Reflections on my time in Italy
It was an odd week to say the least.
I'm not entirely sure what happened, but somehow I went from creating new work on a strange baroque organ to cooking for 20 for a week and getting a pretty awesome tan.
It's not that I didn't enjoy my time in Italy, I definitely did. It ended up almost being a proper vacation - something I haven't had in a long time. I just didn't go there with the plan of having a vacation. I had fully expected to be cooped up in a dark church for a week listening to drones and trying to write. Instead I sat in the hot sun and cooked in a hot kitchen.
I did meet some amazing people, and reconnected with some old friends. The Monastery was able to put together a group of truly, fantastically talented individuals to take part in a strange little performance that, unfortunately, was much more about entertainment than it was about art - and there's nothing wrong with entertainment - it was the right thing to put on in the little labyrinthine town of Calvi dell'Umbria - it just wasn't why I was there, and it's not what I'm interested in doing these days.
I've since come up with some new ideas for new pieces, and I'm hoping to find ways to work with many of the people that I met while I was there. Who knows, it may turn out to have been an incredibly beneficial experience.
Just not in the way I thought it would be.
New and Formless Work
In one week I'll be performing a new work for organ and sine waves at the Labirinto Festival in Calvi dell'Umbria while in residence at the Art Monastery. I'm not sure yet what form this performance is going to take yet. I'm currently thinking that it's going to be the first step in a series of works titled Do You Remember ... that I've been sort of vaguely planning for the last six months. that would involve the multitude of toy organs I've been tuning as well as sine waves and sustaining instruments (strings/voices ?).
However, I'm not sure what the tuning of this baroque organ is going to be. It's been described to me as "strangely tuned" - and this is by early music people. I'm actually sort of looking forward to the challenge of having only one day with a massive instrument that I don't really know how to play, in a tuning that could potentially be anything, and trying to create something beautiful from it. I tend to get caught up in the theory of my work, often at the loss of initial spontaneity, so this will be an interesting, and hopefully rewarding, prospect for me.
It will be recorded, so hopefully those of you who can't make it to Italy (and, i'm guessing, that's probably most/all of you) will be able to hear at least a bit of what I've done.