Joseph Zitt

If I’ve fallen unusually silent of late, blame it on the Moses project. The composing’s been eating up most of my available time and brainwidth, and I’ve been falling behind on email and other such necessities.

The writing is going well. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first draft, and some early decisions that I’ve made are paying off.

All the melodic materials and most of the rhythms are derived directly from the spiritual “Go Down Moses”. I’m sticking strictly to the notes of the harmonic minor scale that the song uses, meaning that I’m not really modulating at all, and that I’m not heading into any harmonic wormholes that might get me lost.

Harmony, and particular harmonic motion, are not my strong suit. While I understand that many people have some sense of built in harmony that compels them to want to follow a given chord with another particular, I’ve never caught this. Almost any chord, followed by almost any other chord, sounds pretty good to me. I sort of hear chords as clouds rather than as direction-pointers, so I wander among them as they happen. Since this piece, however, effectively stays within one chord, I’m not as afraid of zigging where I should zag and modulating into a ditch.

I also decided to consider the text as fixed, once I posted it here. This saves me from second-guessing the wording and rewriting it, and keeps me focused on the music.

I’ve set myself a deadline of February 15 to finish the score, and I should make it. When I finished Thursday night’s bout of composing, I emailed my mother the score as it now stands. She’s replied that her orchestra should have no problem playing it, and didn’t have other criticisms.

Meanwhile, I try to continue with my regular life in the cracks between the twin compulsions of my job and the composing. I had spent several nights thrashing about the accumulated stuff in my room, convinced that something had eaten my favorite pajamas. But I just found them under a pile of my shirts that I had forgotten in a drawer of the room upstairs from which I moved many months ago. When I got the shirts back, I absent-mindedly put them down on top of other clothes. A fortunate avalanche of laundry revealed where they were.

I might have seen them sooner if the overhead light in my room had not burned out. It turns out to need a weird round fluorescent bulb. It’s also a little too high up for me to reach easily from our stepladder, and positioned over an archipelago of stuff that juts out into the center of my room, so that I would have to lean over it to change the light bulb. (How many of me does it take to change a light bulb? If the answer is greater than one, we would probably trip over each other’s stuff and break several more bulbs in the process.) Fortunately, I have a desk lamp that’s working well enough for now.

Following up on earlier messages: I look forward to getting together with folks in New Jersey and environs when I’m out there. The way that my schedule is shaping up, though, the best possibility would be the day of the performance (assuming that it happens as planned), Sunday, April 1 (no fooling), somewhere in or around Toms River. Perhaps y’all could come to the show and we could go out afterwards. I realize that this would involve multiple people coming down from Central and North Jersey to Toms River, rather than my head up to where you are, but I’m committed to being in Toms River on both the Saturday and Sunday, while most folks work on the other days. And I haven’t driven a car in several years (not needing one out here), and would be leery of just hopping out onto the Parkway after this length of time.

Meanwhile, I’m going to post this, catch up on some other mail, and try to get the Sony Clié that I’m delighted to have been given working with my Linux box. The next sound that you will hear will the usual howling and cursing as I wrestle with technology. Fun abounds…