A wordless piece, the seed of the melody came from the bassline of yesterday's piece. Named for the clear Melbourne winter weather of the last few days.
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I pulled myself out of the fog of procrastination to write this one. Taking cues from the etymology of the word Monday, specifically "Murk Monday", the Scottish name for a solar eclipse that occurred on Monday 29 March 1652, and thermometer. The harmony also comes from the word Monday, which I serialised. I don't really experience traditional Mondayitis any more, as I work unconventional hours, but I had plenty of past office job experience to draw on for this one.
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I felt a lot of pressure to produce something decent after my break, as though the imaginary audience in my mind were waiting to judge me on whether the pause was worthwhile, and if I still had it in me to create a decent piece of music. In order to keep those voices at bay I kept myself to some very strict compositional exercises.
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Moving on from my glove mind map, this piece came out of a songwriting exercise I did with one of my young students in her lesson. I had her make a mind map starting with the theme "forest", and then make pairs of words from the map. We each chose a different word pair to use as a prompt for a three-minute writing exercise, and mine was "singing night". Here's the result of my own three-minute exercise, which became the chorussy part of this rollicking drinking song.
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About a week before I started my music degree I met someone at a party who had studied a similar degree overseas. He told me to just do the first year, learn the essentials, and then quit. This is what he and his friends had done, and he said they were more successful and making "better" music than the people who stuck it out until the end. In his opinion everyone who finished the degree was brainwashed by the jazz education, and the music they were making was either boring, complicated or weird.
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My research into vista led me to the name Gwendolyn, which led me to Merlin, which led me to wildness. Merlin was also a seer, which connects nicely back to the word vista. Other vista-connections that found their way into this were kaleidoscope, clarity and vision.
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A proper update on this project is well overdue. I think I have quite seriously contemplated giving up every day for the past couple of weeks. I've been trying to put my finger on what the real issue is, and it seems to be a number of things compounding. The most perplexing problem seems to be a loss of confidence in myself. I have managed to make over 100 pieces of music in as many days, and many of them I'm really proud of, yet I have lost faith in my ability to continue. What if I've exhausted all I had in me? What if I've just proved my mediocrity 100 times over? What if I just repeat the same ideas for the next 100 and become a broken record? These fears are ridiculous, but I'm finding it hard to switch them off.
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Letting go, I can create anything. Some notes generated from the word SPIDER, and an imagined soundscape of a spider working away.
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This one came out easily, unlike most of my recent attempts. My starting prompt was venetian blinds.
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A second song written and recorded while camping, my starting prompt was brittle.
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A continuation on the hailstones theme, written and recorded while camping in Marlo, which is a ridiculously gorgeous part of Victoria. I'm blaming the distraction of bird calls for my terrible attempt at bossa nova guitar. This one needs a little more practice.
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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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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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This is Sunday's piece, and I had regained a little of my mojo for this one. I started with the theme clumsy from the previous day's piece, and did a three minute timed writing exercise. I then took all the nouns, verbs and adjectives from the result of that writing exercise and created word pairs with them. I used two of the pairs, "somewhere rain" and "another kitchen", as prompts for two additional three-minute writing exercises, and the results of those exercises led to this song. The day after I wrote this song it actually did rain in Melbourne, so I like to think I summoned the rain with my song.
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This project is as much about practicing performing as it is practicing composing. I was really struggling to get through a successful take of this one last night. I kept making small mistakes, and then rather than letting them go they were growing in my mind, forming distractions, and leading to larger mistakes and abandoned takes. The clock was edging toward midnight when I finally had a take I was happy with. I'm still learning ways to manage all the mental stuff that goes along with performing, particularly performing for recording, which I find more difficult than performing live. This project is definitely helping, although it's slightly stressful putting these raw recordings out into the public space where they can potentially exist forever.
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For this piece I took the theme coffee from the previous day and in some internet wanderings came across Van Gogh's Café Terrace At Night, which I used to inspire this piece. I focussed on the bright and dark areas of the painting and did a three-minute writing exercise inspired by each. I then wove the result of the two exercises into this piece using minimal additional text. I really enjoyed this process, as the painting provided a wonderful source of inspiration. There was so much to tease out of it, and I think I might have to start a series of these pieces inspired by impressionist art.
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Yesterday I was going through my videos of the past few weeks, putting them onto a USB to give to my partner's parents, and it forced me to sit back and evaluate just how productive I've been. There are a few songs I've written that have stuck in my consciousness for days or weeks after I'm done recording them, however most get forgotten as I turn my mind to the next day's work. Going back through them made me proud of not only the sheer quantity of my output, but also the quality of many of the ideas. It is not helpful to dwell on either the successes or failures of this project, however a look back through my work has given me a boost of confidence that will hopefully help me push through the dark and difficult patches that are becoming more and more frequent.
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If it weren't for the very public nature of this project I think I would have pulled the plug on it by now. Or at least taken a break. But I know from experience that if I take a break at something challenging it can be really difficult to start up again. Especially now, when the rest of my life seems to be getting in the way, if I stopped now I'd probably never find the "right time" to start back up again.
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Last week was challenging, as I never felt like I caught up from the previous weekend. I was generally exhausted all week, and by Saturday I knew I'd make myself sick if I didn't get a decent night's sleep. So although I wrote this one on Saturday, I decided to put off the recording until Sunday morning and make the most of an early night. Unfortunately that was interrupted by an incident that woke my whole apartment building at 4am, and I didn't manage to get back to sleep after that. I spent the rest of Sunday feeling pretty horrendous, trying to get through both recording Saturday's song and writing and recording Sunday's.
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