SCP #48: Leaf In The Wind
This project is making me really aware of the day-to-day fluctuations in emotional and physical energy I experience, and the very real effect that energy level has on my work. I wrote yesterday morning about feeling burnt out, which I absolutely was the day before when I was trying to work on piece #47. Last night, however, I felt entirely the opposite. I was refreshed, ready and excited, and looking forward to an evening by myself in my studio. I had tidied up a bit, which definitely helped entice me into my newly neat space, and I was anticipating the enjoyment of the night's work the same way you'd anticipate the enjoyment of a party. I even indulged the Saturday night vibe with some fairy lights.
I think one of the real strengths of this project is that it forces me to push through on the bad days. The negative feelings that can build around your creative work are often cumulative, and so having a bad day and doing no work makes you feel worse about yourself, which often leads to a second bad day, and the cycle perpetuates until you can pull yourself out of it somehow. I have experienced a few melt-downs thanks to this kind of cumulative negativity, the most recent being in the middle of my Honours project last year. I think this kind of regular work might be one of the keys to managing those cycles of negativity and resolving them before they do reach phase melt-down.
So here's piece #48, written joyously during my Saturday night party for one. I took wind as a starting theme, plus the melodic hook from the previous day's piece. I used the letters of the word PINE to find a selection of diatonic chords in the key of G minor, and then transposed the melodic hook to fit each of those chords. This gave me plenty of harmonic and melodic material to work with, and I set to work on the lyrics. I tried to capture a little of the feeling of wandering aimlessly through the city when you have a few hours to kill.
