The first string vignette sounds so much better with NotePerformer than with Sibelius’ built-in playback thing. Sibelius’ playback sounds pretty good, it’s true, but NotePerformer is so much better. Money well spent.
This was also the first vignette when I still didn’t know what the hell I was doing and really rather frightened that I was a total failure as a musician and composer. The silly little sonatinas had been completed in early 2008, and the failure of a second piano outgrabe had been abandoned in late 2009.
So yeah, these were still dark, dark years for creativity.
The string vignette in 2011—do the math, if you like—was almost an act of desperation. The soul-sucking day job was still devouring any and all strength and energy I had. There was nothing for creativity.
The vignette was a compromise, an act of desperation, as I said. The idea was to be short and to be experimental. I wasn’t going to worry about things like how it sounded or whether it was tonal or even if it was any good. The whole point was just to do something. Keeping it short would hopefully work with the whole total lack of energy for doing anything.
It still took several weeks to compose roughly one minute of music because that’s how drained I was. Also rusty. I suppose I could scroll through the journal archive—now called “updates”—to double check what I had to say about it at the time.
Not going to bother.
The important thing was that I was really, really happy with how it turned out, and it was the first of several—not really many—creatively experimental vignettes.