Composer thoughts

Imagine looking through various volumes of notated folk music collections. As you turn the pages, singing some in your head, thinking about small fragments of melodic or rhythmic ideas and connections between the music. Thinking, if and how these pieces connect together, blend together, perhaps like making a puzzle of the material. The title, Yunomi (a small Japanese teacup) used for daily and informal tea drinking and often a beautifully and unique decorative ceramic brought to my mind the fact that often tea sets are generally made to be uniform in design. I wanted each part of this piece to be separate, a collage of ideas, but potentially able to become part of something whole. Yunomi when spoken sounds like the English, You know me, which can be connected in various ways to this piece. Perhaps these fragments of music are reminding us that they have both similar and individual roots and histories? This piece also grew in the present time of musicians and performers having to adapt to generally not being able to perform together. How to be creative in this time and still work with like-minded people on music that would usually be performed in a live venue is a reality for the moment. I have seen and enjoyed on my computer screen a lot of streamed events that are put together in so many different ways. I realise that Yunomi could be performed and filmed from the homes of four percussionists living in different parts of the world, or it could be muti-tracked by one person. It could be a documentary about how to put music together that blends ideas effectively or shows that it is difficult to layer and make the material fit a conventional scenario or structure. The possibilities are many, varied and I hope eventually effective, there is no goal or set solution for Yunomi.