Chamber CD - Day 36

Monday, December 11, 2006
12:06

Chipping away, just chipping away.

This piece is very hard to work on, like sculpting marble. Every hit of the hammer and chisel yields very small results.

And if I may stretch my metaphor a little further, what also makes this a lengthy process is that I am looking into the marble to find the form.

I don’t have a clear idea for the language, just a concept – to write something “pretty” without resorting to diatonicism, using a free chromatic language. It’s hard.

So every day is just small little marks of the chisel, then stepping back to see what form is emerging.

Adding notes, moving notes, removing, changing, moving bits around, connecting, disconnecting, changing the rhythms, displacing the meter, lengthening phrases, shortening, nip and tuck, chip, chip, chip.

I can see something taking shape now. It’s faint, but it’s there.