SCP #19: Dandelion

There are several recurring themes that are emerging in these pieces, and one is clocks.  I don't know why I'm so obsessed with clocks, but they seem to be right at the top of my unconscious mind all the time and keep springing into my writing.  This morning while I was teaching a singing student the clock in my studio fell to the floor and smashed.  This was completely down to my inappropriate choice of 3M Hook size, yet it still felt somewhat significant.  Perhaps the clocks in my house are sick of me writing about them?  Or maybe they are crying out for attention in our age of digital devices with time-keeping capabilities.  Either way, I chose clocks as a starting point for today, which led me to memories of "dandelion clocks" from childhood - when you would count the number of puffs it would take to empty the flower of its feathers and that would tell you the time.

As well as being mythical tellers-of-time, dandelions have also been used as mythical messengers, sending fond thoughts to loved ones, and I used this as a prompt for a 90 second writing exercise.  I like 90 second exercises, as they produce interesting and concise pieces of prose.  I made no changes to the text that came out of the writing exercise, and simply performed it straight from start to finish for this improvised piece.  I took a harmonic idea from yesterday to lend a bit of structure to the improvisation, specifically the idea of a major 7th melody note held against a chord, creating tension with the tonic.  The melodic structure of this piece is built around two notes a perfect fifth apart, and the notes a semitone below each of them.

I like experimenting with sounds found in language to create drones and textures, and so used the first two words of my text, "my breath", to set up the textural mood for this piece.