Inner Voices: Log

I will admit, John and I had the goal in mind today that we would complete the music for the opera/R&B musical delight. I will admit, we did not accomplish anything.

I want to take a moment and analyze the artistic process that I have used thus far in the project to see where and what I should be doing next.

When Luke gave me the script for the opera, I took it with bold optimism. Without any kind of preconceptions, I wrote the music. Having Anika and Danny with me was a huge help. What happened was that I would play a few chords, Anika and Danny would improvise a vocal line, and then I would record the line. I have a collection of recordings on my phone for each musical line. After about a period of work, we all needed to take a break, but we accomplished quite a lot. Almost half the script was composed.

Then Luke asked me if I could finish the opera at home. I attempted this, but I could not complete the opera. I got stuck, unable to think of vocal lines and chord progressions. I could write a few pieces, but I couldn't assemble something particularly coherent. My hope was that I would be able to bring the piece to school and attempt the same process as before.

After the whole STAC Live mess, the opera was temporarily forgotten, until today when John and I revisited the piece. I showed him the recordings on my phone, but they were of such mediocre quality as to be almost inaudible. I attempted to play the opera on the piano, but without practice I stumbled on notes and chords, so that didn't work out well either. The opera wasn't completely coherent when I tried to play it as a whole. John pointed this out to me, and I agreed but I felt as if the beginning of the opera should have sporadic voices because it plays upon the value of surprise.

Another thing John and I discussed was the direction of the scene. It seemed like it was just a date with some singing (but we can't say just!). It seemed as if the opera was a joke that could not be prolonged because it wasn't going towards any particular direction. That probably means we should make it short and sweet, because it is definitely a funny shtick.

There wasn't much else to say after that. I didn't really know how to move the session towards writing more music. It didn't come to me as easily as it did when I had Anika and Danny assisting me. I was so uncertain, I ended up in a trap where I didn't much know why I was even doing anything at all. John asked me, "Do you want to keep the music you wrote? Do you want to rewrite this? Do you want to keep working on this?" I didn't have much of an answer to offer. It's probably my fault that we ended up being unproductive today because I couldn't make any definitive decisions. I had this hope that everything would be figured out tomorrow, and I spent the rest of the period dozing off.

Hopefully tomorrow we will be able to write music more effectively. I suggested to John that we have the singers assist in the composition process, but he's not sure if it's a good idea to get more people involved. We'll figure it out. Maybe.