CW116

There’s a brilliance in Good’s eyes when she says it that I can’t stop seeing. “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” To paraphrase someone paraphrasing someone else in some YouTube comments: He didn’t kill her because he was afraid. He killed her because she wasn’t.

That’s what I saw too. Either that or he’s an unbelievable coward.

Pray for the victims, but also pray for the perpetrators. The latter are in deep spiritual trouble. (Only a radical moral relativist could argue that those in power get to define right and wrong to the degree this administration is attempting—with no reference to any truth outside itself.)

Pray for the victims, but also pray for the perpetrators. All of them are us.

*

Okay, music:

If you just organize random notes into block chords, careful voice leading will make it into living music. It’s the attention. It’s like a candle in the window.

Let me prove it to you.

I’m imagining four bars of music in 3/4. The first three bars have three three-note chords, one on each quarter note. The last chord, a dotted quarter note in the final bar, is made from the same three notes as the first chord.

That means I need to roll a twelve-sided die to get nine random three-note collections.

Getting the same note twice within a collection requires a reroll. I want three unique pitch classes to build each chord from.

Here I go:

I only got one redundancy, in Chord 5. As you can see, it took four rolls to get those three notes.

It’s worth noting that Chords 1/10, 5, and 6 are all transpositions of the same trichord. And Chords 2 and 7 are the same trichord, untransposed. They are identical.

Okay, now I get to make this into something.

(51 (very absorbing) minutes pass.)

Like with most writing I do, some of this came very quickly, and for other parts I tried many options. (I was playing guitar, singing along (an octave lower) with the top voice, and writing on manuscript paper—what’s above is the clean copy.) And often it’s the ideas I don’t use, but some part of me holds onto for later, that make the weighing of options most worthwhile. The things I say yes to that day are the first order of business, but getting in there and paying attention to all the interdependent elements again is the overall mission. Tastes and moods shift over time; choices come and go. But my sensitivity to the relationships gets deeper every time.

As you will have noticed, I expanded upon my original four-bar concept. It was ending this thing that took up most of my therapeutic hour.

(It was interesting to set a stopwatch. I didn’t look at it, and I made sure not to go faster than I naturally would. I lose track of time when I write. I was just curious to see how long I was in there.)

I couldn’t resist using two of my ending ideas. Neither felt right on its own, but they work great for me like this, as antecedent and consequent phrases. And since I made up the game I was playing, I felt okay taking the liberty to change it in this way: to make room for a little more music.💕