Hello.
With any luck, my trio will make another recording before the year is over. To this end, I have composed new material and am continuing to do so, in the hope that I can have a John Farnham moment such as preceded Whispering Jack where I sit in the backyard with a pile of papers and a rubbish tin, and turf the ones that simply aren’t good enough.*
Composition is agony slash joy slash just enough to permit you to keep going. You have an idea, and you scribble something that might be hoped to resemble it, but the trick is to get enough on paper so as to prevent the rest from escaping between now and next time you look at it. On so many occasions the Great Idea has evaporated on return because the scribbles were insufficient. You think, what was I thinking? Or rather, what was I hearing? The things that, as you produced the idea, seemed so essential to it as to make it unnecessary to write them out, even had it occurred to you to do so (since, after all, they were so obvious, so intrinsic), are gone – and there’s just a bunch of notes and the memory of some feeling of meaning, now marked by a brightly lit lacuna.
The further you get with a piece the stronger it is, and perhaps by then you’ve played it over a sufficient number of times to have developed an aural and even a motor memory for it as well. And you put the chart into the computer, and print it off, and move on to the next one.**
So, dear reader (funny how when Charlotte Bronte said ‘Reader, I married him’ she was speaking to a generalised population of readers, momentarily embodied by the one holding the book, whereas I may actually be addressing a single one), I submit this item, written yesterday.
This chart says all I need it to say. I know what I need to add to make it do what I want it to do; the manuscript is, for me, complete.*** I wonder though what it might mean to anyone else? As I play it, sometimes the quavers want to swing, and sometimes they don’t. Specific voicings are not specified, of course, and they’re open to considerable variation.
What I’d love is if anyone who read this, or passed it around, or whatever, took the chart and read it over and recorded a performance and sent it back. This would be fascinating. You know, because I and my fellow inmates here are the only ones to have heard it as yet, so it’s a measure of what the chart can convey, and what you want to contribute. mp3s to timothy [at] timstevens /dot/ com {dot} au
Have a great Tuesday. It’s a miserable morning here and I have to go to the dentist, so this has provided me with a happy distraction. My thanks.
*Somewhere along the line I heard that this is what he did. Perhaps the story is apocryphal. Perhaps I should ask Dave; he’s the kind of person who’d know for sure. Anyway, there it is.
**Ideally.
***I say this advisedly. Pieces themselves are never complete.
6/v/2013