A slow morning but lots of Salomé music work after that, finalising the production for the first track; Lou Salome Remembers (there is no accent on the e for the official title by the way, I'm unsure if the PRS accepts accented letters).
The morning was largely spent trying to work on the intro. I wanted to start with a music box which inspires the piano to start, as though Lou herself was now old and was reminded of a melody from her past. It didn't work at first, partly because my music box samples (from three different boxes!) weren't adequate, so in the afternoon I took apart my best music box and sampled it: winding, the ticking mechanism, and each tine of its tiny voice. Some of the tines were very dull and odd, and none were really perfect and singing, but it is this charm that makes the music box unique, so I used about eight sounds overall to build a multi-sampled instrument, and it sounded very good. I added a very slight sine wave to these too, to extend and tune them a bit.
Then, I added some ambient chatter from the interval during the live Salomé performance, making this dark and low, like distant doctors or residents in some home where the aged Salomé is now resting. The music box slows to a stop, and a piano plays, a few strokes of the first key, then the melody proper. I've smoothed out the strings and added some brass, percussion (a characteristic sound of mine which is based on filtered white noise and is called SuperDeep).
At first the backing all simply played chords and tribute to the piano, which will, for these tunes, always be the principle instrument, but I felt I had to include more - these poor strings and poor flutes! Aching to play a nice melody and romance with the piano lead. The flute gets the most interesting parts, then the higher strings, with the poor bass and brass playing simple 'Hollywood' bits; the main chord and occasional triad.
As I've written and played all of the music for solo piano, it might be hard to break out of this when recording these 'definitive' versions... hard meaning whether I really want too. Well, I'm pleased that I've played these live a few times first. If I played live again, I may try to emulate these new recordings, or I'm free not to, so the choices of 'complexity' based on ability to play them live is not an issue this time.
After this, I recorded the basic piano parts for The Planet's Oracle, and edited the piano for Dream Sequence, which is dark, gentle, moody, bluesy even; I was thinking Miles Davis as I played, and Robert Miles when I composed (I will produce a trance/dance remix).
In between all of this I've started to worry about money and the future, something of a silly worry, as we are all bound by fate. All the work I do for nothing, or for hope, but such is life. I remember my companion Beethoven, and his struggles resonate with me eternally.
In other news, I've thought again about fate and fatalism. I've probably written this countless times, but now I feel that when anything occurs that we later, due to ego, attach our will to the event and it is by this mechanism that we experience 'free will', not a 'choice' or action before an event, but a proud claiming that we made the choice after it. My next question is about ambition, plans. These are more long-term 'choices', how can we steer fate towards a more distant destiny in this way, if everything is inevitable? Do we merely anticipate what is coming?
