8.45 am. After reviewing incoming emails, I processed Matt. 20.5. and began assembling the composition for ‘Sindebt’:
The composition took three hours to complete, but without any significant hitches or (the stuff of my nightmares) the discovery of a major flaw in the system that would require the project to be either abandoned or completely rethought. (That has happened in the distant past.) Vigilance is required from start to finish. There can be no compromise, no fudge or whitewash, no attempt to shoehorn a botch into an otherwise sound conceptual framework. To do other than this would be to betray oneself, one’s audience, and the source material.
1.45 pm. I completed the second annex (Handboard 3). This connects to the main board via an isolated loop:
An old idea for a sound work has reasserted itself: ‘The singing in the air’. This refers to a supernatural audition experienced during religious revivals in Wales and elsewhere. Witnesses claimed to hear choirs of invisible angels, situated in either the sky or the rafters of chapels, singing exquisitely beautiful and hitherto unheard music. I suspect that my rummaging in the National Screen & Sound Archive of Wales will throw up manipulable material for the project. A Christmas reciprocation and benediction from Mr Fripp landed in my inbox after lunch.
3.00 pm. Onto scaling the printed versions of several works in order to determine the mount and frame sizes. The printer is not accepting large-size files. Am I exceeding its cache’s memory? Very likely. The morning’s work on ‘Sindebt’ will need to be redone with smaller image components. But I’ll complete the composition faster the second time.
5.15 pm. An initial colour trial for one component of ‘A Wordless Gospel’ is successful:
The printer problem encouraged me to think about other scales of works that I’d been considering. One piece may, now, be printed smaller, and another, much larger, than I’d originally conceived. Problems in one area can sometimes throw up solutions in another. Frustration and fruition and bedfellows on such occasions.
7.40 pm. I commenced composing again the matrix for ‘Sindebt’, and completed the task by 11.00 pm.