It's been a long time...

since I rock 'n' rolled. Well, a couple of weeks or so, anyway. I've not been idle, just concentrating on the orchestral piece I'm writing at the moment, so that's taken up most of my time since I got back from holiday. There are a few things from the past month I've got, which I'll get around to putting up when i've got time. In the meantime, here's a litle tune.

Went to see "Maskarade" at the Royal Opera House last night, don't believe the critics, it's a wonderful work, and an excellent production too. I have one small gripe about a throwaway line inserted in the final scene that I think detracts from the import of the scene, but otherwise it's very well done.

Weekender

Just about to head up north to Birmingham, and from there to the Moniaive Comics festival. Really looking forward to a few days away.

Variationettes

I kept playing with the little tune from the 20th, and ended up with a set of mini-variations. Although these diary pieces aren't intended for any particular instrument, I found the basic sound I had in my mind for these evolved from my usual default sound of piano, to cello (my own instrument). I guess the variation theme ties in with the comic strips I'm working on at the moment, as they tend to be variations on one basic gag.

It's such a relief to be off work at last, even though I spent the first couple of days laid up with a horrible bug. The extraordinary tension of the Ashes didn't help me relax either! But now I'm just feeling at last like I can rest and maybe stop just feeling exhausted.

The value of failure

Well, to be honest these are fairly purfunctory and not too inspired, but part of the point of this is to rid oneself of the fear of writing bad music. If it turns out bad, it can be ignored. If you worry too much about whether what you produce is any good, you'll end up producing nothing. Good writing starts with just writing.

A break from the muties

time's very short at the moment as I try to start getting all the tasks done which have been looming over me for a while now. So just a very quick sketch yesterday, I daresay I'll go back to the line I've been drawing for the past week or so - or maybe not. That's the point of this really, there's no agenda or plan, just whatever pops into my head.

Mutante encore

The accidentals just seemed to creep in.

A nice lazy weekend to celebrate my entry into middle age. Just did these couple of things, the first another mutation of the last few entries, the other the half remembered outline of an idea that popped into myn head on the way to the pub before the football on Saturday. It was a very good idea, of course I didn't have anything to write it down on at the time. So this is an impression of a lost moment, really.

A line further

It continues to mutate... what will happen next?

Taking a line for a (shaky) walk

I seem to have hit on a pattern here. I may continue this train of thought for a few days, it's a bit like automatic writing in a way. I like the idea of abandoning clear rhythm or co-ordination of the lines, it seems to open up a fresh landscape.

Sometimes being helpful can be a real pain. Memo to self - learn to say no more.

Sunday night ramble

Very tired today, entertained a visiting brother this weekend. This morning we watched with gritted teeth as England nearly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the second test. The relief when we finally took the last wicket and won by the slimmest of margins (two runs!) was extraordinary. And people say cricket's a dull sport.
At the time of writing, haven't yet done today's piece, I'm struggling to stay awake at the moment, but I should try and get something down before I collapse, especially as I missed out on Wednesday. So many things to do, so little time or energy...

To speed or not to speed

I keep an A5 sketchbook with me pretty much all of the time, and that's where I generally put these diary pieces, along with sketches for larger ideas. Up til now I've written out the entries nice and neat to post here, as the handwriting in the book can get pretty scratchy, (depending what kind of state I'm in at the time...) but today I thought I'd scan the latest efforts straight from the book, see how it comes out.

So far most of these things seem to come out as slow pieces, although I've tried not to indicate speeds etc too much, to leave plenty of leeway. Today's piece is unusual - the way I've notated it suggests a slow tempo maybe, but I actually imagined it reasonably fast as I was writing it. There's no reason it should go one way rather than the other, though.

New Puritan

Another difficult week, all kinds of financial pressures pressing down on all my other commitments, hence another big cache of pieces to post. I missed out on Friday, as I got waylaid in the evening, but hey, a boy has to have some fun, and I did two yesterday to make up for it. Call it Puritan guilt.

Backlog

A combination of all kinds of work and computer troubles has left me a bit behind here, I haven't been neglecting my piece-a-day challenge though, so here's a big catch-up for the past week or so...

One Week on...

No words. What words can there be?

I wrote an email to the Director General of the BBC today asking him if he thought it was perhaps inappropriate that upper management were being awarded enormous bonuses paid from public money while nearly 4000 employees face the sack as the DG says they cost too much and we need to save money. I don't expect a reply, still, better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

Otherwise I continue work on the orchestral piece I'm writing for Kensington Symphony Orchestra (of which more anon) and I'm also starting to scribble down a few ideas for comics for various upcoming publications. Here's a character design I did yesterday (for someone else's script). I shan't say any more than that it's going to be... disturbing.






















(image copyright 2005 by me!)

There's been a lot of stuff in the media about the tremendous will of Londoners to return to normal life as quickly as possible, but what else are we supposed to do? Stay at home for the rest of our lives? If I want to go anywhere, the scale of this city is such that I have to use trains/tubes/buses. Enfield to Shepherd's Bush is not an easily walkable journey. And let's face it, the risk of being blown up on the tube on Friday was probably lower than it's been for years. So it's back to normal; long silences between commuters almost hidden by the screech and clatter of wheels on worn tracks. Londoners united in their determination not to speak to strangers on a train.

After the bombs

I never really saw the point of most blogs, or saw any reason for me to publish one. Who on earth would be interested in my generally not particularly insightful or informed thoughts? And wouldn't it be tremendously presumptuous of me to imagine anyone would be?

At this point, I should mention that I'm a composer - not a particularly successful one, but a composer nevertheless - and of course if I'd thought about it for a few minutes I'd realise that that's exactly the presumptuous thought that I, or any creative artist, has every time he or she produces something that, for want of a better term, I shall call a work of art.

I've long had a vague, ill-defined gripe about the position of composers in the world, especially what seems to me to be the insularity of the whole business. I've met many people in the so-called serious music business and grown increasingly frustrated at the levels of complacency and the lack of any sense of duty to the wider world beyond the cosy smug coterie of "contemporary classical music" (whatever that means).

These sort of thoughts came back into my rambling and frankly drunken mind a couple of nights ago. There was an incident in London that day (you may have heard about it on the news) and, having thanked my lucky stars that my train had pulled into Liverpool Street on time for once that morning, so that I was a good 10 minutes down the Central Line when the bomb went off, I'd decided the best course of action in the uncertain atmosphere was, rather then attempt a potentially difficult journey back home to Enfield, I'd impose on my brother's hospitality in Wimbledon. So, much booze later, I was sitting on his couch watching the TV, where among other pundits Will Self was sitting on a couch discussing the aftermath of the attacks. And it occurred to me that there was no way a composer would ever be asked onto such a discussion. A writer, certainly, a painter maybe, hell, Bono and Bob Geldoff have been all over the telly this last week talking about Africa, but anyone involved in so-called contemporary classical music (which I'll abbreviate to SCCCM from now on)? Of course they wouldn't be asked, and why should they?

So I started to think, how does a composer try and offer a reaction to the world? And the answer, it seems to me, is to forget about trying to produce some finely polished work of art, and just get something written down and out into the world. Don't worry about whether it's tremendously well crafted or cleverly constructed or whatever, the idea is to get something out there quickly. You can always refine and reuse the ideas later in something more reflective.

And then I realised that what I was thinking of was essentially a diary. I've been scribbling tiny ideas down in a notebook for a while now, which I've always thought of as diary entries - little scraps of ideas and thoughts, which may or may not germinate into something more significant, the point being simply to write stuff. Or, in the words of Elisabeth Lutyens, "If you're a composer, bloody well compose."

And once you're talking about a diary which is distributed widely, well, that's as good a definition of a blog as any. So here's mine. Apologies to Joe Sacco, from whom I stole the title, and here's the little piece I scribbled down either side of midnight on the 7th/8th of July. The idea is I'll post up bits of music on a regular basis, possibly along with the odd random thought I've had or cartoon I might have drawn. But I've no real plan for this, just to see what happens.

If you've managed to wade through all the above waffle, I hope this bit of music isn't too disappointing. I imagine it being played on the piano, but do whatever you like with it, although if you're going to use it in some sort of creative project of your own it'd be nice to know about it. And if you're going to make money from your use of it, well I'll be wanting a chat about getting a cut. I'm not that altruistic.