I spent the day trying to decide if I wanted to use a minor, or a minor 7th, or possibly a seductive minor major 7th. This isn’t a vanity choice; this is real, hard decision-making. The emotional connotations of each option will have lasting impact on the entire work, much as the strains at the onset of an opera had better be the ones you want to revisit, and perhaps contradict — or at least question — later, in the aria (when they can hurt so badly). I considered each chord, and the melodic ramifications, and I looked at, or in all events listened to, each in the context of eventual orchestration. In my head, I mean, from the comfort of my own lovely, warm couch. I could use five horns in this piece, if I wanted to…and of course I want to, or I wouldn’t have even thought of that. Too much thought, all circular. I tried to be good, to be worthy of making these decisions, but I suspected all day that I was in the wrong, or perilously close to being in the wrong. That napping yet impressively resilient doubt, which is kept in check, only partially yet miraculously, by my conflictingly sunny disposition, yes, that sleepy doubt tossed buckshot into the tranquility of my afternoon. How will I ever finish this piece, this orchestral yard sale of the bits and pieces of my psyche that I have not previously purged or put to use elsewhere? I’ve been at it for weeks, this same piece, this same work, these same strains, and I can’t stand it, not one more day. Until tomorrow, when it all begins again. It starts like this: from Bb to F to Ab, which I think of as G# and find so impossibly comforting.
