"It's about the journey."

I had a meeting with our adviser before we left for Spring Break; that interaction left me mostly hopeless but also timidly inspired. Granted, I didn’t have much to bring him, and what I did bring him I thought would be sufficient; in my frustrations of trying to put this score together, I figured I should do what I know, which is write pieces for my standard-notated, classically-trained bubble of academia. I started with a big picture drawing, over three or four 8/5 x 11 sheets of paper. I had come up with the structure of the piece, and even how I wanted this little cell I had conceived of in my brain to develop. No such luck. Richard wanted to know what was in the cell. (Beats me, that’s why I left them blank.) We did discuss the process of how the piece was going together, but it was stressed to me that I needed to be thinking about this cell and what I wanted to say with it. It’s all about the moment. So, I had to work on what I wanted my moment to be; what was the minute gesture that was going to make up the entire piece? (Sidenote: this meeting became hugely ironic to me when, the next day I had a lesson with my composition teacher. I am just beginning to write miniatures in my studio lessons, and so the pieces are all about how you take just ONE idea and manipulate it in many different ways. I’m happy that these projects are currently paralleling each other in some way.)

I also expressed my fears, fears which run through my studio composition as well; I worry that what I want to say won’t get translated onto paper properly(my fault), what I want to say won’t get interpreted the same way by the performers(again, partially my fault), or the audience won’t get the same interpretation through a combination of my composing and the peformer’s interpretation. Richard wrote the word “Duck” on a piece of paper and asked me what I would do if I was given that set of instructions. I told him that if I was the dancer in the project, I’d physically duck, if I was the actor, I might quack, and if I was the musician I would most likely imitate a duck sound in some way. Exactly. One word, one image, one cell, is going to create three (or more) different interpretations, depending on the kind of skills you have and limitations your art provides you with. So it’s not so much about what I specifically can convey, but the big picture that I can inspire within the manipulation of these tiny cells that I have created.
It’s spring break this week and so amidst my skiing in Montana I am working on this piece. On my flights out West, I was “that kid” on the plane, drawing all sorts of silly images and making notational notes, scribbling on half a sheet of bright yellow paper. In thinking about my moment, I imagined a gesture that I would want to see created by many different people. I started off with what I knew, what was most comfortable; a musical gesture:


I knew that I wanted it to have a definitive shape, and hit a “high point” in a low register/space. I then tried to create the same idea in a more abstract gesture. (Interestingly, what is more abstract than music notation? Or, even further, what about written language? Many languages use arbitrary symbols to create reference to words or letters; the letter “a” does not look like the shape we make with our mouths to produce the sound. Who decided that this shape was going to produce that specific sound and that, depending on which other symbols it was placed next to, the sound would change? It’s all abstract. So I suppose finding a more abstract gesture is not the right turn of phrase. Perhaps it is finding a different abstract gesture, or a more musically abstract gesture.)

Regardless, this was the first thing I came up with:

1.










Which became:
2.



Which I also tried to create as:
3.


None of these gestures seemed to be portraying what it was I wanted them to. #1 looked too much like a duck, which was ironic because of my conversation with my advisor earlier in the week. #3 looked too much like a blob and didn’t have any direction to it. #2 was perhaps the most accurate, but the gradual process of either pitch or volume could have been lost with that initial right angle.
I drew this:

This was essentially a way to indicate the gesture I wanted in my initial musical example without the constraints of pitch. I thought about what I might do as a dancer or artist if I were to see this and decided that the similarity between projected responses was much more appealing than either of the three gestures created above.

While I had not in any way really come up with my “cell” yet, I had gotten my brain over a few initial hurdles.

Next problem: what is my moment? In this process, I had created a gesture, but this existed over a span of time; in my mind, somewhere along the lines of five to ten seconds, but perhaps in the minds of other performers, this could happen over a minute or be the gesture of an entire section or even the whole piece. Hence another word written on this airplane paper: “fractals.” I had always been amazed by fractals when I was a kid, and thought that perhaps I could create my moment out of the bigger gesture I had imagined in the outline of my piece. More on that later; I only wrote the word down to remind myself what to look at next after I had figured out my moment.

Looking at the “no notes” gesture, I isolated the last portion of the gesture to call it my “moment” and do some exploration. This is what I came up with:




I imagined what would happen if any number of artists were to interpret this symbol, my version of the word “duck” if you will. The possibilities seemed much more endless than what would happen with my standard-notation musical gesture, as well as any of the more shape-like images I had created. Had I found my moment? Not definitively, but I will be using this as the inspiration for what my cell turns out to be.

-Kate