Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Birdsong Sketches (excerpt)


Excerpt from Birdsong Sketches; performed at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, April 2007. Choreography by Lacy James; music by Olivier Messiaen. The development of Birdsong Sketches was supported by The Swarthmore Project, a residency at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and by a summer research grant from UNC-Greensboro.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

seasons, seasoning

Finally getting to work in earnest on the new tracks these past few weeks!  It's been going well -- getting back into the groove!  One song that's been driving me crazy for more than a year has even come around and found itself.  The music was strong, but I just could not like my original lyrics for it -- and yet they kept sticking in my head.  I kept trying to fix them and failing, putting it aside and thinking it was just never going to work, yet somehow I knew that I could not throw this song away.  And now, finally, I went back to it yet again and it just seemed to sort itself out.  Just like gardening or cooking, each song might have its own germination timetable and its own recipe.  And yeah... pulling out a thesaurus does sometimes help too.