I often wait until the early hours of the morning to make recordings, but then there are the occasional outside sounds like this train in the night. Then sometimes there are birds and sometimes puppies, or then the slide of slippers in the hallway. These accidental inclusions can even become the subject of the music, simply serendipitous. Welcome to my way of thinking about music.
The strings are silk and my instrument there is a 22 string Zheng I’ve played for a few years. There are no ornaments as you might see on Guzheng. I will sometimes slip in an extra bridge or two because I need an extra tone there, and replace strings in the gamut for testing. The tuning here is probably the Ritsu scale I was exploring a couple of years back when I made this recording. Lately I have been more interested in Gamelon, but in some sense, I hear the two are related.
Ritsu scale: E F# G A B C# D
Pelog Gamelon Scale: D Eb G# A Bb C D
Slendro Scale: C D E F# G# A# C
I play improvisationally. I am capable of writing musical notation, but it seems a rather tedious thing for me to do.
I’m not as ambitious as I was 15 years ago when I played Theremin, Didjeridu and Tibetan singing bowls.
What I do is develop a theme and play it over and over again for days. Then try to shape ithe basic theme, rather like one might do a visual composition.
I have a very good memory for tunes, and I have always had a visual approach to music. My wife will attest to the fact that I can hear the opening notes of most music in public spaces and immediately identify it by composer and title. I see the shape of the music in my “mind’s eye” as some people say. So, I don’t write things down, but I do listen very carefully. I do use a DAW to record my work and use digital editing.
I see my own music as a series of forms that I perform on strings that I will tune in interesting ways. When I finish with a particular piece of music that I’ve recorded, I nearly try to forget what I’ve done, so I can move on to the next with a fresh approach.
