The importance of clearing your head, part II

I met with the dancer today to talk over the piece, albeit slightly unprepared. Actually, to be truthful, I only felt unprepared. Once I got over the frustration of my computer's little tantrums this weekend, I decided to record myself improvising on the piano on my little hand-held digital USB Olympus recorder thingum. As well, a few days prior, when I still thought I was meeting the dancer on Sunday, I had written down a load of questions on my trusty pad of paper to help me figure out in which direction the music should go for this attempt.

So, I feel certain that, despite not having three thirty-second audio files of the first ideas I came up with last week, like I had hoped I would, I came across very put-together and professional for having all that other stuff ready. Simply knowing ahead what I needed to ask her would have been enough.

But, at any rate, I showed her the recording on my hand-held and, wouldn't you know it, I had hit the mark. What was meant simply as a representation of some of the other ideas and instrumentation I was capable of turned out to be exactly (well almost exactly) what she needed.

I think in a way, all of this scrambling around and nothing working right was just the universe pushing me to, slow down, sit down, shut up, breathe and improvise into a shitty mic and have no thoughts about producing something finished and perfect. Sometimes that's all you need to create, the desire to do so...and not the rushed, frantic, race to quickly stamp something out regardless of whether or not it's what you think the client wants to hear.

Thinking is better than doing sometimes.

On the other hand, it would be nice to actually have this box of wires and circuits do something right besides surf the internet and play mp3s. So, for the next week, I'm going to do nothing while sitting in front of this computer but make attempts at optimizing it and getting it back to its previous state of functionality or somewhere better even.

Anyway, random funny story, while I was in the coffee shop talking to her I got a bloody nose (I think from drinking cold cold iced green tea too fast...that hasn't happened in a while!) and had to go take care of it. While I was in the bathroom, another great idea occurred to me regarding instrumentation, specifically making the dominance of one instrument over another serve as a representation of the relationship between the two dancers in the dance. Sometimes you just need to get a bloody nose and go to the bathroom to spark creativity.