One tired evening in Dearborn (13 VI 2012), my brain was abuzz with unprocessed worries and I had an urge to hear/make something fairly cyclical--even abstract and exacting--on the violin. This is certainly in the vein of early minimalist string quartets by Karl Jenkins (of Diamond Music/Palladio fame)/looping cellist Zoe Keating, and the phrase "intentional minimalism" ran through my mind as I was setting up my instrument.
Between the pauses, I decided to add harmonic squeaks and shrieks. Since my tone production was poor and I didn't want to get stuck with the same notes, I tried to develop the pause space into a secondary motif that would [ideally] eventually overcome the repetitive initial motif [this was really challenging to keep the initial motif going and develop the second one at the same time—definitely a schizophrenic endeavor!]. I'm pretty certain there's a way to make a logical transition that lets the mechanical motif yield to a more melodic and lyrical motif [I wanted something lifting or ascending], but I couldn't quite make it happen and resorted to subtly abrupt disruption [I threw in bright-sounding things] to pull the tune into a new direction. Though I had been playing the violin for over 11 years (now 12 years) at the time, the ability to consistently play quietly and sensibly was a newly discovered nuance from that evening. I especially savored the dynamic changes in this play-through.
I could tell I wasn't settling into making high-quality tones in that session, so I decided I'd further play with the scratchy sounds as I brought the tune to a close. In mind, I was thinking of the fuzzy noises of a radio or old vinyl record, and you can hear it in the decay of the last note I hold. [little known fact: even though I've mostly recorded acoustic quasi-classical tunes, I'm looking forward to the day when I can use/obtain equipment suitable for noisy electronic music making.] This awakened my appeal for integrating focused "noise" in more tunes (none recorded yet--my recorder went through the wash and I'll probably need to replace it).
In life overall, I was trying to break out of long-standing hyper-objective/hyper-vigilant tendencies as I was worried they were paving a road to unnecessary paranoia. The experience was captured very well by ideas from "On Reason and Passion" the Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran's book of poems "The Prophet" which resonated very well with me since it captured two dimensions of life that really contributed to a personal struggle for fair balance. Though not a verbatim quote, I prefer to recall it as "move in passion, rest in reason" (I've likely reversed the quote).
Anyhow, I like the tune as a piece on personal growth. In the few times I've been able to recall most of its elements and dynamic nuances, the tune has changed a lot since I first came up with it--caught in this recording.
Recorded in a parking structure with an Olympus VN-6200PC digital voice recorder placed inside of my car, doors open. You can hear the buzz from the lights at the beginning. The photographs are my own--most were taken with a Canon Powershot A20, the starting image was probably from a Nikon. I'm running out of images that I can adapt to music...
No comments:
Post a Comment