Inspiration ...

... or you could say "lack of."

As of today, that isn't entirely true. I've been trying to get some notes down on paper, and while I have a few, I wasn't really happy about any until today.

Yay!

Not so fast. That may may mean discarding everything that I've done before today. It's not a huge amount, but I hate to do that. I'm still rather unmotivated. After coming up with the new material today, I plinked around on the piano and was satisfied. It had a sound world that I was comfortable with. I took Jenny to work, did my workout at the gym, and then I was back in procrastination mode.

What is going to make this piece difficult - and what has made it difficult so far - is that I am using 5 and seven note sets, but I only have a tenor sax and a string quartet, i.e. 5 instruments. Of course, I can use double-stops in the strings and not use the entire set in the chords. It just leaves me the choice of what notes not to use: which notes can I drop from the chord without losing the color of the set. It's not that difficult in the 5 note set in the string quartet context. As long as I keep D and F#, I can use any two of the other notes and still get the flavor of the chord. If I think of the 7-note set as two chords, I can use either as 3-note chords and add one from the other, of two notes from each of the chords, to get the polychord flavor.

I also have 17-note row, which distills into a 12-note row - D# and D can appear in multiple positions. I haven't decided whether I'll use permutations of the 17-note version, or just the 12-note one, and leave the 17-note one as a melodic outline.

Formally, I'm leaning towards a similar pattern to Labyrinth (and the sketches for Sym. No 4) which is 3 main movements separated by two free interludes.

My plan looks like this:

I. Slow and dark
II. Interlude - free (Ten. sax and one other instrument)
III. Free - fast fragments darting here and there
IV. Interlude 2 - free (Ten. sax and a different instrument or two)
V. Fast irregular rhythms

It may all change, of course. BTW, I didn't like my original material because it was too dissonant, and the sets were too similar. Sometimes with all that dissonance, you need some pure consonant intervals to clear the air. There was a perfect 5th in each, but the rest of the sets held a preponderance of semitones, and I kept being forced to use tritones from one of the notes of the P5.

That's probably too much information for most of you. Needless, to say. I've found the material, so now I need to excavate the piece from it. I think coming up with a title would help, but I don't have it yet.