I’m not that keen on fierce dictatorship. I think that sort of the point of working with somebody is them coming up with stuff and feeling free to do that.
I’ve written arrangements for choirs and strings in the past, but I usually write music with my voice or a keyboard and then I’ll get someone who is good at writing scores to write it out. Or, if I have the luxury of time.
I try not to record them on my Dictaphone when I first hear them. If I forget all about it and it pops up later on, then I know it’s good enough. I let my subconscious do the editing for me.
A lot of it is really bad sound, really low quality. So the librarian in me wants it at least to exist there so that in 20 years when I’m sitting in my rocking chair, it will still exist in the best sound quality possible, even though it only sold 1000 units or whatever.
I will go in a room and hear the people perform and then change it through what I hear, not on paper. I can read music OK, but I probably rebelled a little – music changes into something else when you read it.
If you can make nature and technology friends, then you can make everyone friends; you can make everyone intact. That’s what women do a lot – they’re the glue between a lot of things.
Maybe that was a strange, personal job between me and myself, to show how overreaching I was being as a woman. The only way I could express that was by comparing it to the universe.
