I never had a lot of time to write this piece, but since the start it has felt very natural to think this piece into being.

I'm counting in hours now, not in days or weeks. Every moment spent writing southwest seems meaningful.

I don't wish I had more time. If I had much more time, the piece would become very different. This timeframe of almost instantaneous composition fits this piece, especially since I've been working on material very similar to this piece since 2018 or even 2017. The core of the material will keep ruminating even after this piece is finished. It's like a mushroom in rain.

It's raining. A piece comes out. Then the mycorrhiza goes back to sleep to keep the humus fresh.

I had started on the first page of the beginning of the piece in full score format yesterday. I had written it with proportional notation and shorthand, using text where jotting other symbols down felt too defining for this stage.

On a few long train trips in November, in the immediate days and weeks after hearing about this commission, I had written several sections straight into Sibelius and developed them there, with the help of the program's playback tools.

I went through these, my initial readily 'typeset' fragments, and selected a few that fitted my current plan. I'm going to print them tomorrow on paper, so that I can work with them equally alongside my manuscript.

I found myself sloping into short score, away from full score, as I got 2 minutes into the piece. I felt as though I needed a step back from defined notation, inorder to sketch out longer cycles of the piece. Some sections are more detailed, but overall I have a lower threshold to jot things down. The stuff of my writing looks like I will come back to it, so I don't have to worry too much about the definitiveness of it. I can go forward, keep the past open, and what may appear may still affect where I had come from.

Tomorrow I will focus more on the three sections after the first one. I feel like I need to break this chronological way of writing, in order to have a more defined picture of where I'm heading.

Balancing being specific and vague. I'm hoping to finish the short score on Saturday so that I can spend all of next week working in full score.

Getting there, good night!

For what seems like the tenth time, I went through all my papers that have something even remotely to do with southwest.


This time, I opened one of my landscape A3 score papers, and turned to its blank side to draw a timeline for the whole piece.

I knew how I wanted it to start (at least for now) and to end. I pencilled in 10 minutes in between the endpoints, and mapped out the location of Φ and the half-way point. Estimating the length of the intro and outro, I had an overview of how much time I had for the other material within the piece, and I mapped out an order for them.

The first part, light and soft, 2' -foot register on the organ/harpsichord.

Second part, gigue-like material circling away for a good 3 minutes.

Gamba rising above the other instruments initiating an interlude of contrasting material for violin and gamba soli.

A final section, where the gamba presses down on the ensemble, bringing them to a 16' -foot register.

At lunch, I mumbled to the person working behind the till, and I couldn't hear what she was saying. I apologised and thought to myself I mustve been focusing for a few hours since I was so distracted and in my own thoughts.

The piece exists now. All is left to do is to write it.

I give myself credit for appearing at my workdesk with all my project files for southwest, my manuscript folder, empty staff paper, laptop, midi-keyboard and headphones. I even remembered to take my two previous notebooks that contain the seeds for the piece.

Meanwhile my Lithuanian colleague is going paperless.

I didnt get anything done today. Realising that this was happening, i proof-listened to a track for a future recording project and sent my comments to the sound designer. I went for an early dinner.

Im writing this on my phone at my friend’s couch, waiting to post tomorrow, once I get back to my laptop I left at the office.

I have 14 days to write this piece. On top of my mind is both a hesitation and a strong will to follow what I feel is the essence of this piece.

Namely two alternating chords, debris and chromaticism that accumulate over time and an increasing sence of pesanteur, pressing down on the gigue-like circular movement, initiated in bar one and carrying until the end.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. Decisions in the face of ignorance and hesitation.

Hesitation is a winter topos - tremolo and sul pont, as illustrated in Vivaldi - and yet plowing through a passage on a wintery street from A to Z demands commitment and a certain lack of care for detail.

At the core of southwest is this seeming lack of care. At the surface, a choreography of lively hesitations.

I wish I could strike today off the calender, but I feel this contact with the concrete floor is a necessary evil to wake me up for more consistency in my work in the coming days.

Courtesy of a lack of inertia, caused in turn by contemplation in stead of decisiveness, i feel like I’m living by a chess master’s rule:

”Don’t just do something, sit there!”

Today I made a start on the full score for southwest.

I still have to work on the form of the piece – which section follows what, and what proportional lengths are they in relation to one another.

Any sound that I like and that I feel is very much of this piece doesn't exist on it's own. You come to it somehow, and then you leave it.

How you do this is equally important to the identity of the sound or the section. This game of proportions and relationships is a lot of fun, but it's also very elusive to me at the moment.

Starting on the full score even though I don't fully know where I'm heading with the piece, I push myself to decide on crucial aspects of the piece.

A piece can start in any number of ways, and they way I chose today eliminates a lot of potential starts. Moving forward or imagining later sections became a lot easier once I have a feeling of how I arrive towards them.

What's also fun is to then either delete the start of the piece if at some point it feels like the form isn't working, or moving it to another point in the piece. The original teleological ratinale of what follows what is then broken, but if you see the piece as being in bubble-form (the past, present and future of the piece is present at any given moment simultaneously) the order becomes less defining. All sections are affected by each other within the frame (the start and the finish) of the piece.

I'm listening to Byrd today. I love the album featuring Fretwork, Magdalena Consorts and His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, especially Christ Rising Again has a fabulously beautiful and engaging polyphonic grid, and a balanced dual form with a slow and fast passage. Almost naive, humble. It communicates a similar sense of humility and contemplation, yet chromaticism and illuminating use of colour and dramaturgy as Beato Angelico's murals at the San Marco monastery in Florence.

What is enough is enough, and for today, having made a start on the piece is enough of a days work. I will have very little time this week to continue on this, so I put all my hopes and dreams on next week. Coming back to this will be easier now I'm able to ruminate on what follows, since I know where I'm coming from.