One or two

I've got a sinus infection. It's being dealt with. Antibiotics are expensive. I'm sort of half-sick right now: I had a day that was alternately productive and delusional, with bouts of me telling fever-created apparitions to screw off. When I'm feverish I don't want anyone anywhere near me, even if that anyone is imaginary.

It's been a scattered while. I've been writing a bassoon and piano piece for a friend, which has been hard to engage with until recently because so much of my mind is on the Old Growth script. [WARNING, music geek talk ahead:] My musical mind is still fixated on a really simple number series (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 basically) that I keep using to make rhythms and pitch series in *everything*. I started thinking about that stuff when I was writing little flute pieces for Aura in the fall, trying to get a feel for what the Old Growthmusic might sound like. How do I write music that sounds like a tree? I got fixated on how to put the two main principles of spruce tree structure (symmetry and recursion) into music in a way that was audible and sounded good. 20 tiny flute pieces and an orchestral overture, I've still got the same melodic and harmonic material bouncing around my head. Turns out when you start on a note and then go up (or down) by intervals of 1 semitone, then 2, then 3 and so on, the result 1) is bluesy, 2) implies some neat and chord progressions, and 3) has the same bleedin harmonic progression that I've put in every piece I've written since I was 20 (two chords alternating, neapolitan minor to tonic major (or I- to flatI+, if you will) (i.e. C#- to C+)). Love it! So does John Adams.

So the bassoon piece suffered/benefitted from the distraction of a MAJOR script in major development, and the bouncing around of earworms. I was actually going to make the piece abour earworms but when I worked on that idea my earworms got way worse.

I'm putting together a cohesive draft of the script! I'm calling it Draft Two, because that makes me feel better. Draft One was in pieces, Draft Two is a putting together of pieces while editing them. The result is going to be a two-hour show, and then the cutting begins. It has a LOT of sections, which is cool, I like the structure, but man, some of them better overlap or something. But it's going well - writing falls out of me, I feel very confident writing in my characters' voices. Soon I'm going to send it out to a crack team of everypersons and theatre gurus alike, whose pairs of eyes will scan for believability and whose guts will react. One of them will hopefully be T.J. Dawe. He still owes me some noseflutes.