Quick update on the violin piece

Since I just returned from a long weekend in San Diego on Monday night, I’m just now getting back to work on the violin piece. I have some thoughts about the ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS cycle.

I began work this morning by playing back what I’ve written so far, and I didn’t get past the first entrance of the violin before I stopped and changed it by doubling the length of the last note of the phrase, i.e., slowed the whole brain-frame down.

This is GESTALT in action: I look at the work and pay attention to what is missing, what is extraneous, what needs to be changed. I realized I wanted to hear that note a little longer than it was playing. So I made it happen.

That bit of SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION meant that when I got to the point where the violin unexpectedly plays a sixteenth-note pattern, matching the piano, it was jarring. Those sixteenth notes are from an idea I had about engineering a climax for the piece — and now I don’t know why they’re there. The cycle continues.

More work is required, as we say in the Lichtenbergian Society.