Wrote the music for Clown Face today, a simple piano tune, and recorded and sequenced it. There seem to be three different types of Fall in Green music:
1. Speech with sound effects or non-musical sounds which augment to speech with a location.
2. Simple music without specific melody; either repeating structures, or chords, meandering between keys, pleasant or unpleasant, to evoke the mood. These are very freeform and have the utility of being able to match the mood of the words more easily, but are generally simple, easy; music which would struggle to work without the support of the words.
3. Melodies with speech between or in specific passages. Of course, there is some crossover with the second type; any sound can be melodic, but here I mean music that you can hum or whistle, with a lead over specific chords. These are my favourites. Can they suit any sort of poem or speech?
I felt the need for more melodic pieces, so the Clown Face tune is one of those. It's very simple, no layers of complexity, and if there is a theme at all it's two repeating notes, but this is one of the first where I designed different lines of the poems to fit into the music while I composed it. Similar Fall in Green music; the Time, Falling theme, or the music for We Used To Store Sunlight (which we haven't yet recorded, although it has already become a live staple), were composed on the fly so to speak, with Deb reading the words as I composed.
All day for these few minutes. It feels like a slow day. I'm impatient, but time is limited. Life is limited. Must keep trying. My Lexicon Alpha appears to be dying. I light need a new sound card soon.
But wait! I did something else too, the last illustrations for The Burning Circus, my next poetry book, and the one that by coincidence includes Clown Face. I'm so pleased with the poems in this book, certainly my best work. I love it. Here is the Clown Face page from the very book itself. It will go on sale on Amazon in April and I'll have some reading and book signing events at that time.
