In The Shed: Misrememeration

Recently, I was catching up on Catherine Sikora’s excellent blog where, each January, she posts a practice idea every day for the entire month. In 2022 she wrote about writing a line of notes every day and this past January she followed this up with a second blog going deeper on working with these lines. Somewhere between reading these blog posts and telling a colleague about them during a session I twisted some of Catherine’s words and ended up unintentionally creating my own variation on the exercise. In her more recent post she recommends taking the first five notes from one of your daily lines of notes and working them over in a variety of ways; I won’t restate her post, you'll have to go read it for yourself! But this mention of five notes supplanted the phrase “write a full line of notes every day” with “write five notes a day” and so that’s what I’ve been doing. Truthfully I find it very creatively engaging to write just five pitches every day and experiment with making them sound like fully realized musical thoughts. So here is what I do with them.

1. I arrive at my five pitches a day in a variety of ways; I sometimes let myself play freely until I find a phrase that I find enjoyable, other times I will pick the first interval and randomly choose other pitches to follow it. Truthfully it doesn’t really matter how you arrive at your pitches, it matters what you do with them.
   

2. Once I have my set of notes for the day I write them in my notebook then I start playing them with a variety of rhythms. Often I will use the app ‘Drumgenius’ and choose a variety of styles, tempos, and time signatures to see how playing against different grooves informs my interpretation of the pitch set.
   

3. After I have thoroughly familiarized myself with the set as I originally conceived them I will repeat the second step starting on each successive pitch in the set. In effect ‘tonicizing’ each note as the root of the phrase. I think in some ways this might be the most important part, I have found in just a couple of weeks of this practice I am able to hear variations on melodic figures in a much freer way than before.
   

4. At this point I have only engaged with the pitch set in the order in which it originally appears, the second note of the set is always followed by the third and preceded by the first, regardless of which pitch I chose to start with. The next step is to freely improvise using the set in random order, let yourself freely explore the set as a collection of possible pitch movements instead of a set phrase. At this point I reintroduce ‘Drumgenius’ and partake in more extended improvisations. I will eventually begin to include the same notes in different octaves, you can be as granular and methodical with this as previous steps or freely begin to introduce higher and lower octaves, I like to vary my approach from day to day.
   

5. At this point you can either choose to end the exercise, which I sometimes do depending on the pitch set and its implications, or you can continue to explore the set and add other notes to it. I find some pitch sets pull strongly to other notes that aren’t included in the original five. Since the idea of this exercise is to develop your sense of musical imagination and hear multitudes of possibilities I think it is good to let the pitch set pull you towards a variety of resolutions and expansions.

I recommend anyone looking to deepen their connection with their instrument and their ear to give this a try and to check out Catherine’s blog as she has many many more posts filled with excellent practice concepts and ideas. Don't forget to listen to her excellent music over on Bandcamp as well!