10.12
New reading at the breakfasting trough: Ravi Ravindra’s Pilgrim Without Boundaries (Morning Light Press, November 2003).
This is my last visit to Milton Keynes in the foreseeable future as Slinky Willcox completes her run this coming Sunday. Snow White can have an easier time of things for the next 11 months.
Shortly, off to DGM.
16.34 DGM HQ.
Alex is loading in last’s Saturday’s performance from All Saints’ Church, Broad Chalke from the DAT recording he made. The effect is that the atmosphere in DGM SoundWorld II is changing.
Threshold – Bells, Time Stands Still, Queer Jazz – Symmetrical, Promenade, Threshold – Future Shift and now At the End Of Time. This is prayer in musical form.
17.02 Queer Space – Whole Tone, now another Promenade. A promenade is where the player walks around the church with the music set to ongoing, but continuing with changes: four channels continue with different repeat durations for each.
I was surprised on Saturday that most of the audience sat where they were, in the pews, and for most of the 90 minutes’ performance (other than those with pressing commitments & long-standing engagements, without bleeping & droning within earshot).
17.09 The editor/producer has to balance how much the performance space adds to the music, and cannot be conveyed in the recording. What editing is necessary to maintain a sense of the music unfolding, whether the music is “developing” or not? There is an area of Soundscapes that do not develop (in the musical sense of developing variations) but just stay where they are - sonic pleroma: a warm, safe place to be but not going anywhere. Being where it is, is already where it’s going. Even there, as with the changing-durations of the repeated themes, being-where-you-are is usually far from static.
17.27 Queer Jazz – Minor & now Coda which becomes a promenade (the performer walks out of the church).
Generally, 30 minutes seems to be the preferred time span for innocent audients. A lunchtime, or extended performance, also seems to work where audients feel free to move around, view artwork, see the church, experience the sound in different parts of a live space. Much as it is for the performer, then. Today, the audience mostly stayed seated.
17.30 Alex comments that he prefers the music, now listening to it a second
time, to hearing it on the day.
18.18 Discussion with David re: release strategy for DGM CDs & David has gone home.
21.03 Listening to WNYC NPR radio news via i-Tunes.
21.38 Traditional Persian music on Radio Darvish. Internet radio is one of the benefits of broadband.
The inbox is groaning & the floor is promising wonder & delight & refreshment.
"Define the aim simply, clearly, briefly, positively"
