Too tired to work on music today after a very busy yesterday.
Instead, I spent the day on the simpler task of scoring the War Is Over music. The complexity of the improvised piano opening, and the One Hat vibraphones make this really difficult (from the MIDI sequence, I never really stick to timing or pay any attention to it - I record everything at '120 B.P.M.' with no click track). I'm so pleased I've developed the tools to help. My tool essentially shoves the notes next to each other, then I can manually edit the music in Sekaiju. It's time consuming, but a lot faster than hand entering note by note. I suspect that even an A.I. or apprentice couldn't do this seemingly ideal task for them, as there are a lot of creative control, active composition decisions, needed.
It made me think. The essence of One Hat, while playing live, isn't at all to match that recording. I generally improvise it all using the same approximate chords as the recording, but I've never really played some parts in the same way. I've never since, for example, played the darting between D and C during the 'onions' part, and often the strokes for 'Half he said, half' tend to be more on time when live than on the recording. Much of the live playing is about matching Deborah's pace. Now, I rarely write Fall in Green tunes like this, instead writing actual different parts for the poem, more like songs, but these early works were more improvisational.
I thought that the essence of the score should be like my 'live' mnemonics, here:
Rather than the full notes in the recording, which are far more complex. A similar issue exists for Janus Never Blinks. I do tend to play it rather like the recording, but over the many live performances it's evolved into something a little different. For the Testing The Delicates music, this will be a big issue, as most of it is improvisatory in nature.
Well, the scoring process is tedious but I've managed Janus, One Hat, Valhalla (which is barely musical), and the piano piece at the start which is called War Is Over Intro. I wrote two others at the time, for the live Knutsford and Congleton events. These were called We Are The Dead and Rhapsody For Peace, but I can't remember if I played them - they were only sketches in the score. However, I've tidied these up a little too. That's it; a day's work done.
