I have a cellist!!! Yesterday’s quick message has paid off and I now have a lovely cellist lined up for workshopping and performing the piece in September, which is a huge relief because I was a bit worried that I mightn’t be able to find anyone and then I’d have to rethink everything, which would be a pain even though my thinking about this so far has been so vague.

Today I’ve been working gently towards concepts with some reading and thinking. Yesterday as I stood staring blankly at my bookcase in a moment of mental haze, the catalogue for the Joseph Cornell exhibition that was on at the Royal Academy last year kind of leapt out at me and I pulled it out to peruse in detail today. Somehow I feel that Cornell is kind of right for this project. I feel the collage/assemblage idea may be useful in combining the live cello with material in Max/MSP and reading and perusing the catalogue today has reinforced that feeling. Nothing specific, just a kind of a vibe I’m drawing from this which I think I can use.

The Cornell stuff has somehow also triggered a feeling of connection with a visual art project I’ve been working on for a while called Black Book, which is an ongoing sketchbook project using limited materials to build up a personal repertoire of visual gestures and develop how I use those. In particular it uses drips, smears, hand-drawn and cut lines and some collage. A couple of pieces from this in particular feel Cornell-like to me and I’m now thinking how I might use material from Black Book (or visual material developed out of the experiments in Black Book) in the piece.

I’ve also done a little listening – pulled out a Louis Andriessen CD I’ve had for about 15 years but never listened to (partly because it was in storage in Sydney for a decade). Didn’t really spark anything but I feel it did my brain good. Plus it got me to change the batteries in the Discman so I actually can listen to CDs in my studio again. Hurrah!

[Header photograph is my Project 365 photo of the day – the Cornell catalogue I’m talking about in this post.]