The CT Collective was started by Michael Klobuchar using cassettes (remember them?) The group members contributed music by mailing a master tape which was distributed to the members as a CD. No one got paid for any of this! I found it a great creative stimulus, creating music to fit the theme and hearing how others interpreted it.
The inspiration for this project was to place some restraints on composition 4 tracks, 4 instruments from a related musical family, 4 minutes long. I wanted to encourage music with perhaps a stronger emphasis on melody and harmony than on the textural approach of some CT projects.
My track is “Fourplay” – I had a piece half-way complete, but abandoned it and started again. I found an old midi snippet from an exercise in whole tones from many years ago and decided to do the whole piece through midi. I did a crash course in Ableton midi and put the notes and arrangement together fairly rapidly. What took ages was choosing the sound to be used! In the end, I settled on one called “piano for airports”! Don’t ask me how the melody and timing came about, I just moved notes around until it sounded right.