After a few weeks

I feel that for this blog page I need to write some autobiographic aspects, because they may or may not be useful to understand what I want to write next.

First of all, I stopped sketching my Guitar and String Quartet piece because I had rehearsals, premieres and a research document to finish. So, only after finished all these, I was able to start working on this piece again.

Reading the previous pages of this blog I realised some material are strange and I am not confident about them. For example, from “Decisions” (5/04/18) I feel that I have no explanation for using a specific dynamic for each partial of the harmonic series. Also, I have no justification for using a specific metronome for each harmonic pole (original and opposite).

On the one hand, when I thought about the specific metronome mark, I was just using an idea I liked from other composer. However, his music is related with video and electronics. So, for him it makes sense using different metronome marks, because he need to relate and combine video, electronics and music. On the other hand, maybe the dynamics makes sense because it is acoustically correct. However, I could apply this partials=dynamics only when using the harmonic series in his crude stage. Does not makes any sense applying this in chords that are a mix of different partials played at the same time. So, to conclude I may use this partials=dynamics for melodic lines that are using a sort of crude harmonic series and not for chords.

Other example of disagreement with my old thoughts is, from “give-and-take” (06/04/2018) where I was suddenly sketching a new material for the beginning of the piece without having any idea of what my material looks like? What is the core of my material? How I will transform it? Or even transpose it? Although these are uncertainties, it was good to meet Fabio and explore the possibilities between my material and the possibilities of the guitar. In a way, It was no so bad to have tried to start composing the beginning, that gave me ideas to explore techniques I am not knowledgable about the guitar as for example ‘cross string trial’.

After a few weeks, I returned to the sketching process. At the beginning I was struggling with some of my material, sometimes for the reasons above and sometimes for the time-factor. However, the time-factor made me realised that some of the material I had was not as good as I thought it would be. So today, I started to engage again with all my materials and to select which ones are good and which ones are not.

On my first approach, I took the melody I created by accident - “happened by accident” (15/04/2018) -, divided it in three small sections and created an opposite pole melodic fragment (image 1)

Image 1 - melodic fragments (original and opposite pole)

Then, I took each fragment and transposed it in all ‘major’ tonalities of the circle of fifths. For this, I recognised that all the melody is in B, which is where my chord 1 is based. So, fragment 1 (A-flat, A-natural & F-natural) was transposed in F-sharp, C-sharp, G-sharp, etc. (Image 2).

Image 2 - melodic fragment , original pole, 1 transposed

After this, I inverted the directions of the intervals (image 3). I ended up with more options.

Image 3 - melodic fragment 1, direction inverted, transposed

At the end of this fragment, I inverted the pole and transposed it in all the ‘major’ tonalities of the circle of fifths (image 4).

Image 4 - melodic fragment 1, opposite pole, transposed

Later, I applied the same process to the other two fragments.