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Monday 18 March 2013

Creativity is a funny thing


Creativity is a funny thing, and sometimes I need to be dragged out of a space and plunged into a new one to change my perspective. This weekend I have had the most rewarding and enlightening weekend with the other Adopted Composers, Sound & Music and Making Music. Sometimes life as a composer becomes quite insular, and you need to be picked up and dropped into a pool of wonderful people to reawaken your senses. The people involved in the project have so many skills, so many perspectives and are wonderful and welcoming. This outward interaction, results in a new relationship with my inner process, I am challenged to think in a new way, to reassess my work.

I’ve been struggling with my Cory band piece, I think for several reasons which were obscured to me. Spending time with other composers and talking about their practice this weekend has been really enlightening for me, and has opened up a way of thinking about my work which is enabling me to solve some of these creative struggles.

I was finding the writing of the piece very stressful, and was not feeling any flow or inspiration around it, each day was a battle, each decision a struggle. But, when thinking about my process I suddenly realise that it is not piece which is the problem, but the process. My last few pieces have been written in Sibelius 7, which is a new approach for me. I always used Sib 6 to write up scores once they were already finished but this time I am trying to use it as a creative tool. My natural preference would be to work in Logic, exploring the sonic world without any reference to the dots on the page or music theory. I think this comes across in my work, my Sibelius based work is more clunky, more concerned with pitch and convention, more immature. In a lift in Waterloo Station, I remember that I am not a notation based composer. I am an aural composer. Trying to approach the work from a notated point of view has been, for me, like doing everything left handed, trying to open a can with a spoon. My aural sense has not been inspired and has not lead me as my eyes have been too preoccupied with asking my brain for harmonic permission.

I realise that my process and means of composing is perhaps not what other composers are used to, and not what ‘classical’ musicians expect, but I am not a classical musician and I am not a trained composer, I am just a person with ears who makes sound. There will be much to learn about how I can adapt my working practice to a world which has slightly different rules and expectations, I think a lot of that will be about being clearer with myself and others about how I work and what I need in terms of collaboration.

Monday 4 March 2013

Top Banding


It’s been an action packed few days here is the valleys. Arriving Monday and heading up to the Cory rehearsal I’m struck by how different it all feels, and then I realise, I have only been here in the dark before! At the Cory rehearsal I’m treated to 2 hours of top class band playing and watching master conductor Phil Harper work through a score. After this, I grab 5 minutes with him to have a look at my sketches so far. It’s fair to say that most of it won’t work, it’s either too high, or there is nowhere to breathe. So we come up with some solutions about how to write this sound using different techniques, splitting rhythms over parts and dropping sections into different keys. 

Tuesday starts bright and early to a cheery welcome from the 7 year olds at Ynyswen school, who, thankfully, remember me. “Miss, Miss, are we going out on another trip?” “Miss, Miss can we go for a walk?” The first visit seems to have stayed with them. I pull up the scores of the sketches I’ve written, which were based on their compositions we did last time. We talk about how the dots on the page are like a script for actors, they tell the musicians what to play. We also talk about other types of scores and before long, we’ve got the children making their own graphic scores of my pieces. We talk about what sounds to listen to, spiky, smooth, loud, quiet, high , low, short, long and how we might draw them. The whole group go dotty at a staccato cornet passage! 

After a quick coffee with Craig and Charlotte (Making Music and Ty Cerdd respectively) to discuss the logistics of getting 2 brass bands on one stage (!) I head off to have tea with local historian and walk designer Cennard Davies. Cennard greets me with true Welsh hospitality and I am offered bara brith and tea. His head holds so much of Treorchy’s history, it’s a truly fascinating afternoon, recording his stories for the guided history walk and a poem by Ben Bowen which we’re hoping to use in the performance. Cennard tells me the story of an old friend of the family who used to come to his house each year to commemorate a momentous event in his life. The dining room served as the operating theatre when he was carried down from an accident at the mine. His leg was amputated with nothing but whisky for anesthetic and the kitchen table for an operating table. Each year he came back to toast the table with a drink. I can’t resist taking a photo. 

Straight from Cennard’s stories I head to Abergavenny band rehearsal, where they have a work through some of the sketches I’ve brought with me. There’s still a lot to learn about writing for band. Some of the sections work quite nicely but others need breaking up, changing register and rethinking. I’m writing this as I listen to their rehearsal. Tomorrow to Friday I have booked myself writing days, so I’m hoping to get these ideas and developments down, into scores and away to Phil to try by the weekend.