New Piece: C. C.- After Caitlin Rowley

This piece stems from a twitter conversation between myself and the composer Caitlin Rowley, whose been encountering numerous road blocks trying to finish it off. We discussed many things, including graphic scoring, and it so happened that she’d done this painting which she uses as a map of intensity of the poem Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “Carrion Comfort”. I also read the poem but it was Caitlin’s intensity map that spoke the most directly to me and I asked to do a piece to it.

Poem intensity map of "Carrion Comfort"- Caitlin Rowley

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The piece came very quickly; the shapes and colours suggested harmonies and stucture- below you can see my initial sketch. What happened was once I had the initial ideas down, the piece came to me immediately! I abandoned scoring with pencil and recorded direct into my DAW using both hardware and software synths- I pretty much knew form experience what sounds I wanted, once I had twiddled the various knobs I started recording MIDI direct with music keyboard. The gaps in the compostion I filled with improvising solutions which really equate to spontaneous composition because I was constantly reviewing these parts; often deleting and re-recording until I was happy with what I had. In the end I had the piece nailed in four hours!

 

You can hear it at the bottom of this post

 

Beginning of piece