My theme from the previous song was swell. I did some word fishing from the book I'm reading at the moment (The Master and Margarita in case you're interested), picking the first word on random pages starting with each letter of the word swell. I did this a couple of times and then mixed up the results, and the phrase little white embroidered eyebrows was the one that resonated. I turned that line into this song about a childhood doll.
Read MoreI started with the word draught from the previous piece, and then opened the book The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (highly recommended by the way) to random pages and chose the first word on the pages starting with each letter of draught. The words led me here, and I let myself just hit random keys on the piano for part of the accompaniment as I'd run out of energy to nut out something more functional.
Read MoreThis piece is not what I was originally working on yesterday. I had planned out a whole story-song and done lots of timed writing exercises to generate material to work with, but by the time I got that far it was after 11pm and I was exhausted. I looked up from my piano and into the mirror and my eyes were red and watery, so instead of pushing through I changed tact and did something much simpler.
Read MoreI concluded yesterday's blog post by saying that I would let interest and enjoyment be my guide, and I think that's something that deserves a little exploration. It's not quite as simple as just doing what you are enjoying, especially if you want to develop your skills at something. What is good for you may not necessarily be enjoyable, and it is easy to become bored or to feel like your practice is stagnating if you don't work outside of your comfort zone every now and then.
Read MoreI considered leaving this to tomorrow morning to record, simply because I would have had more fun if I could crank my amp a bit. Once I start doing that, however, there's nothing stopping me from putting the writing off until the morning too, so I stuck to plan and recorded as quietly as I could.
Read MoreIt's summer in Melbourne, and even though it wasn't particularly hot today my flat just won't cool down. I don't like to play or practice with the windows open for the sake of our neighbours, so spending time locked in a small room with no airflow has been particularly uncomfortable the last couple of days. I got about half an hour of guitar scales in today before I'd had enough, so I kept today's piece very simple.
Read MoreToday marks the first day of month two of this year-long project. I should probably write a bit of a reflection on month one, but I might do that as a separate post tomorrow when I have a some free time. Today I'll keep my writing about my composition, and I might get a little nerdy in today's post. If you're one of my non-musician friends you might want to skip through to the bit about the lyrics.
Read MoreMy 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.
Read MoreI love lyrics, words, text and poetry. They have always been the driving force of my composition practice, and I think Lydia's Needle from last week was possibly the first thing I've ever written without any kind of textual component. That makes today's contribution is my second ever instrumental piece (although can I call it instrumental even though I'm singing the melody?)
Read MoreToday's contribution starts to stretch the definition of music a little, but it falls within my use of the term. This was a purely lyrical endeavour, and came from the line "tripping through streets in insensible shoes" from yesterday, which I found myself turning around in my head long after I'd finished the recording. I decided to take the dominant sounds of that line, S's and T's, as my starting point. After brainstorming a whole lot of words that featured those sounds I put them together into random sentences, and the one I really liked the sound of was "the taste of a stammer". I used that as the starting point for a narrative, and fleshed out the text with other words from my brainstormed list, weaving them together in ways I liked both alliteratively and narratively
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