This one is connected to the previous piece through light-play. The text came from some exercises I did with one of my students, we were doing some timed writing exercises around the theme forest.
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I had a little songwriting energy back, so I took the original Scuffle text and used that as the starting point for this piece. I kept the spirit of the previous video's randomness by improvising the melody and piano part. And by improvising on piano I mean randomly hitting white keys without much consideration for what I was playing. Perhaps I shouldn't have admitted that...
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From scuff to scuffle, to looking out my window and noticing the leaves blowing down the street.
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It's school holidays and my teaching load has lightened up, so I spent a leisurely amount of time on this song. I have found through this project that I often run out of steam half way through a composition, particularly when it comes to writing second verses of lyrics. All my best ideas from writing exercises usually end up in the first verse or section of lyrics, and then there is pressure for the second part to equal the first in quality, and also move the song along somehow. I find a more traditional pop song structure much harder to write in a day, but these less traditionally structured songs come much easier. I treated this one a little like a painting, with both verses adding new layers to the picture.
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Here's last night's piece, just a little acapella improvisation. My starting prompt for this one was gumboots and the text is the result of a 90 second writing exercise. As an aside, it's finally jumper weather in Melbourne, which makes me really happy. I love this time of year.
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Thursday's piece. I continued on with the whisper theme and one of the words that appeared in my mind map was Will-'o-the-wisp, or a mysterious ghostly light that lures travellers from safe paths. Other words and concepts from the mind map also made it into the lyrics, including spider silk, secret, float and shout/cry.
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I hadn't realised it, but somewhere along this project I stopped judging my work and just got down to the business of doing it. For some reason my judgement was turned back on for this piece, which is why I realised it hadn't been there for the past few weeks. Despite recent complaints about the heat and lack of emotional and physical energy, all those songs felt like a breeze to work on compared to this one.
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This project is making me really aware of the day-to-day fluctuations in emotional and physical energy I experience, and the very real effect that energy level has on my work. I wrote yesterday morning about feeling burnt out, which I absolutely was the day before when I was trying to work on piece #47. Last night, however, I felt entirely the opposite. I was refreshed, ready and excited, and looking forward to an evening by myself in my studio. I had tidied up a bit, which definitely helped entice me into my newly neat space, and I was anticipating the enjoyment of the night's work the same way you'd anticipate the enjoyment of a party. I even indulged the Saturday night vibe with some fairy lights.
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I'm coming to the end of the third week into my full teaching schedule, and I'm starting to feel a little burnt out. When I don't have a lot of time for working on the day's piece I fall into tried and tested habits and processes, and while I'm in the composition process my inner voices are telling me that the music is becoming routine and uninteresting as a result. Many of the processes help me turn off those inner voices, but perhaps as I get better at using the processes the voices get better at finding their way through my defences. I think the answer is to keep introducing new processes and composition exercises, to keep my brain distracted from self criticism.
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I won't write too much tonight, instead I'll direct you over to Rehearsal Magazine, who have just published an interview I did with them this week. I will say that today life took over, and I was left with only a small window of time for today's composition. That window didn't coincide with my feeling particularly creative or inspired, so I forced myself through a few 90 second lyric writing exercises and then improvised with results.
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My friend Emilee Seymour (who is a wonderful multi-disciplinary artist) told me in an email the other day she was intrigued by the writing exercises I've mentioned a few times in this blog, so I thought I'd use that as an excuse to talk about them in a little more detail today. First, my connection to yesterday comes by way of dandelions, which are part of the daisy family. I dipped into the Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore and the Occult Sciences again, which told me "it is very unlucky to transplant wild daisies into a cultivated garden". Using this idea of trying to tame a wild daisy I conducted two three-minute writing exercises, the first prompted by wild daisy and the second by cultivated daisy.
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There are several recurring themes that are emerging in these pieces, and one is clocks. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with clocks, but they seem to be right at the top of my unconscious mind all the time and keep springing into my writing. This morning while I was teaching a singing student the clock in my studio fell to the floor and smashed. This was completely down to my inappropriate choice of 3M Hook size, yet it still felt somewhat significant. Perhaps the clocks in my house are sick of me writing about them? Or maybe they are crying out for attention in our age of digital devices with time-keeping capabilities. Either way, I chose clocks as a starting point for today, which led me to memories of "dandelion clocks" from childhood - when you would count the number of puffs it would take to empty the flower of its feathers and that would tell you the time
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I worked out today that I have been writing songs for about fifteen years, which sounds like an amazingly long time, and I feel I should be much better at it than I am by now. One chunk of that fifteen year period was plagued with horrible writers' block, which was largely due to not knowing how to write about things that were not highly and specifically personal. Learning how to separate myself from the songs and treat them more like works of fiction really helped me to get past that period, and now my writing tends to draw as much from my imagination as it does my own life experiences. Opening up space for my imagination means I can turn to books, films, mythology, poetry or art for stories and ideas, without having to wait for something in my own life to throw me a spark of inspiration.
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I dived a little way back in to my secret past with today's piece. My music degree was my fourth attempt at tertiary study, and the only degree I managed to complete. When I was much younger I studied almost all of a textile design diploma, but gave it up because it was destroying my love of making things. I'm not sure why studying music didn't do the same, perhaps just because I was older and more sure of my path.
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Week three begins, and I started today refreshed and ready to write again. The last few days had left me feeling quite stale, so I decided I needed to introduce some fresh creative material into my process. From yesterday I took the idea of the night, and did some quick and dirty Google research into night-related mythology. I was intrigued by Nyx, the Goddess of the night, and so I used her as the basis for this piece. In particular I was interested in the ways she might bring on the night, by physically casting a veil of darkness over the sky.
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Today was hard, and it's only day three. I had about four hours sleep last night and spent most of the day as a zombie, but at about 11pm I pulled myself together enough to get this one out. These videos are the kind of thing I'd usually keep to myself, and not share them to become a public record of my experimentation. A huge part of this project, however, is about learning to put my inner critic on hold. Besides, tomorrow is another day and another chance to create something new.
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The tyranny of the blank page...
It turns out there was a fatal flaw in my plan for this project: I didn't have any kind of starting point for the very first song. I'm naturally an excellent procrastinator if given the chance, and I almost decided that my announcement of the project would count as today's work. But I made a late dash to the finish line after dinner and emerged triumphant.
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