9.00 am. Hail, rain, wind, blow: the background noise against which I competed periodically throughout the morning:

As is my habit, I reviewed those sections in progress (they won’t be finished until they’re finished, and that wont be until the whole composition is resolved), made minor but significant tweaks, before settling to section 4 — the abrasive, nasty one. This section arrived too complete too soon. That was a blessing and a curse. Both had to be broken. Rather than intervene immediately, I, instead, began building another and independent structure of sound derived from my set of turntabled voice samples. I extracted over 20 from the set, and simply threw them together without any preconceptions. (Sometimes one can overthink a problem.) Thereafter, the pieces were moved around the ‘board’ until they formed a serviceable shape.

12.00 pm. I concentrated on section 4 as a whole, once again, and inserted the new elements plus the descent motif. Then, I endeavoured to reconcile the elements.

1.30 pm. Each needed to find its place and volume in relation to the others, and to be modified tonally and spatially. This is mundane, first order, organisation, but one cannot move forward without doing it. 2.30 pm. I headed for the Arts Centre, where I was chairing the final session of the day’s art and science symposium:

The delegates and speakers were committed, thoughtful, and spoke as though something genuinely important was at stake. Which of course it is. 5.00 pm. Homeward. There was the anticipation of snow in those Ruisdaelesque clouds:

6.30 pm. Practise session 1. 7.15 pm. A little email catch-up before I scurried back into the sound studio. A thought came to me, forcibly, while en route to Arts Centre: ‘Dismantle section 4. Take the voice of God, and place it at the beginning’. I always take such moments of auditive intuition very seriously. So, in the evening, I acted upon it. Clarity emerged, as does so often in any medium or discipline when the elements are separated out and can, then, be experienced individually and distinctly. Once the change had been made, the remainder of the composition fell into place effortlessly, following its own internal logic. This was my ‘fast track’: