The course - Real Time Workshop is its title - was hard work today. We were trying to improve the clock-making process. I managed to get my part of the clock assembly process under some kind of control which meant I was able to get a clue about an overall design inconsistency. This inconsistency meant that the next person in the production line had trouble with the total assembly which he tended to blame on the inaccuracy of my work. Of course in terms of course design this is a masterstroke.

Another wonderful element in the course involves a model of an operation. The tutor sits in a chair, gets up, walks across to a table, picks up a pen and takes the top off, walks to a flip chart and writes ABC under a sample ABC at the top of the chart, turns round, goes back to the table , caps the pen, goes to his chair and sits. Thats one complete cycle. This has all kinds of marvellous echoes - its quite like something that happens in the first pages of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations involving slabs - slab A and slab B come into it. When Minimalism was first discussed and the term itself had not been coined the expression ABC art was used by some critics. Once you start writing a set of instructions for this operation you get close to some of Lamonte Young's 1960 compositions - eg draw a straight line and follow it.

The course location - Studley Castle - is about 5km south of Tanworth in Arden. Its in the Forest of Arden which is very attractive and great to drive to work through. I came home a different way � a very direct road to Warwick which avoids all the motorways and main roads and so is not much used. To make sure I could get back that way I bought an OS map which helped me see how close I have been to Far Leys. I glanced at the music section and saw that Ashley Kahn's book about A Love Supreme has appeared. I immediately went to a bar and sat down and read Elvin Jones' introduction and the first chapter - what can I say? It reminded me of how I had written on the same subject in my Moral Sciences Ethics and Aesthetics finals. At the time I thought maybe I was out on a limb in putting ALS forward as a revolutionary work - I have often wondered who they got to mark my paper. My current hypothesis is that it may have been Roger Smalley. Maybe you don't know the truely revolutionay work until a long time after.

I am still listening to the latest fifths piece - even as I write - I think I may have got to see what the piece is about - after the opening there is a full-ish statement and then the opening is repeated in a different form. The middle is a process of reduction - which fifths will sustain quite decently - but there are occaisional discontinuities and the conclusion is about a shift which appears to promise resolution but doesnt - at the moment. Maybe it will take one step further on this path, who knows?

I have got Cubase-Go working on the new portable and loaded up the Midi parts to Dayindayout. Wavelab seems to be prepared to record Gilbert's gtr parts from the CD in its internal drive which means that I have been able to get a new version of that tune going using the MIDI patches on Cubase's softsynth. Currently the piece sounds like my idea of a NYC loft jam circa 1975 around an emerging piece by - well maybe Philip Glass's younger brother. I have heard the original AWE32 arrangement for a long while and so I find this new one refreshing. The idea of the piece was always that a group of New Wave jazz musicians meet up with some moderately hardline minimalists and try to persuade each other of the merits of their respective causes. Anyway its good to get Cubase-Go going as a vehicle for working on the Isbin/Cameron collaborations.

Ravi Shankar didn�t hear a Love Supreme until quite recently but when he did he really liked it a lot.