I’m writing this on Saturday because, seriously, who blogs at an after-party?? And blogging on 2 vodka, lime & tonics is not a sensible thing. So it’s a little late, but in the interests of coherence.

It was kind of a short working day yesterday, mainly so we didn’t wear ourselves out for the performance. All the making was finished on Thursday, so on Friday morning we musicians helped to put away all the detritus from the making and dismantled the tables so we could use the whole studio space, while the dancers warmed up. As the dancers were going to start with rehearsing Hug, we took our Sudophones and Merztins and made our way onto the actually-not-terribly-comfortable beanbag cushions outside the studio to work on Stealth. Neil contributed an excellent suggestion, which was to take advantage of the impression that a short loud sound sounds like a quiet sound so we shaped the piece so that the first sounds in the opening were shorter, but more open, gradually growing longer and playing more with the muting as they lengthen. I think this worked better in the larger space, ultimately, because the shorter, louder sounds carried better than the longer quieter ones.

We also finessed the ending and how we would use the space. We decided to be seated in the audience, on the ends of rows, so that it would feel like more of an intervention, as it did in the pub. We came up with a plan to all stand up at the point of “coming out of the closet”, then make our way to the stage for the end of the piece. Our videographer (VERY collaborative this session!) suggested that it might work better if we stood up individually rather than all together, so we ran with that, but with moving towards the stage at about the same time. And for the ending, we improved this by all improvising together once on the stage, with the bird whistles from the Merztins carrying on while the Sudophones started their wail upwards, dropping out to leave the Sudotins, which then dropped out one by one until it was just me holding the last wailing note.

I think that getting Stealth to work better has reinforced what I was thinking when the stuff I worked on on Wednesday didn’t really come off – Stealth really is all about gestures: start quiet and with wide spaces, build the improvisation, stand up and let the improv rip, end with group wails. The only part of that that’s to do with actual specific sounds is the ending, which uses an easy-to-get sound-feature of the Sudophones, unlike the sounds I was tinkering with before which required very specific hand positions and lightness of touch.

After that was sorted and the dancers had done with Hug, we ran through Still, the camera piece, until lunch, refining our moves, and specifically working on who was switching cameras on and off when. I volunteered to turn on the first camera because originally, Eleanore was doing that then moving across in the pitch dark to turn on camera no. 2, so this was an improvement. Plus it made me feel more useful! We also did a final run-through without the sound, which I captured on video (below) which was quite amusing as everyone tried to simulate the electronic rumbles and pings and the instrumentalists tried to replicate their instruments’ sounds!

(also, I very carefully plugged my camera into the wall on Thursday night so it would have a full battery for Friday – and then left it there. So Friday’s photos and vid are a bit lo-fi due to having had to resort to snapping with the iPad!)

After lunch we had a short session talking about the week and where we raised any questions we had, which didn’t go on for terribly long, after which there was mending and stretching and tuba-polishing and chat.

At about 3, we sauntered off to check out some of the performances happening for other projects. It was like a mini Edinburgh Fringe out there! I saw a couple of dance performances, a project to do with role-reversal, in which the musicians danced and the dancers played instruments, and a 40-minute musical on the songs of Robbie Williams. Crazy!

We had a rehearsal in the hall at 5, where we set up the cameras, ironed out tech problems and got to run all the pieces once, which was very enlightening. “Dark” really was very dark indeed! After the rehearsal, John told me that Marie was going to switch off my camera so I wouldn’t have to come back on in the dark, which was probably sensible, but being unrehearsed it meant that that camera went off a good 5 minutes before it should have, so the end of the piece changed in the final performance, but I still think it worked well.

And I think the final performance went off really well! We all found seats on the ends of rows and started in with Stealth before the lights went down, while people were still talking, which was actually great. Theo actually came over to talk to me just after I’d started and I had to shoo him back to his seat! Heh Nobody fell down the stairs or tripped over a cable, and while there were some giggles when the first flashes went off for Still, they stopped pretty quickly. Hug also went down well, and I think John was right to have the order as it was – it was a lighter ending, which made the Death and the Maiden project which followed a bit less of a contrast than it might have been.

The rest of the concert was fabulous – Death and the Maiden (what I saw of it) and the WWI poetry piece were both great and the AfroBeat band were simply fantastic! I had no idea Cassie had such an amazing voice! And Alex too! A really great set to end on, then all the composers went off to the bar to chat and listen to the Brazilian band project, which started a little loungey, but pretty quickly was turning out some great sounds.

Really excited about what I might find at Trinity next week – I’m looking forward to seeing what else has been going on after my taster at Laban yesterday!

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The performance is really starting to take shape now and I seem to be carving out a role for myself but it really is carving – definitely not something I’ve just stepped into, but I’m glad I decided to not bring my flute. It might have been easier if I had, but I think this experience is actually more valuable for me as a composer, even if it’s a bit uncomfortable at times.

This morning we finished making the camera-instruments, assembling our timers, the flash component (made safe by John) and the switch and pot control into the camera body. Fiddly work, but very satisfying and the cameras closed up perfectly once everything was in place and wires wiggled so as to be as low-lying as possible.

The afternoon was spent rehearsing the performance and I spent quite a bit of time working with Marie, who was organising the dancers and providing them with feedback due to being poorly and unable to dance herself. This was very satisfying, between discussing things with musicians, suggesting and discussing ideas with Marie, working out cues for musicians and dancers alike. It was a very productive afternoon, one of the best we’ve had, I think.

While the dancers were rehearsing Hug after this, I co-opted the musicians to try out some ideas I’d been playing with for the sudophones. Well, that was a bit of a bust, alas. And not helped by everyone being tired! So that idea’s gone in the bin, but we’re considering performing Stealth in the concert instead. Not entirely sure how that would work, but it might. At any rate, it was useful to work on the failed piece and while I’d hoped for input from the performers to try to make more of it, it still helped in that I think I’m beginning to see how working with unusual instruments such as these, for non-specialist performers, requires a different way of thinking from how I usually approach writi music. My ideas were too precise to work, I think, even though I’d tried to take into account the temperamental nature of the instruments and that they don’t all respond the same way – it seems to me that writing for stuff like this, you actually need to compose gestures rather than sounds. Compose the gesture and the sound will follow, but if you try to duplicate particular sounds, even allowing for variation, it all comes apart.

The main piece is coming in at about 17 minutes and I think John’s and my estimates were about right – it really couldn’t be any shorter – it needs that length to work through all the material, both audio and visual.

Last day tomorrow!

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Today we skipped the making part of the day, which was kind of a shame – I’m really enjoying it and it’s the part where at the moment I feel I’m really most involved – but we did a bunch of other stuff and it was nice to mix things up. My big disappointment with the making is that we haven’t been able to make the synthesiser components ourselves. I get that there’s not much time and the really collaborative aspect of the week is creating the final work, but I really wanted to build one. Guess I’ll just have to find a book and do it myself at home some day

Instead, we started the day with working out some of the logistics of the flash piece – how many cameras will make noise? where will all the cameras be positioned on the stage? Do we want to be in complete darkness all the way through or have a low wash of light? That sort of thing. The dancers raised useful points about cables trailing across the stage for the sound-generating cameras, and came up with a good solution, to have the sound generating cameras at the edges of the stage, two at the front, two at the back, so that their cables can go straight offstage and not get in the way of the dance space at all. We also had a brief discussion about costuming. We’re discussing black vs grey and the possibility of leaving as much skin showing as possible to reflect the flash-light. Thank heavens I won’t be onstage!

We split into groups mid-morning to do some composing with the Sudophones and Merztins today, with the aim of performing them at The Duke pub over the road from Laban and in the Laban garden. I really enjoyed this activity as I felt it was something I could be really useful in and I was hugely pleased with the result of our work.

My group – consisting of Liz, Katie, Bianca and me – decided to prepare a piece for the pub. I suggested that, given that we weren’t going to be asking permission to perform it, that we work on the concept of a ‘stealth piece’ – one that started surreptitiously, then ‘came out’, as it were, to be super-noisy at the end. There had been some talk about whether we’d be kicked out of the pub if we performed without permission, so this seemed a good way to tackle that issue and to hopefully be able to at least get most of the way through it!

We started with our Sudophones upside-down to mute the sound, then we’d each gently take our tin, start the sound and tip the tin a little to let the sound out, then close it again and let go to stop the sound. We did this slightly randomly to start, with gaps between the sounds, then moved into a section where we were all making muted/unmuted sounds. Next was the ‘out of the closet’ section, where we boldly grasped our tins and turned them open-end up, continuing to improvise at full volume, then gradually moving into sustained ascending tones, which on multiple Sudophones sounds like they’re all trying to get into tune with each other but not quite succeeding.

And it went really well! We did the other two groups’ pieces out in the garden on our way to the pub, which was gosh-darned chilly but a lot of fun, then went over to The Duke en masse. We herded in, the barman pushed some tables together for us and we all ordered our drinks and eventually clustered round the table chatting. The chat was going pretty well, so we decided to just start our piece and see if the stealth effect really worked – and it did! Notwithstanding a Little Moment when Katie couldn’t get a sound out of her Sudophone and it turned out she’d forgotten to reconnect the battery but we just carried on with our stealth mode and gradually the group realised we’d started and our videographer (Cheng) hurriedly switched my camera on.

I upped the stealth factor (I like to think) by continuing to sip my tea through the first part, and it all went down a treat! Really worked well in the context and we got a round of applause from some random guys in the corner. It turned out the director of Laban was also there having lunch – he was a bit surprised by the sound but pretty quickly worked out that we must be a CoLab project. Heh. And the barman brought us a free plate of goats’ cheese risotto! I call that a win!

We spent some good time on the main work in the afternoon, putting together the acoustic instrument parts and I think it’s coming together well. My role is becoming a little more defined now, as I’m working with the instrumentalists to help mould the sounds they’re making to work within the context of the sounds from the cameras.

However, we musicians are also staging a small rebellion. Because the dancers have their own piece, Hug, the performers are feeling a bit under-utilised, and because I’m not in anything on stage at all, I kind of wanted to develop something extra. So we’ve suggested to John that we put together a new Sudophone piece, possibly to play while the audience are filing into the auditorium, and he seems to like the idea – and may even want to play in it himself!

So I spent some time with the Sudophones after the other students had gone this evening and have gathered some sounds which I think might work well, which I’ll suggest tomorrow. I don’t think I want to fully compose the piece, more bring along a concept and see where it goes when we start playing it, because if I just write it and they play it, then it’s not much of a collaboration!

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First day back at college today and it’s been very full-on, but in a good way. Lovely to see all my friends and get back into the swing of classes. Deadlines are looming and while it’s been nice just working on composing, it’s actually really nice to be back at college and feel all the activity humming along.

The day started (9.30am!!) with Fourth Plinth, which we are rehearsing and then performing next week (Thursday 17th at ICA, 6.30pm – come along!) so things really need to hum along with this. I did a bunch of work on the train writing up my ideas and thinking about how to approach it, and between that and something Dominic raised in class – that pretty much everyone is doing improv pieces, but really only a couple of people in the group actually consider themselves confident improvisers – I’ve pretty much decided to go with a graphic score, with indications of pitch sets to use for each section. This will give me control over levels of consonance/dissonance (which I’m thinking will be useful for expressing the different phases of the Trafalgar Square area) while also taking some of the pressure off the players to come up with something that works. I’ll probably use lines for melodic material/feel/pace indication but colour blocks to indicate intensity/aggression levels. Nothing complex that they need to memorise & I’ve given in and just accepted that music stands will be required. It’s a shame, but there’s too much content in the concert to expect people to memorise something that (hopefully) will work better with a bit more structure. Did I say? The piece is called Lines of Sight. I’m also working with another student on the programme, which is looking fun and hopefully not too taxing with two of us on it.

The big news of the day was that in the hour between finishing up with Fourth Plinth and trotting off to see Jamie in Marketing about the branding requirements for the Fourth Plinth programmes, I think I finished the short-score for Fear of Falling. I need it to sit for a bit, and I don’t think it’s really perfect, but it IS an ending, and that’s half the battle!

I’ve also done a bit more on the Ansel Adams piece tonight. The lack of rhythmic interest is really bugging me in the second section. I’ve done some reading of Wallace-Berry-the-Impenetrable (Structural Functions in Music) which has proved useful. Berry’s a funny one. His text is so dense as to be near-incomprehensible, but every time I look at this book when I’m having a problem, I come away with something useful – even if I didn’t really get what he was saying. Weird, huh? In today’s case, he’s sent me off to consider a) altering the metre in the second section (probably from 3/4 to 4/4) b) slightly increasing the tempo, not just shrinking the note-values and c) maybe hunting down some evocative poetry about flowing water to transcribe some speech rhythms and then layer those. I think layering of rhythms is going to be key in this section. I mean, in a running river, it’s not just one big block of water, is it? it’s all sorts of little drops encountering different levels of resistance, their paths all slightly different and shaped by whether they’re at the edge, pushing against the banks, in the middle of a clear run of water, or in the middle of a rapid where a clear run might suddenly be interrupted by rocks and the flow diverted. Feeling a lot better about this, although there’s still clearly a ton of work to do.

So the big things this week are to: Complete Lines of Sight and send it to the performers, draft my Twombly project proposal to send to my supervisor (proposal’s due in next Thursday, the same day as the Fourth Plinth performace) and defeat the Ansel Adams 2nd section.

Guess all that means I should head to bed! G’night!

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Happy New Year! Djelibeybi decided to take the day off today, so we trotted off to Whitstable and had a lovely afternoon strolling along the beach, admiring the view and the lovely houses. Photos will be on Flickr as soon as I can find the cable to attach the camera to my computer…

I did get some composing done before we went out but not a lot – a few more notes for the Rothko quartet. It was nice to get back to it after a bit of a break. I’m still really pleased with what I’ve got for this one, which is a bit of a relief. Tomorrow I need to launch myself into the 2 big pieces in a major way, but as college is finally open again tomorrow, I’ll be heading in with my laptop so I don’t have the distractions of home!

The triumph of the day though was a lot more prosaic, but as it involved ticking something off my to-do list which has been lurking and making me feel guilty for A YEAR, I’m just hugely excited about it. It also helped that it made me realise I’m a lot better off than I thought Yup – I made 2 phone calls to Australia, updated my address details and finally got online access to the last two of my three superannuation funds. And the joy is that, thanks (HUGE thanks) to the Australian government’s compulsory superannuation scheme which came in just before I got my first permanent full-time job, I actually have a decent amount of money growing itself for my retirement. Huzzah! I’ve been reading Ramit Sethi’s book I Will Teach You To Be Rich, which may have an offputting title but is actually a really good read and about as inspirational as personal finance writing can get. He neatly freaked me out with the following table (p. 239 in my Kindle edition):

I also started hunting for a new accountant as ours, while a nice guy and pretty good, just doesn’t get the concept of a business which draws its income from creative work and property investment and normal contracting (actually, I think he doesn’t entirely get the contracting thing either) and both Djeli and I feel we really need someone who can advise us on ways we could be saving money or spending it more effectively.

Oh, and I posted my annual creative goals post too.

So, a productive day, even if not an especially musical one. I can recommend both the Sethi book and Whitstable

Tagged with: artist date, blogging, completion, composition, gtd, learning, organisation, reading, tools | Add a comment

Hugely productive day today. I’ve spent the entire day at the Tate Library at Tate Britain doing research for my Cy Twombly project. Gosh I love research. I’ve so missed it – must try to keep it up after the degree is over. I’ve been gathering some useful general info on Twombly and having a look at his other works on paper to start building some ideas for how to approach my project and how to document it.

First thing I have discovered: Index cards are really annoying for anything other than short-term 100% text-based projects. I am ditching them in favour of a not-quite-A4 plain paper Moleskine – this will ensure I can carry around all my notes, make extra notes in margins and scribble/draw/paste stuff to generate ideas, all in the one place. I’d hoped to get a hard-cover one, but it seems Moley don’t make ‘em in the extra-large size *sigh*

Second thing I have discovered: Found a fascinating and massive book called Writings on Cy Twombly, which starts with early reviews of his work and goes through to long-form essars looking at his themes and processes, by way of anecdotes and poems and all sorts of things. It is massive – 300 pages and about 50cm tall, on nice-quality heavy paper with large margins. You know the sort of thing. Classic art book. I got through about 50 pages today, so that would work out as 6 trips to Tate to read the whole thing. Did some sums, looked it up on Amazon, and it is cheaper to buy this massive art book than to take the 6 train trips needed to read it at the library. Again. Madness.

Third thing I have discovered: Tate Britain do an excellent mocha in their vestibule cafe.

I’ve gathered a lot of info and am starting to build an impression of Twombly as a person and as an artist, but it’s kind of hard to express that yet here. Suffice to say: it took the whole day but was very useful.

Once the library kicked me out I went to see the Turner Prize exhibition. And OMG. Go and Google “Paul Noble artist” if you don’t already know his work. Gorgeous and fascinating.

After that I did a little Christmas shopping then went out to Stratford and had Brazilian barbecue for dinner with Djelibeybi. Very civilised. AND I got dried pears from Waitrose

On my train trips I’ve aso been starting to read Tony Buzan’s The Mind Map Book. Buzan apparently created the concept of the Mind Map, and as I found it just sitting on the shelf in the college library, I figured the start of a major research & composition project was as good a time as any to research some study skills. It’s very interesting! I like how he explores a little of how the brain works by way of introduction and talks about how standard note-taking bores our brains into forgetting the very thing we’re trying to remember. I’ll be interested to start applying some of his ideas to this project. For the moment, it’s sort of hard to apply because textual research kind of requires that you keep track of exact quotes, so there’s a lot of copying out rather than idea-generation. Still. All useful info and I’m sure it’ll come in handy soon.

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It’s been really a rather triumphant day! I took my carol along to my group lesson with Errollyn Wallen today. I took both the appalling-singing version I recorded in about 10 minutes yesterday evening and a version that was just the accompaniment/descant in case I felt brave enough to sing. In the end I didn’t feel brave enough to haul out the appalling-singing version, so I loaded up my backing track of giant organ with trumpet descant and pretended to be a choir. And it really went down very well! Errollyn seemed quite taken with it – she’s suggested a couple of tweaks, and then wants me to record it to include in my portfolio at the end of the year! Not bad for a couple of afternoons’ work I really enjoyed Michael’s carol too (he’s another third of our group lesson; the final third, Emma-Jean, couldn’t come this week) – he’s got a great intro going and it’s going to be fabulous. Can’t wait to hear the final version in January!

Anyway, Errollyn was so thrilled with both our carols that she got us to sing them again when one of the pupils for her next lesson turned up early! Heh. I also sang them some snippets of WG James’ Australian Christmas carols and we generally talked churchy music and organs for the whole lesson. Glorious fun!

So I’ve done a rather better recording of it (although still very, very rough, and obviously there’s some changes to go in) which I’ve put up on audioboo. Hope you like it!

(afraid my tempo’s a little off. Sorry. Also, may need to tweak the word “undefiled” as it keeps sounding to me like “and defiled”, which is not really the image I’m looking for there…)

I’ve also made some progress on Fear of Falling, the orchestral piece I need to write this month. After yesterday’s wail about not being sure where to start with short-scoring, I did some Googling on the train, and what should I come up with but this extremely useful article from my friend Jenni Pinnock, which has confirmed for me that the logical way forward is probably to have separate staves for separate instrument families. So I set it up – a grand stave each for woodwind/brass and strings/tuned percussion and a single stave for untuned percussion, so 5 in all. It may be a bit larger than Stephen was thinking, but it’ll keep things tidy and is still a good deal smaller than the 19 or so staves it will take to score the whole thing.

And not only did I decide on this approach and set it up, but I’ve already sketched out about 45 seconds of the piece, quite easily. I’ve set the woodwind/brass stave to use a clarinet sound, and the strings/tuned percussion one to use a string ensemble sound and so far that’s working out OK. I’m setting up staff annotations as I go and if/when I need to put in something that’s out of range of the clarinet, I should just be able to switch channels to a different sound so it comes through as bassoon or trombone or something for just that section (I felt most triumphant when I worked out last night how to do this to get the organ accompaniment to use different stop sounds!).

It still amazes me how much my ear has improved over the past year or so. I find myself, about nine times out of ten now, picking the right note when I’m writing something down from my head, so that Finale is becoming more of a safety net/checking tool than a serious requirement. At least for melodies. I still suck at harmony, though, so definitely need it when setting up chords. Gradually getting a bit better though.

I spent some time on the train working through chains of chords a la Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s method, for Fear of Falling, so I feel I have a few things set up and ready to use. It’s becoming quite obvious to me that I don’t really like close-position harmony. I like my notes to be spread out where possible. I’ll be interested to see where this goes though and to discover situations in which close harmony seems appropriate to me.

So that’s today! I might carry on with the chords this evening a bit, but I’ve got a huge day tomorrow working on the Fourth Plinth exhibition concert at the Institute of Contemporary Art with the rest of the class so going to attempt to get to bed a bit early – for once!

Tagged with: christmas, composition, conversation, learning, music, study, thinking | Add a comment

This month I have masses to do. Not merely lots, but masses in an almost geological sense. Apart from the usual Christmas things, I also have to:

• Write a 5-minute piece for orchestra
• Write an 8-10-minute piece for large (and odd) ensemble based on Anselm Adams photographs
• Write… something for my Art & Music class in response to an exhibition I haven’t yet seen
• Prepare an experimental piece for forces of my choosing (I’m leaning towards improvising pianist and tape)
• Start thinking about a piece for organ
• Keep working on the string quartet
• Dash off a quick Christmas carol for my tutorial next week, and
• Work out exactly what I want to do for my personal project so I can have the proposal ready to hand in in January.

Most of this stuff isn’t actually due in till January, but once term starts again I’ll once again find I have barely any time to compose, so the back of all these pieces needs to be broken over Christmas. So I’m starting A Project. I’m going to work and blog every day (probably not Christmas Day though!) in December. I’m hoping it’ll keep me on track, help me to sort out what is likely to be a massive seaweedy clump of ideas, and provide a record of what goes on in an intense block of work like this. It’ll be like Creative Pact, only this isn’t going to be any side project: this is the focus of my life for the next four weeks… I’m calling it my Advent Calendar

And so, to begin: today I actually haven’t composed a note! Now, there’s a great start! Heh. Instead I’ve spent the entire day at Queen Mary, London University in Mile End at the London Chamber Orchestra’s ‘Inspired by Digital’ study day. I signed up mostly because I was curious to see what they’d have to show us and because there’s a project you can put in a proposal for but only if you went to the study day. Because I don’t have enough to do, obviously.

It’s been a great day – really interesting and useful. I’m not sure whether I’ll put in a proposal or not – I suspect that rests rather solidly on how far I get with all the Christmas projects, but it’s been really inspirational for the other pieces I have on the go right now and has presented a few new ideas to explore in those.

I’ll just talk about a few of the bits I felt I could use, otherwise I’ll be babbling for hours and will miss the start of The Mikado, which would be very sad. The day was structured so that the morning was presentations on specific technologies which are up for grabs to be used in the proposals: B-Keeper adaptive backing track/click track software, MuSA.RT real-time key detection software (available for free download on the Mac App Store) and the Magnetic Resonator Piano. In the afternoon we heard presentations from four composers about their own work with tech and their ideas for how these three technologies might be used in proposals.

Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Eduardo Miranda both talked about compiling arrays of chords to use in their compositions and Cheryl’s method of laying out various chords in all their possible inversions and transpositions was especially appealing to me. I’m going to try this out for the quartet – Stephen wants me to have a plan of harmonic progression through the piece and I think a matrix like this could be extremely helpful in moving from one area to another and in discovering new chords I might be able to use that I otherwise might not think of, my harmonic thinking being as vague as it is.

Lisa Bielawa, a US composer and singer, gave an absolutely fascinating presentation on her work and I was particularly taken with what she had to say about long glissandi and about using programming logic in live pieces (well, she didn’t put it like that, she used the term ‘human circuitry’ but it’s essentially programming logic from what I could see). I think these could be helpful in finding a way into the orchestral piece.

Finally (although it was talked about first) Elaine Chew talked about the relative aural distance of intervals in her MuSA.RT presentation, which I think is a concept worth exploring. She was taking about how a minor 2nd, in spite of being physically close on the keyboard, sounds like the notes are quite far apart, while a perfect 5th or octave sounds close together, in spite of the physical distance between them. It made me wonder whether there’s something in this that could help in my eternal quest to find more space in my music.

And the Magnetic Resonator Piano: wow! What an amazing instrument! Basically it’s a piano that can sustain notes, create dynamic envelopes on a single note, do vibrato and pitch-bending… on a standard acoustic piano! The sound is somewhere between a piano and an organ and absolutely delicious. It’s digitally manipulated but all the sound is acoustic – no loudspeakers involved. Go and look it up! This one really got me thinking about what I might want to do with this organ piece I’m starting for Errollyn in a way that thinking about organ repertoire hasn’t. Fabulous!

So that’s the summary. Now I’m off for a spot of G&S!

Tagged with: composition, ideas, learning | 1 comment

I probably shouldn’t write much now because it’s late and I’ve got a truckload of work to do on the merry morrow, but I’ve been meaning to update here for a week and just haven’t got to it till now.

The workload is proving as daunting as I thought it would – and I haven’t even started all my classes yet! Eeep! On the plus side, there’s no class I’m disliking yet – even Research Methods is interesting and enlightening, which it really wasn’t in my undergrad degree. It’s amazing me though how much things have changed since I did my BMus on the study materials front – back then, if I wanted to listen to something I didn’t own (which was most things) and it wasn’t on the radio, I had to go into the uni library and listen to it here. Now I scour Naxos Music Library (free through college) and Spotify (half-price Premium access via my National Union of Students card) and only the most obscure repertoire requires dealing with actual physical media. Back then, finding articles meant wading through issue after monthly issue of Music Index to see if anything was under the heading you were hunting for, and RILM was a directory of abstracts with no indication as to how we students, in Australia, could ever see the dissertations it referenced. Now, Music Index is nowhere to be seen – a quick search on JSTOR returns not only references but entire articles – and you can search the full text too, not just the categorisations they’ve been indexed under! RILM similarly contains full text of a bunch of things as well as the abstracts, and apparently we can ask for an inter-library loan for stuff that the library doesn’t hold.

I guess being in Europe is a help too – part of our Research Methods session this week (on using the reference resources, particularly the online ones) was talking about how to find things in various collections and libraries, which may be in other parts of the country or in other countries, and emphasising that we should call before we go. It probably seems a silly thing to people who’ve grown up here, but for an Australian it’s “OMG, you just call and then you get to see original manuscripts by people who’ve been dead for centuries??? OMGOMGOMG”

I am gradually whittling down a topic for Research Methods and reading the book recommended (but not required) for the course, The Craft of Research, is helping me so much. What a fabulous book! I highly recommend it if you’re researching anything in a systematic manner, and especially if you’re in the position of having to come up with essay topics of your own devising, at whatever level. The section on determining a topic to write about is unexpectedly brilliant.

My composing year is gaining shape too. My tutor seemed to like my one-note piece and has asked me to expand it into a 2-3 minute piece suitable to play in a concert for next week (I’m allowed to use another note or two, not just my D as in the first version). We talked about what I want to work on this year and have decided that in addition to the song cycle I’m planning and the harp project I’ve signed up for, I’m going to work on a 15-minute string quartet and seek out some other ensembles to write for too.

I’m having a little trouble mentally juggling the work too – There are so many bits that it’s hard to know where to start – between the slow bits of reading and listening and the urgent homework assignments and having to juggle things that need me to hear stuff (quite a lot, even some of the reading needs this) with when the builders are here or Djelibeybi’s doing something noisy on the house, as well as making sure I take some time off, but not so much that nothing gets done and still needing to finish off a couple of website projects I didn’t manage to finish before the start of term and so on, is rather doing my head in. I’ve booked an appointment with one of the Student Services people to talk about how best to manage my time so I don’t go completely mad or miss getting things done.

Tomorrow’s plan is to finish one of the websites, harmonise a bassline which I need to score for string orchestra later in the week (due Thursday) and do some reading and/or listening. Given that the last harmonisation took me 6 hours, I guess I should head to bed so I can make an early start tomorrow!

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Lots and lots and lots of thinking going on. The experience of starting a Masters is turning out to be very different from either starting my BMus or my Graduate Diploma in Design. The main difference is the questions it’s raising about how I define myself and what I do, what I want to achieve, who I want to be at the end of it.

I absolutely never expected such big questions to be raised so soon into the degree, and I suspect that when I get time there’ll be a blog post or seven in there, but for now I’m just mulling over things and thinking about what I want to do. In a way the huge workload is good – plenty of work means plenty of learning, but until I get into the swing of things, I’m a bit concerned about how I can manage to compose as well as getting all the prescribed work done!

I’m doing OK though this week. VERY glad I started the reading I knew I’d have to do early though! And I basically ordered the CDs for the Adler Study of Orchestration book as soon as I walked out of the class – literally, went to the library, pulled out my iPad and bolted to Amazon! – with 5 chapters to read this week and having done 2 of them and knowing how long it took to get through 1 chapter with examples, it’s going to kill me if I have to do that in the library every week. Not to mention the pain of the train fares to go in on my days off if I can’t get it all done on the days I’m there. But I’m getting through this week’s work at least and am pretty confident I’ll have everything done on time.

The listening tasks I’m actually finding very difficult. Not because the listening itself is hard, or assessing what I’m listening to, but simply mentally justifying sitting in a beanbag listening to beautiful music and calling it work. I know this is something I need to do. I know that doing it while not doing anything else is the best way to do it, but still it feels unbelievably decadent and my guilt chip kicks in. So I need to push myself on that. I’ve managed to do listening sessions with two of the pieces off the Simply Terrifyingly Enormous Listening List.

Yesterday I spent some quality time with Beethoven’s 3rd symphony (he gets a C – the first two movements rated a C+ to a B but the Finale was really far too long and brought the whole score down).

Today I had an interesting encounter with Robert Schumann and his Piano Concerto. I pulled out the CD of it I had – it’s one of those ones that come with BBC Music Magazine – usually decent performances – and listened through with the score and by golly was I bored. From about 10 minutes in I just wanted the whole thing to stop. Awful. And I thought to myself, “well, this has been put on this list for a reason. I’m really not seeing why at all, so maybe I need to find an alternate performance of it”. Then I remembered that I’d bought the Martha Argerich Concertos set (I highly recommend – she is AMAZING) and lo and behold, it was in there too. So I put Martha on (with Rostropovich, in case you’re wondering which one) and WOW! It was like a completely different piece! I still don’t think it’ll go onto high rotation, because it’s got that German Romantic thing going on which I just don’t generally relate to but I can totally see that it’s really very lovely and I’d not avoid listening to it again. Martha rescued it from the obscurity of a D- rating and brought it up to a C

We have to rate each piece we listen to: A down to F for a true stinker. I was a bit sceptical at first but it’s actually a useful exercise, because rating the piece means you don’t just think “do I like this?” but “do I like it and is it actually any good?”.

Other stuff on my listening list for this week is Brahms’ 4th symphony, which I don’t think I’ve ever heard. I do rather enjoy his 1st but the 4th I don’t have a recording of and can’t think of any time I’d have heard it, so that’ll be all new. The other one is Shostakovich’s 5th, which it surprised me to find that I don’t seem to have a recording of, but I’m sure I’ve heard sometime. And, hell, it’s Shostakovich. I love it already.

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