Since we first got to Warsaw some four months ago I have been working on a piece. For the first couple of months, as I usually do, I spent a lot of time listening over and over to the material and the fragments of ideas that were there, slowly adding a little here and there, exploring. I remember for a few weeks I didn’t get to work on it so much, and when I got back to it about a month ago I finally understood what was going on–and that I had to start over again.
It’s difficult to do, to spend so much time involved in a path a piece takes, only to find that it is not going to work that way. In some ways it’s perhaps more difficult to start over than to simply leave it and move on. However, the material is good, and as nice as it was unfolding in the original, it now has something the original was lacking.
It’s also not time misspent. Going through the work of the original path illuminates the new path, and so in a sense was a necessary step to get to where things are now. That’s sometimes hard to realize especially when you first get to the point where you’re contemplating this type of change.
Sitting here and writing this, listening to the piece now, the sounds are breathing, gently moving along, serene…