Mailbag; Kate's composing methods

[IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU]

     A big thankyou to David Durand for his help with "The Twa M.s".
     Julian's note of welcome to Kari is seconded at this end, by he
whose ancestors emigrated from their own Norse sea-village.

 >      Is IED sure? The 'cello part for HoL only has one stinken note
 > in it!  Well, okay, two notes (but the second is just an octave of
 > the first).  I can hardly imagine Kate (or anyone else for that
 > matter) sitting down and writing that out. Hell, even I picked it
 > up the first time I heard it.

     Yes, Kevin, that's what Kate said herself, anyway. As for the cello
part being all of one note in octaves, that's misleading. Try really
listening to the two (separate) cello parts, each playing in octaves,
all the way through the track, and you'll discover that there are
actually several melodic shifts; in addition there's a crucial
_third_ cello line (actually just one note) that comes in with
the words "His little heart/It beats so fast".
     Admittedly, the cello parts are quite simple, and that's
probably why Kate was willing/able to write them out. Since, as you
say, it sounds as though the parts would be very easy to pick up by
ear, the fact that Kate _did_ go to the trouble of writing them out
is further evidence of the precision which she expects from her players
in the translation of her original musical ideas. Here are Kate's words
on the subject:

Question: You don't have staves with whole lines of music written out?

      "Well, no, the only time I did that was for the cello parts in
'Hounds of Love', that's the only time I've ever written out a part,
that's the only time I've ever written out a part.
I stayed up all night to do it and wasn't sure if I could. But I
worked them out on the Emulator and wrote out the chords that I played
in the treble clef. Then the cellist Jonathan Williams--he's such a
great player and so into the music he was-- helped me out by working i
an octave lower."

     The catch is, though, that Kate's method of "writing" is still
very unclear. In the following excerpt from the _Keyboard_ interview
(this part was excised from the published version) Kate seems to
indicate that she actually _does_ "write out" parts more often than
her above comment would seem to imply; and that she uses the Fairlight
to help her actually _notate_ (in other words, she uses it not only
to create and record sounds, but also to help with the _actual_
notation process).

     "The great thing, again, you can do with the Fairlight that I
enjoy so much is I can write a piece on it, say, with an acoustic
guitar or a cello, and I can write it out, and then I can get a
musician in to actually play that.  So he's playing what I've written,
but he's doing it much better than I could do. You see, without the
Fairlight, I probably couldn't have written these parts before.
     I would have written them on the piano and they wouldn't have had
the feel of the strings, or acoustic guitar. And at the same time, you
know I don't think me playing them on the Fairlight is as good as
these people. But it's an interesting blend."

-- Andrew Marvick