Instead of going for the trumpet today, I went straight to the piano. As I was saying before, I’m working on a piece that is all tied together with a single theme. This can be a tough thing to do as it requires a discipline over a long period of time that, honestly, is a challenge for me. I’ve noticed over the years that I have trouble with very focused structures like this. Perhaps I will finally win the “long form” contest.

So, today I tried to just write a piece, and if I end up liking it, then I’ll keep it and just call something from the piece “the one theme to rule them all” rather than trying to come up with this magic sequence of noises before I really know what the piece is going to sound like. I made some progress on a first piece for the suite, so we’ll see if I keep all of it and pull something out of it that will be useful in the next piece.

On another note, I was ordering more of my favorite manuscript paper, and it turns out that I ordered the big size, about 12×18″, with 18 staves on each page. This sort of thing is really great from writing large ensemble music, but for my quintet its a bit on the large side. But then I remembered one of my favorite poets, Robert Creeley, who was talking about his writing process. He said that when he was writing a novel, as opposed to his short poems that he’s known for, he had to switch to a different size paper. I’ll dig up the quote later, but it made me feel that perhaps I was destined to buy big paper so I can write a bigger piece! I don’t know, I guess it makes sense to me.

Off to rehearsal with James Ilgenfritz for his “The Ticket that Exploded” at the Issue Project Room.