How to compose

Erin, in the middle of kindly linking here, says she can't imagine how you'd go about composing. Well, it's easy! Here's the Defeatist's Ten-Point Guide to Composing:

1. Take your instrument. If you don't have one, just sing or hum or something.

2. Play (or sing or hum) a tone. Carry on as long as you feel like it (or can without asphyxiating)

3. Now do another one.

4. And another.

5. Maybe you fancy playing a bunch of fast ones? Or not? Well, do or don't, whatever you feel like.

6. Maybe you fancy playing more than one at the same time? Well, why not? If you can only produce one tone at a time, consider having a friend handy.

7. Continue in this vein as long as you please.

8. Hey presto! You've just composed!

9. Write it down if you like. Or not. Doesn't really matter.

10. If you want to do something more complicated there'll probably be editing involved, but that's about it, really.

Somewhere beyond a thought

I didn't quite manage to achieve my aim of writing something for every day in January, but I got a respectable part of the way there. Somewhere in the middle of it all I reached my 500th post too, which chimes nicely with the thought that part of what this has been about is going back to how this blog started: Write something, get it out there, don't worry too much about whether it's any good, just write something.

So here are the January Pieces. Not all of them are "finished" pieces, though I think many of them would work if you just played them exactly as I wrote them down. To do that would be to miss some of the point, though.

There's more to it than getting over inertia, of course. Although I didn't write so much last year, I thought about the process of it all a great deal. Part of this is to do with exploring the possibilities of Just Intonation as a guiding principle (of which more anon) as well as the problems of notating it (more anon on this too), but there's a bit more to it than that, which shows in the fact that instead of the piano which I half-considered the sketches I put up here in 2005 to be for, all these are for my own instrument, the cello. there are several reasons for this. They're all practical, but also have more philosophical rationales lurking underneath. One is that as I'm beginning to explore a completely new method, and so starting from scratch, really, it's good to be able to experiment directly rather than try and imagine something that remains on paper until you can find someone else to play it. there's also the fact that you can't produce just intervals on a piano, and you can on a cello. But there's also the product of a lot of thought about what composing is and what role the composer has in music. I don't want to be one of those composers who doesn't play music, but has to rely on others to bring his work to life. I've always thought it's important for a composer to ave practical experience of performing, and I increasingly think this should be a primary focus. So these bits and bobs are meant to be the basis for a performance. Maybe not a finished "work", but a pool of ideas to dip into.

Backlog

It has been a difficult week. The blog's always the first thing to go.

Sunday

The Moment

Waiting for Tchaikovsky

F.Y.B.T.

Ostinato

First Principles

Vertiginous

Who'd have thought that snow falls

Triad on 7

Today is Morton Feldman's birthday.

Progression on a 3/2

Seven and syntonic

Dream

Seriously, this happened: a couple of nights ago I had a dream consisting of harmonies based on the 13th partial of the harmonic series. What I've written down isn't that - that's hard to describe. In a way it was really just the single 13/8 pitch at the start of this page, but somehow there was a multitude of other sounds shimmering round it. It wasn't a visual dream, but it had a huge sense of space. What can it all mean?

I could just sit and play that first interval for ages. It's a strange one, it takes some listening because it lies even further outside the harmony I was brought up with than the 11th partial (which does bear a passing resemblance to "quarter tones" in equal temperament).

Scordatura

One of the things about Just Intonation on a cello is the fact that the strings are tuned in perfect fifths, which means that if you take C as your 1/1, the A string's actually too sharp. So here I detuned the A string by 80/81. I did this by stopping an E on the D string (tuned to make a just sixth with the G string) and then tuning the A down so it made a perfect 4/3 with that.

Beats

2010 on D

New Year