It’s that time of year when I feel even more directionless and dispirited than usual; obviously, as resolutions go, “be less crap and stop feeling sorry for yourself” sets the bar simultaneously too high and too low. I’m honestly not sure whether I should be planning to devote a bit more time and energy to this blog, or swearing off it for at least a couple of months.
The one thing I do increasingly realise about myself is that I like making and doing things, rather than all this wretched brain work. Maybe the alternative career plan, of becoming a chef, made more sense than I realised – though I doubt that I’m robust enough for all that pressure and shouting. But I can at least make sure I schedule time this year for cooking and brewing and gardening and sausage-making and the like, rather than just beating myself up that I’m failing to get any writing done.
And I will certainly be carrying on with the music; composition classes resume in a fortnight, and in the meantime I’ve been experimenting with the graphic score approach I mentioned last month. ‘ Knight Moves’ does indeed consist of a chess board, around which the musicians plot their way using the classic knight’s move, remaining on each square for as long as they wish (and with some interpretative latitude), until eventually everyone reaches one of the corner squares and decides to stay there. For the purposes of recording a version of the track, I simply rolled dice…
No, it doesn’t sound great – I think I need to write better melodic fragments (I was hoping for more interest to be generated from the interplay of the different instruments), and probably think of ways of messing about with the tonality more. But it doesn’t matter, because no one else is ever going to play this or worry about it. Might it work better with actual musicians listening to one another at the same time as following the score? We will undoubtedly never know…
Sphinx 
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