Have largely planned for Saturday's performance evening.
Spent most of today working on Burn of God, a concept album I started last February but hit a wall with. It began off-step from the start. In 2018 I played a series of piano tunes, composed in my instant expression way, so each tune had a feeling build in, but a lack of musical structure as such, a little melody. These were experiments in themselves. I thought that perhaps I could unify them by giving them a theme and assembled an album of sorts.
Then I thought I could make the music about religion and belief, but trying to fit the musically unrelated tunes into some global idea proved really difficult. I added some words and wrote some new pieces with words, a few words, like the music in Shadows, and indeed this whole album is an experiment in the way that Shadows was. That album worked really well, but I can't trace why I think that did, but this album isn't. It is perhaps because I've started not with new music to fit the emotion, but by trying to squish and malform existing work into a new mould.
Not only this, the narrative kept changing and was originally inspired by a very surrealistic story, party based on Ingmar Bergman's film Through a Glass Darkly with elements of Cosmos by Andrzej Zulawski. This felt interesting, but perhaps it made the result more fragmented and less emotionally powerful or consistent or authentic.
Perhaps the problem is a lack of coherence. I keep darting from working carefully from start to finish, and wanting an overall structure, yet it's difficult to form an overall structure when then source musical material, which is largely written is musically diverse, if not emotionally diverse. Many of the moods are simply pleasant. It's similarly difficult to start from the beginning slowly for the same reasons.
Yet, the music I have is already probably enough for an album and sounds attractive enough to deserve to be heard.
Instinctively, I divide things into sections, usually three, like movements or acts. This is a start. The first begins with the silent cry to nobody and nothing at 4am; a good and authentic start. This is a time of screams. It is only when we are totally alone, grasping at anything and anyone that we seek a god at all.
I have a song about a priest who is an artist, and so has doubts. I have some whispered words about a woman giving birth. These things are pretty but don't fit anywhere. I must keep working. Each time I start something I feel it will be easy, and sometimes it is, but sometimes its very difficult and takes months and weeks and lots of energy and angst to wrestle out a drip of creation that, at the end, I'm generally unhappy with. I must work rationally; calculate problems and obstacles, and solutions.
