I’m still working on the Morning Noodle project. A few days ago I organized and labeled the pages; I’m up to 59. I don’t generate a page every day; some days just half a page, other days more than a page. I sit at the piano, toss the solfege dice, see what I can do with it, and work at it til I get restless.
My usual approach is to take the random notes in order and group them into chords. Lots of suspendeds and chord extensions! I play slowly, because I don’t know my way around a keyboard well. For several days this past week I felt bored with what I was coming up with (“It all sounds the same”) so I added a complication by treating the string of random notes as a melody, and rolling a separate die for the note durations. This particular die is a D60. It’s huge (larger than a pingpong ball). and solid metal. The way I’m calculating note values is — 60 is a whole note, 30 is a half note, 15 is a quarter note. 20 is a dotted quarter and 40 is a dotted half. I guess I could say 8 is an eighth note and 4 is a 16th note, but right now I don’t want to get that crazy — I’m just rounding the numbers up or down. Thursday when I did this I wound up with a melody in 12/8, which I thought was cool. Not a meter I normally work in. Yesterday it was in 4/4 and sort of ponderous and lumpy, so instead of treating it as a melody I used it as a baseline for chords — throwing out anything I didn’t like. It’s as if I’m rounding off the edges. I’m sure someone like Adam Maness could take even the oddball notes and metric intervals and make something interesting out of it!
Today I’m having trouble focusing. I’m too tired to roll the D60 and figuring out note durations. Back to the easy route of taking groups of notes and making clustery chords. I got 3 chords then went off on a tangent. If this had been a conversation it’s like you were talking about the weather and that reminded me of something and I started talking about a dream I had. It would be rude if I treated you that way, and somehow it seems rude to today’s random notes to treat them that way too. I should respect them and let them say what they have to say! If this were a homework assignment I had to hand in — if I had to compare my work to my classmates’ efforts — I would be trying much harder today. My desire for recognition and praise would motivate me. Even more so if someone said “hey, that’s cool, can I add a countermelody to that” and it became a group effort.
Working on my own without a class to check in with and get energy from, without a teacher for me to entertain…is its own kind of struggle. I think if Jay Allen were here he would encourage me to take the digression. In one of his Skillshare lectures he demonstrated a technique where he took some random notes, played them in a canon against themselves, and listened for anything interesting that emerged. “I kinda like that, now lets transpose it…” A very gentle and exploratory approach. And I think Adam Maness would say that simply sitting at the piano and playing what I hear in my head is a good exercise.
The Power of Habit author would say that simply sitting at the piano the same time every day is a good exercise.
It’s hard to focus today, I’m tired, not feeling very imaginative — well — I was outside in the fresh air for several hours yesterday planting trees! I didn’t think it was very hard work at the time. We were moving slowly and it was just 3 little trees. The weather was exhilarating — brilliant sun, breezy, and just on the boundary of being warm enough to take off a sweater. Every few minutes the sweet scent of the neighbor’s invasive wisteria would waft across the street. I was digging the final hole and backfilling it with compost as the sun was setting. OK, I give myself permission to be tired today lol.
