First Sketch from Jack Rowland on Vimeo.
Here’s my first weekly sketch, based on the excerpt from David Whyte that we were given in class. The very first thing that came to mind when we were given that short excerpt was how it reminded me of another poem that I really love called Evening Poem by Alice Oswald. That poem’s final word is ‘falling’ and it’s placed by itself in its own stanza. The way that Whyte in his poem places ‘fall’ and ‘toward’ on their own lines reminded me of what Oswald did, the form in some way reflecting that downward motion of falling. I understand that this linkage is very loose, but I wanted to work in a slightly improvisational way, and so followed this first thought.
One of the first things that I did in terms of process was to look for a short snippet of my own music which could accompany the piece. I very quickly found the piano piece that I had originally created through putting some notes from a piano through granular synthesis, which gives the piece its floaty quality. I recorded this audio onto a homemade cassette tape loop which accounts for the noisy, slightly lo-fi sound. I used this format both because I appreciate its sound, but also because I thought that the imperfections it introduces into the sound, the ways that it rounds off and softens some of the frequencies, might hint at some idea of longing after the past, or at the very least a time other than your own.
The tape loop also introduces a rhythmic quality to the audio which I tried to reflect in the speed at which the poem’s text appears on screen, as well as the footage of the tape loop itself in which you can spot the tape itself steadily moving around the reels.
I decided to very simply juxtapose the two pieces of writing by having all the words of Whyte’s text disappear apart from ‘fall’ before cutting to the short excerpt from Oswald’s poem which ends with the word ‘falling’. I decided to have my reading of the excerpt be the only sound in this section, so that the excerpt from Oswald’s poem almost functions as a coda to the sketch. I also wanted to heighten this quality by having the image fade slowly to black as the text is read out.
Works Cited:
Oswald, A 2016, Evening Poem, The New Yorker, viewed 24 July 2020, <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/evening-poem-by-alice-oswald>.
Wikipedia 2020, Granular synthesis, Wikipedia, viewed 24 July 2020, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_synthesis>.