September 26th, 2020

Sound Haiku

Best thoughts come to me in the shower and best ideas come over breakfast, so I`ve found.  June and I were talking over breakfast a couple of weeks ago and a chance remark has started me on a new thread of creativity.  We had been talking about an artist who uses Japanese Haiku as an inspiration for painting and I suggested using a lines or blocks of colour in groups of 5 and 7 to create a series of pictures.  Although not totally historically correct, modern Haiku are short poems made up of 3 lines of 5, 7, and finally 5 syllables.   There are lots of other `rules` in the writing of these poems, many just conventions of 20th Century writing and based on the interpretation of the original translations.

June then said the same might work in music.  Well, `blow me down with a feather`, it immediately struck me that it could.  What about composing very short minimalist works.  Just three, seven note, bars with some silence, producing three groups of 5, 7, and finally 5 notes.  It`s so cool and also so challenging.

There`s an added bonus for me as I`m attempting to increase my keyboard skills and this was just what I needed to help with practice.  My challenge now is to write and play and then mix one of these mini-works several times a week and come up with something interesting each time.  I have finished several now and here is the latest ~~

https://youtu.be/_YwekZX96QI