Diary

day 3

17th Feb 2011 by Mira Calix

sarah cresswell our percussionist arrives in the morning. we rehearse - the more that you appear, and later in the afternoon - onn/off which is written for the full line up of musicians. while they rehearse upstairs in the kiln, the bbc bods are busy setting up in the britten studios along with our sound engineer david sheppard. the lovely peter meanwell (producer) and sarah mohr-pietsch (presenter) arrive just in time for our open rehearsal in the evening. in all this busyness….and speaking for myself…crazyness… the dj provides some bass relief

Tagged as: aldeburgh, recording days

day 3

13th Mar 2010 by Mira Calix

after more improvising at the piano this morning, we continued with the technique of combining the simple notation method tansy had devised yesterday with a new isorhythm. then i spent quite a few hours writing out notation of the pitch material following the rhythm. other than having to use a pencil, erasor ( a lot) and count a lot, which i’m getting the hang of extremely slowly, this has of course, a lot in common with how i normally make music, although perhaps from a different angle. the commonality, is the use of loops and slowly filling in the spaces, creating more layers, and refining each one as you go. making a tiny adjustment, moving a note, 1 beat away can make the biggest difference. in the afternoon i used sibelius for the first time, copying in the score i had written by hand perviously. it takes some getting used to, and i suffered some frustrations, not only getting to grips with a new bit of software but combining that with the new approach to making music, it again was a slow process but so worth while.

Tagged as: score, sibelius