Two very busy days, but now of music rather than painting. The one-hour performance next Tuesday for Make Music Day is a challenge that requires rehearsals and lots of new music to compose, notate and practice. I much prefer and like performing new work - partly because I and we are improving with each passing month and event. My music now is more melodic and fitting to the words, rather than setting a mood in the background. I'm also scoring much more of it, so learning to sight-read rather than memorise everything. All of this means that even older pieces need more work, typing up scores that have not been there. I've made notes (if you excuse the pun), but the live versions of oft-performed pieces, like 'Whose Apple Thou Art', are always different than the recorded versions.
So, now I want to score everything and use this as the basis for shows from now on. Plus, we've decided to do many new pieces for this summer event. We'll be performing some extant tracks live for the first time (like Humpty Dumpty's Whimsical Semantics) and performing several existing poems for the first time (even one by Richard Dadd!), that means writing music. We rehearsed yesterday, only working through the new tracks, and I roughly sketched out four new tunes for four new poems. One, 'Crumpsy Madpash: The Tale of the Short Tempered Madman' has been performed as a poem twice but never with music. 'Beetle Circus' needed a custom bass loop designing for the MODX.
Today I've scored many tracks for the first time, even if only in notated form, and finalised the score for new piece 'Effervescent'. That is a somewhat Celtic sounding waltz. Even existing works which were scored reasonably well (like Sky Robes of Celeste) didn't state where the words were. Our poems, read to music rather than sung, aren't easily added to sheet music. The software likes to automatically fit lyrics to syllables. I've also finalised complete scores for some works which were partly sketched out, like Herr Kasperle.
Several of these new works need new instruments designing on either the MODX or Microkorg, which can be a frightfully time-consuming process, but I can whizz through this and use presets as a starting point.
This, plus today I had a third piano lesson with my student Peter.
For years, I've had recurring dreams of missing trains. In last night's dream I missed one, with some other musical and artistic friends. We sat in a café and waited for the next train. They showed me some of their latest music and book releases. The next train, an old 1970s-era diesel, arrived and I and the others ran and just caught it. It stopped at the next station and the others got off to visit a café or shop, which I thought was idiotically risky, and the train sped off without them. So this time I managed to catch the train.
