<p>Just spent like.. forty-five or so minutes walking around campus and talking to myself (and my tape recorder). I've decided that music is awful and horrible and I absolutely love it for one, big, Discordian reason: you're taking something that - for me - is completely chaotic, emotive, and only based in logic on the most rudimentary levels, and forcing it into the complete order and rigidity of math, only to try and return it to it's original state; fitting emotion into black notes on a white page, for other people to reconstitute into it's original, emotive self.</p>
<p>This has been a big problem for me as a composer, the first step. Especially so now that I don't have the aural feedback that I did with Sibelius on my laptop. Having to somehow force my emotions out through my pencil onto staff paper is proving difficult and misguided at best. So what I just did was sort of a stream of consciousness exercise: I walked around campus and talked continuously about "The Bucket Rider" until I slipped into that half-conscious stream-of-thought state that comes with such exercises, and found that I quite easily just described the entire piece from beginning to end.</p>
<p>Now all I need to do is translate that into black notes on a white page, which will mean first transcribing my tape (boring at best), then taking the transcription and turning it into a complete idea of a song, then taking that and writing the song from it. So, basically, doing the impossible. Oh well, I have until November 11th to complete this and mail the score out to wotsits, the competition. I'll keep you updated, because if there's anything you want to hear about, it's my stupid music :</p>
