler

While hunting for different editions of the Barbarella comic, I came across a rarity from Virgin Record Stores in the UK from 1981. Around that time, the second collection of Barbarella comics, Le Coleres du Manges-Minutes, was released in various editions internationally and Virgin Records printed a four-issue series in English under the title The New Adventures of Barbarella (this title was also used in the German Heyne editions a decade earlier with Die Neuen Abenteuer der Barbarella). Those Virgin Records publications had become my white whale in both their rarity and cost. Rarity being the biggest barrier because for a while I could only find visual records of their existence and none for sale. Eventually, I pieced together numbers 2, 3, and 4 for a decent and not embarrassing price. The cost of my collection as a whole is embarrassing, but only for a few editions am I actually uncomfortable confessing how much I paid.

But still the Virgin Records issue number 1 was elusive.