Monday, November 30th, 2020

I finally get to play back my long piano score. I’d recorded its four lines, one line a week, playing each without listening to the lines that preceded it, over a month of Saturdays. Each follows the same structure, beginning and ending at the same place at the same time, but wandering in between through a field of possibilities. I’d recorded each in the same octave, then arbitrarily assigned them to different ones, low to high in the order that I recorded them. It sounds like a single piano, though I would never be able to play the result. Unexpected melodies occur. A phrase starts in one octave and continues in the next. Chords appear, and moments of harmony. Silence has its place. Stretches of four or five seconds at a time, though rarely more than that, pass without new notes being played. I may add a pedal to everything, so a haze of tones drifts in the background. I may not. I planned it to be played by others, and eventually it will be, but this is what it has become for now. It’s one layer of several. I have already recorded four tracks of my voice reciting a text, similarly connected and separate. There will be sounds from the environment and elsewhere. Birds, seascapes, and children will appear, as well as clusters of massed violins that I played some twenty years ago. All this goes along with visuals: pillars of text, images of my city, and other layers not yet known. I like what I hear in the piano score. I know that I made mistakes, but I can’t hear where they are. I leave them in. It’s time to start combining things. The whole thing is soon, though I don’t know how soon, to be a minor motion picture. I want to watch it as I fall asleep. If only I can understand and enjoy what it becomes, it will be enough.