Stagnation

I spent some time on the second movement yesterday. I typed my progression into Sibelius and listened to it, just a series of ascending scales. It works - of course, it should, but it didn't send me running to a piece of manuscript paper to write down the movement in one big belch.

Instead, I came to the conclusion that I'm a beginning-to-end writer. The only times that I haven't written pieces in order, I haven't been happy with the result. No Free Lunch is better in its original 8 min torso, than it is in the commissioned five minute distillation. It just all seems in the wrong order. Inner Sanctum is a distillation with a difference. Like Stimmen, it appears in the same order in which it was composed. Okay, I didn't use everything in the final version, and it isn't what I originally planned, but both pieces work. Likewise, Remembering the Night Sky will never be as good as the Night Vision sketches.

You know what that means. It's back to the beginning. Of course, all my source material is still useful, but I can't write the second movement until I have a skeleton of the first. In any case, the second movement is really an interlude, and the other piece that I wrote the interludes first, that was all I wrote.

Still catching up

I had a strange dream last night. It was a dream of a dream, in fact. I was at a university where a rehearsal was taking place, possibly York (but different). I dreamt that I dreamt about revisions to my first symphony. Although at the end of the dream, I realised it was actually my second symphony. I could hear it very clearly. I was revising it as I was typesetting it (the original is a fair-copy ms).

When I awoke, I realised it was neither. I was dreaming a new piece. I remember hearing it clearly in my head. Unfortunately, it wasn't a piano concerto, but I might be able to incorporate the ideas into it. A slow section of widely spaced string harmonies (open 5th & octave), two lines of which overlapped. The first movement had a series of interrupting chords that in the revision were preceded by glissandi or runs up to them in the winds.

I'll have to think about it.