A full day that has flown! I started with more Snow Business admin, and worked on some sheet music for Maggie's song, then started work on The Apocalypse of Clowns sheet music, which is interminably complex and difficult.
It's amazing, when listening to Skin, and looking at its MIDI sequence, how little it sticks to a rhythmic structure. There is a steady change of chord in time terms, yet it doesn't correspond with a change in note terms; not in 8 or 16 notes, but odder numbers. This makes it difficult to notate. Essentially, the 'bars' change mid-bar at almost all times. The alternative is to have pauses or jumps at the end of bars to aid reading, but that too won't help elucidate the structure. When playing live, I play to the words, the pace and feeling of the day.
For Mandalino, things are a little simpler, and better still for Clown Face, a tune I wrote specifically to match the poem. These three scores have take until 6pm or so. My life feels Sisyphean today. My stomach still aches and I fele physically under the weather. Such is life. Onwards we roll our rock.
