8.30 am. Before returning to the sound studio, I uploaded Friday and Saturday’s diary blog, updated software, responded to emails, and filed documents and photographs. Yesterday, before making for home, I’d attended the retrospective exhibition of Frank Auerbach’s paintings at Tate Britain. I much prefer this site to that of the Tate Modern. Here, the walls soar upwards, there’s more latitude and space between things (space to think), the soul can breath, and the eye enjoy the natural light:
From ‘The Black Notebook’ (10 Mar. 2015 – , 48-49):
his paintings: repellent (in a compelling manner) / something rots within them / realism, but in a direction opposite to photography / paintings as palpable equivalences for their subjects / ‘uncompromise’ and high seriousness mixed into the pigment / his ravaging eye / portraits: in death even as the sitter lives / no concession to the audience whatsoever / the mundane as magnificent and worthy of our attention / acrylic doesn’t serve his mode of painting / mapping pins retained in the drawing of Reclining Head of Julia (1994) / Rothko left the gumstrip surrounding his late stretched paper works / the relation between A’s drawing and painting is absolute / little evolution in his paintings since the 1950s — magnificent consistency / the imposition of a formidable personality and sense of certainty / models’ names denoted by their initials / he abbreviates reality too, in painterly lines, hatching, and slurs / Sickert is evoked/invoked throughout.
10.00 am. On with a review of the sound compositions completed last week, followed by a process of reacquainting myself with ‘Image and Inscription’. Coming back to a work, even after only a week’s absence, can be a struggle. And, returning to a composition that I know must work, the more so. I began with a section upon which I’d established some purchase already. (When in doubt, begin with what you know.) In tandem, I took up once more the source text’s narrative and timeline chart:
I’m more and more persuaded to use the narrative sequence as a structure for composition — in short, to make a programmatic sound work that establishes correlations between the narrative and the development of the ‘music’. The original story begins in the wilderness or in the desert (מִדְבָּר (midbar)) — literally, either a place where flocks are lead (such as a pasture) or an uninhabited land. Today, as then no doubt, the area around the mountain and its range is largely barren of event:
7.20 pm. So, at the beginning: a wilderness on which the Israelites pitch their tents in front of Mount Sinai. I began with a single drone, extracted from the bitstream of one of the engravings of Moses on Mount Sinai, which I’d lowered in pitch by 5 octaves and slowed down by 1000%. (Multiples and divisions of 10 (being the total number of commandments) govern the tonal and temporal modifications of the digital samples used in the composition.)