The Sacred Harp

I made sound today by opening and closing, and by flipping the pages of, the book, The Sacred Harp. I began by flipping back and forth through the book, running my fingers along the pages as I did so, letting the book fall in chunks of pages, or holding pages back so that they fell through a few at a time. I trired shutting the book at different speeds, and then seeing how it would fall open.

I then tried turning the pages slowly, running the pages across each othe as I turned them. This created some new sounds. Mostly, though, taking this more measured approach caused me to notice particular tunes I know, such that I would then hear them in my head. The mixture of sounds in my head, and sounds that entered my head was interesting, but it mostly just distracted me from playing the book, and I didn't find much interesting timbrally over the course of the fifteen minutes.

I thought that I would find a lot of sound to make in a book. I might try again with a different book, perhaps one with firmer pages (and no songs in it!).

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is my first meeting with TH since I began doing this, and it looks like my ideas for the sand dollar pieces are still the best. I'll am going to come up with something specific, probably just a solo piece, tomorrow morning.