short

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!