Learning about arrangement

I've twigged I want to know more about arrangement, specifically with harps, but also any music where it's devised by ear. I could pick a few tracks and analyse them exactly, but I don't think that's going to very helpful. The stuff that would ping out first is the stuff I already know, and that's not the stuff I want. Also a lot of what is played on harps is very simple but somehow something in the way it is played makes it magic - to analyse the notes misses the point.

Instead I'm going to listen and try and pick out the kinds of things that change - ideas, features, as and when they turn up, giving my attention to anything that catches my ear. It's going to get collated and updated here. My plan is to allow what I really like experiencing within music to ping out to me and let that feed back into what I create.

Emilie and Voltaire

I've just picked up a book and it's the most exciting thing ever. It's about Emilie and Voltaire and what they achieve together. It's a lovely read and really exciting to see ideas coalesce and form, the slow patient revealing of how the world might work. It's academic work and it's much more exciting than any music I've listened to recently. I wonder if I'm in the wrong job.

To seek to understand, to be more at ease with their world, to have a deeper connection. To find new things, to feel like me. Surely I can find a way to do this through musical work too.

Confidence

I feel confident with a certain skill or body of information when I can feel the edges of that information - I know there is nothing missing and it makes a clear and coherent whole. That sense of completeness is essential.

I also feel confident with skills that you cannot do that with through peer review - I can tell I'm on a level with my peers and I have their good opinion.

I suppose both these approaches are about the pressures of competition - if you know you're going to win and can defend yourself, then it's all ok.

Harp played by ear was the first instrument I felt I could "get a handle on" - the first instrument I felt I could feel all the edges of. Such a relief.