The Blue Forest

The Blue Forest

Welcome to The Blue Forest.. No, it’s not sad. everything is just covered with a sheen of blue. Again, a lot of exploration, and re-doing of parts to make things ‘fit together’..  Once I got it to a certain state, I found it easier to delete a number of tracks, which really weren’t contributing much.. This still carries the essence of what I wanted to do. Actually better, because it is not so cluttered.  It might seem strange, but I have been influenced a good amount by some of the postings here, because of the directness, and clarity and brevity of the musical statements. So although this piece apparently has nothing to do with ‘classical music’, I have gleaned some important lessons here. 

I was trying to create some ‘blue animal sounds’.  but alas,  ran out of patience, so we only have a few ‘bluebirds’  twittering here and there.. I replayed many of the tracks a few times. As I created more parts, I realized re-doing one of the earlier ones, ‘entertwined’. better.. Also a few times, I condensed 2 parts into 1 by just playing the important part of each..  A lot of thinning of sections, so that the desired motif at the moment wasn’t ‘fighting’ to be heard.. 

I seem to have to create an atmosphere or territory, before I can get down to the real meat of writing the melodic motifs..  It will  be a good lesson for me to do a future piece, with a couple of musical motifs in mind first, and then design and build a chord structure around it, or even just add counterpoint/harmonic lines. Then the chordal structure will become evident.   What has been insightful for me, is that the way I make music is kind of the way I have lived my life.. Wandered a round a bit, before, I got real clear about what it is I wanted to do..  

My compositional process of late has been the one I read Prince used.. He repeatedly over-dubbed and ‘re-dubbed’ parts.. So that as I added a new part, 
say a flute, I would go back and re-do other parts to make the flute part ‘fit’ better.  Motifs were created, and then re-enforced this way..  These exploratory 
pieces, start with only a determined and well worked out chord progression. With enough complex chords, to ‘open up’ the harmonic possibilities as the piece
develops.. Often later I will remove instruments sticking closely to the original chord structure..  Additional melodies and lines, will then alter the chordal implications.
 I like the effect, plus it is a great challenge to alter parts to give the piece ‘coherence’.. I think that like life, when we refine, reprocess, things we create
complexity (sometimes too much).. Since I am the only one, performing, it is somewhat hard to be ‘spontaneous’.  Yet I attempt to by playing sever ad-lib’d parts at the end of 
session.. The next day. I listen to them, and glean out anything useful, or which moves the piece to new, previously unthought of territory. 

I was recently in a ‘music workshop therapy group’.  Instead of traditional psychiatric talking therapy.. we were a group of eight musicians.  There were 
a large number of percussion instruments available, with some chromatic instruments, including individual pitched tuning fork type hand devices. The beauty of them were
they all were notes of the Dorian mode.. (so you could do no harmonic damage).  For almost all of us, percussion was not our instrument.. The moderator 
played guitar, and we were encouraged to use the percussion and our voices.  We weren’t trying to create a performance, there was no melodic right of wrong, 
it was more about expressing emotion.  It was very interesting and therapeutic.  Being seasoned musicians (all in our 60’s or over).  We did listen and respond to each other. 
I found it challenging to depend and co-operate with 7 other strangers.

I like it! The beginning part may be called a little random by some people. I like it very much!

Wow, this is amazing. Your works are like big puzzles of sounds and music. I like this piece particularly. thanks for sharing it, and your thoughts on the process.