Today’s work on the piece involved coffee and a friendly chat. While I find these blog posts helpful for clarifying my ideas as well as documenting them, it was good to be pulling together a verbal overview of the piece, to describe it from scratch to someone who didn’t know anything about it. While I don’t know that anything really either changed or developed, I think it kind of cemented some of the ideas. And there were good questions – particularly, why do I want the electronic part to get all big and aggressive at the end? to which I think that’s a balance thing – it’s the scream that balances out the whisperiness of the cello part throughout most of the piece. But I also think I’m going to be considering this further and I need to understand how that fits together.

Also, listening suggestions: Lachenmann’s Gran Torso string quartet and his Pression for solo cello. I’ve listened to Pression this evening (several times) but not Gran Torso yet as I keep telling myself I need to go to bed cos super-sleepy after all the wandering about in the London-pretends-to-be-Sydney heat. I’m super-excited to discover that the British Library has the scores of both of these (of course) so I guess it’s time to revive my reading room pass there and trot off to King’s Cross for a listening-and-reading afternoon. Maybe next week?

Oh, and this morning, I decided to quickly take photographs of the pages I’ve added to Black Book since posting the ones that are on my website. It was good to go back through them, actually. I hadn’t realised I had so few undocumented pieces in there and there’s quite a few I really like. I think in the later pieces, there’s something of a style evolving, especially when compared to the earlier ones which are a bit less confidently executed – I feel the later ones not only show a stronger use of the gestures but a better understanding of the media involved. Here are a couple of these pages – the photos are a bit rough and I had a light to the left so the tone’s a little uneven, but they’ll give an idea until I can document them more carefully: