Sphinx

This is something of a negative and/or holding post, but it seems worthwhile putting it down as a marker to myself if no one else… As I’ve mentioned before, one of my resolutions for lockdown was that I would finally make some progress on my Thucydides musical project. This hasn’t got anywhere, partly because of the ongoing brain fog issue (in the light of recent scary newspaper reports, I’m trying to take the optimistic view that once again I’ve got off lightly compared to others and so this will pass if I just take it easy, rather than contemplating the thought that this might be permanent), but partly as a result of the jazz composition course I’ve been doing online. As I’ve noted, this has been enormously valuable as an exercise in seeing things from the student perspective (and I really feel for the tutor, as he’s falling into exactly the traps that I would fall into, trying to engage with students in a normal manner although this takes much more time than usual, and trying unsuccessfully to get people to make use of the chat facility between classes). But I have also learnt a lot about jazz composition, especially when it comes to modal approaches.

And this means my original plan, to read the whole of Thucydides and characterise each chapter according to a set of parameters that would then drive melody and harmony choices, needs some refinement. At the moment I’m wondering about assigning a different mode to each Book, but certainly I think I need a more complex and interesting set of mechanisms – deciding in advance that certain events will trigger a chord or key change, for example – while also aiming to produce something that sounds half decent. I’m wondering about drawing on my Thucydides class next year, asking them to characterise different books and identify key moments and themes as the basis for composition, rather than determining everything myself. Or, of course, I could produce multiple versions. Current idea is to start doing this in the autumn, producing a Book every month, but this may be over-optimistic. Anyway, nothing for the moment, but watch this space…