leafing through notes

I've come back to writing here. The thought of keeping a composition diary has not left me alone, and this new piece I'm currently working on seems to me a good project to bounce some reflection off. It might clear some murky aspects of the process to me, and help me realize the potential of the material I'm working with. The piece will be called southwest.

To give a little bit of background, Johan the AD of Viitasaari festival asked me to write a work for their visiting ensemble Continuum XXI, a specialising in cross-programming HIP baroque works alongside new ones. The schedule for delivery of the finished piece was tight as it was, even without the 2 pieces I had to get out of the way before fully being able to start on it.

Immediately during the call with Johan I 'saw' the piece and how it could unfold, and how it is linked to what I was then currently occupied with, namely a fascinating mean-tone temperament (Pietro Aaron 1/4-comma if you must) and a practice linking early baroque and contemporary music together.

I also saw the potential for 'southwest' to link with a cycle of pieces I've been working on on and off since about 2018, with the first outcome being 'north' for ensemble (2023) and for organ positive (2025). The cycle is still in process, but let it's working title be 'the compass cycle' for clarity.

So although the schedule was tight, I felt as though I had this piece in me.

I've been gathering material for southwest all the while I was working on the two other pieces.

I gravitated towards the concept of the 'diagonal'.

This came about when I was looking through the harmonic material I had devised for compass through the years. The chords for 'south' and 'west' had an interesting potential to mix and merge, so I combined them to give birth to two chords distinct from their parents.

The oscillation between these chords forms the harmonic base of the piece. I've been since looking for ways to include temporal and timbral processes to latch onto the harmonic skeleton.

Today I started by clearing the office from bits and bobs from the previous project. I coiled some cables and built my meantone keyboard setup again.

After lunch I leafed through my most recent notebook which contains all the thoughts and ideas I've been collecting since November when I received the commission to write southwest. I collected key fragments and sentences, ideas and concepts around the piece and wrote them out on one of the last pages of my notebook. I found that I had done a similar summary earlier in March, one that was more concerned with musical, rythmical and timbral questions. Today I was more interested to step back and think more conceptually.

I downloaded images of two paintings that I've been associating with this piece: a painting of the Norwegian glacier Josteinsbreen by Peder Balke and the famour Das Eismeer, by Caspar David Friedrich. The concept of the diagonal is very central to romantic landscape painting, and Das Eismeer is a very schoolbook example of it. The diagonal is a hypothenus of time and gravity, and of gravity and forward motion. A glacier slowly descending down, carving a U-valley for itself.

Friedrich had made three small sketches of ice on the Elbe river during a very cold winter in the late 19th century. I was these sketches when passing through Hamburg when traveling to Belgium for Christmas and New Years'. I wanted to keep these works, their level of detail, their spontaneity and their fragmentary form, close to 'southwest''s project.

After this archival work, I listened to the chords I had devised already some time ago in early December, and looked for ways make new combinations out of them. I also experimented with chromatic transpositions, as I was in any case looking through ways of having mixed 440Hz and 415Hz performers playing the piece together. I felt that it would be interesting to somehow compose this discrepancy into the piece, even though most of the piece's tuning will will be matched with a simple and very common chromatic downward transposition.

I knew I wanted to work with a very small percussion setup, and I was intrigued by the notion of having just a hand drum and a tambourine - this was also the extent of my knowledge of what baroque percussion constitutes. I went to buy a hand drum from a music shop just down the road that had a suitable approximate pitch (close to Bb) and brought my tambourine from home, jingling in my tote bag on every step of the way from home to my office.

I spent the rest of the day experimenting with different nail, thumb and rubbing techniques on the hand drum, and different angle positions for the tambourine. The concept of the diagonal is fascinatingly audible in how the tambourine sounds different when positioned horisontally and vertically, with exciting sound worlds in between across the diagonals.

I pledged to write at least 10 minutes after every composition day, this one took a bit longer, but next time I won't need to give as much context.

Tomorrow I'll have a rehearsal for another project, but I'll be able to get back to this on Mayday's eve.

Thanks for reading!