spaces between

A particular kind of aloneness

2012-01-29T18:25:00.001+11:00

My six year old daughter was singing in the kitchen today and I told her what a good singer she was. She asked “Did you sing as well as me when you were six?” And the answer is, I don’t know, and I no longer have anyone to ask.

I’m not sure whether you can really refer to yourself as becoming an ‘orphan’ once you are a grown up. I’m very grown up, almost middle-aged by some people’s reckoning, but I still feel the particular impact of knowing that both my parents are now dead. Although I have a half brother and sister from my father’s first marriage, they are a generation older than me and I did not live with them when I was growing up – I grew up as an only child. And that is what makes me feel this newly conferred ‘orphanhood’ more acutely. In a way I feel as though I have been severed from my childhood. If I can’t remember something that happened when I was four, now there is no one else who can. I relied on my mother’s recollections of my childhood, particularly for the years before about the age of 4. Now that she is gone there is no longer a reliable witness to my childhood. I know this comes to all of us but I think having young children makes me feel this absence more keenly. What was I like at 4? Is my 4 year-old similar or different to me at the same age? If my 6 year old pulls a certain face, there is no longer any one to say - “you look just like your mother when she was your age”. I’m not going to wallow in self-pity about my ‘orphanhood’ because in the scheme of things it is really not so significant. We all lose our parents eventually - some of us sooner than others. At least I had one parent who lived to see me a happy adult and mother of my own children. But still, I think this particular type of aloneness will take a bit of getting used to.

A Birthday

2012-01-23T21:28:00.003+11:00

Today would have been my mother’s 85^th birthday. This time last year I had no thought that she would not be around for her next birthday. I just assumed that there would be at least another couple of birthdays, although I’m not sure my mother was so convinced.

After some one much loved dies, I think it is the ticking over of that first year and the passing of ‘special’ days that can be most difficult to bear: the first Christmas without them, the first New Year, the day of their birth and the day of their death. I managed to cope quite well with Christmas and New Year: I steeled myself and held it together. But over the last week or so I have been feeling an increasing sense of dread, the welling up of grief and a dissolving of my carefully maintained composure.

The last two nights I have gone to bed and cried, missing my mother, wishing that she could have been around for a couple more years, wondering if there was anything we could have done to hold on to her for a bit longer. All of these things are of course part of any grieving but it was her birthday that was my undoing. Last night I tormented myself thinking about her last birthday and whether she had any inkling that it would be her last. I went back and read my diary for this time last year and was relieved to recall that we were all there for her birthday – that she had her two cherished grand-daughters pottering around her house for a couple of days; I’m pretty sure we got a cake to celebrate. So it wasn’t such a bad last birthday. There was some consolation in that at least. But I still miss my mother and although 84 and a half years was a pretty good run, I still feel the loss and the unfairness of losing someone who still had a bit of living left to do.

What was it all about?

2012-01-19T22:32:00.002+11:00

I thought it was about time I revisited why I started this blog and what it was supposed to be about. “A blog about creating things and the spaces between creating things”. And herein lies the reason why my posts have been so few and far between. I’m not creating things and the spaces in between seem to be jam packed with other, not so interesting, stuff. I’m not finding those moments for reflection and refocusing and recharging. What I AM finding is full-on child-focused summer holiday blur, following on from hellish year of great sadness and stress and business. There was a brief period of energized activity between busy hell year and school holidays when I got the garage door replaced, a new skylight and attic put in and the garden brought under some semblance of control. I could perhaps have spent that energy and time on starting a new piece or doing yoga but I chose to try and bring some outward signs of order to our physical space. The garage door was so that we could put a CAR in the garage – what an amazing concept – instead of all the junk that we have been ‘storing’ in there. And that necessitated a bit of a purge of no longer used things thanks to our local freecyle group. The attic was because we were rapidly running out of storage space, particularly after taking possession of many of my mother’s things – furniture, papers, photos etc. The skylight was to brighten a gloomy kitchen. So all of these things have actually helped make me feel a bit better about the space I am in. I am feeling less swamped and oppressed by stuff. I feel slightly more in control. And that is important to me. I find it hard to work in chaos, surrounded by boxes and no longer used things. So although I really don’t have very much to report in the way of ‘creating’ things or inspiration in the spaces between, at least I am in a slightly better place than I was before. So, as I get closer to the end of summer holiday craziness, approaching the start of what looks like a dog’s breakfast of a year, I shall take a deep breath and brace myself. And I will keep trying to find those spaces, between and otherwise, where I can do the things that I really need to do.

Something in The Age

2011-11-11T09:44:00.001+11:00

Photo by Wayne Taylor

Thanks to Kathy Evans for the lovely piece in The Age today - a follow up to the premiere performances of EPIC by the Australian Chamber Choir.

A Performance... of my new work

2011-10-19T23:07:00.000+11:00

The Australian Chamber Choir are performing my new work, Epic, this Sunday in Melbourne.

The details are...

Sunday October 23, 2011 at 3.00pm
at Our Lady of Mount Carmel,
216 Richardson St, Middle Park (Melways 2K: C10)

with Baroque strings and chamber organ

Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky - Legend "The crown of Roses"
Heinrich Schütz - Saul, for 14 voices, 2 violins and continuo
Josquin des Prez - Missa Pange lingua
Johann Sebastian Bach - Motet for double choir "Komm Jesu, komm"
Christine McCombe - Epic (2011)
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi - Magnificat for choir, soloists, strings and continuo

The Poetics of Silence

2011-09-16T14:55:00.003+10:00

I teach a course at RMIT that focuses on sound and time and space. This week we spent some time looking at the idea of SILENCE. I have to say that Silence is one of my favourite subjects – so overlooked and underrated, particularly in music. Each week I set a reading to discuss in seminar – this week it was Thomas Clifton’s ‘The Poetics of Musical Silence’, published in The Musical Quarterly in 1976. Although the essay is very clearly focused on the roles of silence in traditional Western Art music, the ideas developed can easily be applied to any kind of music or sound art. Clifton sets out to discuss different qualities and types of silence and the effects these have on the listener’s perception. He opens by comparing the study of musical silence to “deliberately studying the spaces between trees in a forest”: from the outset this essay has so many connections with my own work and preoccupations. And the subject area clearly found a lot of resonance with the students – most could directly relate Clifton’s analyses of musical silence to music that the listened to. For anyone interested in the poetics of silence, this paper is well worth reading, but I’ll attempt to outline some of the ideas he presents. Clifton’s work seems to give physical form to silence – he describes “hard-edged silence” where there is sharp contrast between sound and silence. In other instances the boundary between sound and silence is almost imperceptible. In his description of ‘Silences in Motion’ he outlines a kind of silence where sound “disappears below the threshold of audibility” but is still present, just out of hearing, until the sounds re-emerge above the hearing threshold once more. He explores the idea of “Silences in Registral Space” – the idea that the sound space covers the whole range of audible frequencies, or register, and that sounds can drop out of a particular register, leaving a kind of sonic void that seems to wait to be filled. One of the main points that Clifton makes is that one of the strongest effects of silence is to heighten our perception and awareness. The introduction of silence makes us listen more intently, waiting for the return of sound. The dramatic nature of this perceptual focus is clear in the use of silence to surprise – sudden silence, or to increase expectation – the tension of waiting for the next sound. His essay also reflects on the nature of ‘ending’ – the quality of the final silence. Silence can be approached by a gradual emptying out of the registral space, a gradual disengaging from the composition: “the piece itself becomes absent”. This type of prepared ending allows us to accept that the piece is indeed coming to an end and that the silence that will follow is final. We had an interesting discussion about the impact of abrupt or unexpected endings in music – that these types of endings can be quite disturbing, unsettling and in some cases quite shocking. I was reminded of a friend who always insisted on ‘fading out’ any music that was playing on the stereo before he left the room – he would NEVER just press ‘stop’, so extreme was his reaction to any unprepared ending. The nature of ending is something that relates to so many aspects of our lives, and as is so often the case, music can act as a kind of sonic analog for things other than music. Clifton takes this to its extreme when he draws a parallel between musical ending and Heidegger’s phenomenological description of death. Clifton invites us to “consider the way music presents the essence of dying.” A musical ending is in effect a disengaging with the possibility of further ‘relationships’. The piece becomes ‘absent’. “When silence intervenes… the piece itself passes over into nothingness.” Such a powerful and beautiful way to think about the nature of ending, musical or otherwise.

Musical Chairs Anyone?

2011-09-10T14:13:00.001+10:00

Yesterday I spent a very pleasant couple of hours 'speed dating'. Not the conventional meat-market-show-us-your-wares type of speed dating, but a much more refined and creatively rewarding version. Chamber Made Opera and the Victorian Writers' Centre have just run a week long Librettists Workshop, part of which was a lunchtime 'speed dating' session where writers could meet composers, discuss ideas (briefly) and make connections. I sat in a comfortable chair by the window and talked to writers about their work and told them a little bit about mine. There was food, drink, interesting company and a clearly defined structure to make sure that writers got to talk to composers (and vice versa) for at least a couple of minutes. And in between the hard work there was time to chat to everyone else, other composers and performers and old friends. I'm sure I will follow up a couple of the writers I met, as even in such a short space of time, various strands of common ground emerged. Possibilities start to present themselves, seeds of ideas are planted and I am reminded that I am part of a community and not just a solitary composer sitting at my desk.

Mr Price's Food Store, North Melbourne

one week

2011-08-19T11:14:00.004+10:00

It is one week since my mother died. Last Friday morning I drove across town to be with her for the last time. The Darling Gardens were shrouded in fog and a shimmery, unreal kind of morning light . By lunchtime the day was transformed by glorious late winter sunshine, streaming through the windows. But all this played out in the background, as I sat by my mother’s bed, holding her hand, talking to her gently although she probably couldn’t hear me. I kept holding her hand as various doctors and nurses came and went and the life of the hospice continued around us – the plumber banging away at the pipes in the bathroom, another patient being moved into the bed opposite my mother and all the associated business. Finally my mother was moved to a quite space, a lovely room to herself away from the clatter, and there she spent her last minutes. I think she waited because she knew I wanted to be alone and somewhere quiet where we could be together for the last time. I watched my mother draw her last breaths, I held her hand, I told her it was OK to let go, that I would be alright , that everything would be alright. And then it was over. Perhaps the hardest part was leaving her. My beautiful mother, lying still, no breath, and the warmth of her body gradually fading. I stayed with her for two hours and stroked her cheek and kissed her gently on her forehead and smelt her hair and touched her hand - all for the last time - and then I had to say goodbye.

In loving memory of my mother.

Winter was hard

2011-08-03T15:40:00.002+10:00

This is the title of one of my favourite Kronos Quartet CDs featuring a beautiful piece by Aulis Sallinen. The title is particularly apt - I am having a hard winter. My mother has been diagnosed with lung cancer and at 84 years of age there is little point trying to treat the disease. As I write this I am sitting in a hospice, the sun is shining, the spring flowers are just about ready to pop up. My mother is drifting in a cloud of morphine and I am trying to keep my head above water in a sea of sadness. I met an old friend on the train yesterday and I filled him in on what was happening in my life. He asked me if I felt like writing music, as some way of dealing with all of this. Not yet, I said. I feel a need to listen to music but only very particular things. Today it is Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel. Nothing too jagged or unsettled. At least I can listen to music. My mother's partial deafness and foggy head make listening to music pointless. She cannot focus or concentrate to read. Even getting out of bed to sit in the almost-spring sunshine is beyond her today. And winter continues to be hard.

Order in Chaos

2011-06-14T15:28:00.000+10:00

Have been a bit quiet on the blog front... Suffice to say I have been busy working and somewhat distracted by various family issues. This afternoon I had a couple of hours of time to myself and decided to sort my CD collection - that is return it to the alphabetically ordered collection that it once was, before each of my daughters in turn decided to pull all the CDs off the shelf and create their own order. Feeling assured that they are now both past the age where pulling things off shelves is fun, I thought maybe now was the time to create some order. Call it a preliminary step in creating general order in my world - an ongoing and long term project of mine (feel free to laugh). So I made some coffee and got stuck into the dusty chaos and about an hour later my CDs are beautifully ordered, according to my own slightly quirky version of 'alphabetical' order. My husband still has the occasional laugh at my expense when he goes to his CD collection (yes, they are separate) to try and find something according to my ordering - serves him right for not sorting out his own CD collection when we moved house. Anyway, now I can actually find CDs when I go to prepare my lecture notes for next semester and I discovered all kinds of CDs I had completely forgotten about and rediscovered some long lost loves. I had to smile at some of the CD neighbourings created - Gaelic Psalms next to Garbage, Madonna next to Mahler, Sonic Youth next to Margaret Sutherland. So now, back to work, happy in the knowledge that some order at least has been restored.

Chaotic Cycles and Unpoetic Moments

2011-03-03T11:00:00.005+11:00

I have been thinking a bit lately about the state of things in my life. The fact that I go for months without seeing my friends because any ‘free’ time I have I feel compelled to spend on work (ie brain work) or house work. The fact that I feel like I am going round and round in circles with alternating phases of intense dissatisfaction / frustration / enervation and more positive / optimistic / life-is-good and we-are-very-fortunate. I’m not making much headway with the brain work at the moment and spent my last ‘free’ day writing letters and reading a book because I just could not face trying to be creative with zero energy or creative focus.

Blogs are great when it is 10 at night and you haven’t had any meaningful interaction with grown ups and the things they think about but are too tired to actually ring up a friend for a chat. A couple of blogs have made me laugh / felt encouraged or just put things into perspective. A fantastic blog that made me laugh out loud is Not Drowning, Mothering, especially the page on Domestic Godlessness - the photos of other people’s mess made my heart sing and also made me realise that chaos is relative.

While looking through Arts & Letters Daily I found a review of a biography of American poet Elizabeth Bishop. The review focuses on the poet’s relatively small output, averaging two or three poems a year but each of these are described as works of “quiet perfection”. This also made my heart sing, but for another reason. So much of the guilt and frustration I feel as a ‘creator’ is because I am not creating enough, that my current output of one piece a year is pointless and futile. But I can aspire to write one beautiful piece this year, and then maybe two beautiful pieces the following year – who is actually keeping a tally except me?

And in my idle moments (when I am hanging out the washing or tidying the living room or making big girl's school lunch) I try and formulate metaphors to describe how things are in my life at a particular moment. Does anyone else do this? Try to find a succinct and illuminating analogy for something that seems to be quite hard to describe? Two crackers that popped into my head this morning...

Unpoetic Analogy #1

I feel like a fly stuck inside, buzzing around hurling itself at a closed window when there is an open window right beside it.

Unpoetic Analogy #2

The inside of my head feels like the contents of a blender. Someone keeps adding random things into the mix and what started out as a raspberry smoothie is becoming eggplant dip.

Can I make this an invitation to anyone who has tried to find a way of describing their personal chaos/pre-occupations and come up with something less than poetic? The more bizarre the better. Send me some of your best efforts in the comments here - I would love to read them!

the cargo effect

2011-02-25T23:39:00.005+11:00

We recently purchased a cargo bike - a massive three-wheeled chariot for transporting things like children. This was motivated by two things. Firstly, my partner and I have a bit of an anti-car agenda. I feel bad about driving children relatively short distances in a car when I would normally walk or ride my bike, if I didn’t have two children in tow. And secondly, I am desperate for some vigorous physical activity. Walking at the pace of a 5 year old does nothing for my cardio vascular fitness. Riding a fully laden cargo bike around, on the other hand, is a fairly strenuous workout. At first I felt a bit self-conscious about my very visible presence and being quite possibly the first person with a cargo bike in our suburb. We definitely attract attention. But apart from saving money on petrol, reducing our ‘carbon footprint’ and increasing my physical fitness, there is another quite lovely and unexpected bi-product. Total strangers come up to me on the street to talk about the bike, people wave and call out encouraging things, parents at school come over for a chat. Our kids LOVE it. They sit side by side, have a chat, share a snack, enjoy the wind in their hair and, I think, feel a bit special. When I get home after the school/crèche drop-off, I have had my ‘work-out’ and get that fantastic burst of energy and feeling of aliveness that you get from physical exertion. And also I feel happy that I am in some small way connecting with the community in which we live and breaking down some of my natural reticence and latent misanthropic tendencies. All this from a bicycle (or tricycle to be more accurate). Amazing.

A New Routine

2011-02-17T10:59:00.002+11:00

Our five year old daughter started school last week. Things seem to be going fine - no howling at the school gate (unlike her mother at the same age) and she seems to be adapting to the change. Her three year old sister is in creche two days a week, and although she is less enthusiastic, she seems to be getting into the swing of things. So, with my partner off to work and the house quiet, I have two days where I can (from the hours of about 9.30am - 3pm) do some WORK. This is just as well, because I have a fair amount of work to do. I'm re-writing a course which I'll be teaching in second semester and writing a piece of music for a performance in October and I also have a couple of other 'projects' I would like to get under way. Although it is only the second week of my new routine, I am beginning to experiment with different work schedules. Writing lecture notes and composing music are two quite different activities and I am finding that the best approach at the moment seems to be one day of words and one day of notes. I find it difficult to change easily from one to the other but maybe this will be a skill I can develop with practice. Once I am immersed in the world of sound, I want to stay there for as long as possible and the same is true when I am focussed on words and theoretical ideas. For the time being, this is probably the most efficient way of working. I'm also trying to make time for things like playing the piano - something which I've found very difficult to do with two small children around. I remember thinking, when I was pregnant with child #1, that I would be able to play the piano with the baby/toddler/small child beside me, happy to listen to music. This has NEVER been the case. Either the children have cried, complained, joined in or just generally pestered me until I stopped. It is lovely being able to sit for 20 minutes and play some Bach Preludes and just enjoy making music. And then, with my mind focussed, I sit down and get on with some words or notes and reconnect with my thinking and creating self again.

The Adventure of Childhood

2011-01-11T10:00:00.001+11:00

I watched a fantastic documentary last night on ABC called 'The Lost Adventures of Childhood'. With a five year old about to start school I have been thinking a lot about what we have given her in preparation for school. Have we done enough 'stuff'?, ie shouldn't we have tried to fit in more extras like music lessons and dance classes as well as the swimming lessons she loves. I've been feeling anxious, thinking that in some way I had wasted this precious pre-school time when their brains are like sponges and their neurons are firing and connecting all over the place. Have I in someway limited her development and potential by not doing all this 'stuff' early? Watching 'The Lost Adventures...' put it all into perspective and reassured me that perhaps we haven't been so far off the mark. Our two girls love spending hours in the garden - making potions and 'cooking' and collecting magic stones and building little gardens and climbing trees (the five year old at least) and decorating the pavement with chalk and making 'paint' and dressing up and doing 'shows' on the trampoline and teaching each other tricks and pretending to be birds and building hiding places - in short, having Adventures. The documentary made a very strong and compelling case for the importance of play as a way of learning important skills like independence and initiative and problem solving and communication and negotiation and of course developing creativity. As far as I can see, these skills are clearly more important and core to success as a human being than whether you can dance or play basketball. The program shed light on the worst excesses of 'hyper-parenting', however well-intentioned, and debunked some of the myths about team sport being 'character building'. In one fantastic and inspiring example of the real benefits of play, a drab school playground was transformed by some cardboard boxes, large pieces of fabric, chalk, fun 'props' like walking sticks and other miscellaneous objects intended to stimulate creative play. The results were quite amazing. In the playground, the children's approach to 'playtime' completely changed from filling in time to a fantastic chance to create their own adventures. And in the classroom, the teachers were struck by the change in their students - their concentration, problem solving, initiative and group communication all improved noticeably after only two months of playtime adventures. The school didn't need to spend thousands on fancy play equipment - a couple of cardboard boxes and some material did the trick! I found this incredibly inspiring and also reassuring. Kids can learn more from old fashioned play than from hours of 'extra-curricular' activities that in reality just leave them exhausted and overwhelmed.

here's to new horizons

2011-01-01T14:11:00.001+11:00

Ahh... Another New Year. There is something quite nice about waking up in a new year but I don't tend to go overboard with new year's resolutions and the like. Nevertheless, it is a good chance to at least reflect on the year that's gone by and the one that's about to unfold. Many people we know have had a not-very-good year. We've come out reasonably unscathed and for that I am grateful. When the future seems a little uncertain it is easy to put things off until things become more stable and secure - the result being that things never get done. So I've decided that my 'thing' for 2011 will be to do things when they need doing - like celebrating each special thing and not waiting for something BIG as an excuse. Go on that lunch date today and have a glass of bubbly while you're at it. Buy that thing that you've been wanting to get for ages but think you can't really justify. Arrange that holiday weekend even if you think it's too much of an indulgence. If it makes you happy NOW it is worth it. Often even the little, simple, happy-making things can be skipped over and overlooked and put off. A year goes by so quickly and there are so many missed opportunities to be happy and savour the moment. Break open the champagne now, I say.

music and words

2010-12-18T23:06:00.000+11:00

words and music

I am embarking on a new composition – for chamber choir – which I am really excited about. I love writing for voice. We all (or most of us) have a voice - it is our first and most compelling means of expression. In many ways I think the human voice is the most powerful and evocative musical instrument.

Part of the appeal of writing for voice is that you have the opportunity to combine music with words, to express abstract musical ideas and non-abstract language based ideas or even narratives. It seems like the perfect art form and of course over hundreds, if not thousands of years people have combined music and words, for one reason or another.

As I start exploring ideas for this new work one of the first things I need to do is find a text. I find it almost impossible to start writing a piece for voice if I don’t have at least some idea of what words the voice might be singing. It is of course quite possible to write a composition for voice that treats the voice exactly like any other instrument, that is to focus purely on the SOUND of the voice and the different ways of making the sound and how this is shaped and articulated through pitch and rhythm and texture. As I struggled to find a text I was tempted to go down this path and write a piece of vocal music that was liberated from any specific extra-musical content, ie WORDS. I spent some time thinking about the inherent problems of combining music and text, the various traps one can fall into when one starts with a strong text and then has to somehow ‘set’ this to music. How does the music maintain its own integrity and shape when the compositional process is being dictated to a greater or lesser extent by a pre-existing text?

I think one of the easiest traps to fall into when ‘setting’ a text to music is that the text comes first – the starting point is a poem or piece of writing that has its own structure and technique. The greatest poems do not necessarily make the best pieces of text around which to compose a piece of music. The beautifully crafted structure of a favourite poem may not lend itself readily to a reworking or interpretation through music.

One of the things I look for in a poem or text is the SOUND of the words. The ideas and language may be exquisite but if they don’t sound right then I have real trouble bringing them to musical life. There is a huge difference between reading a poem in one’s head and reading it out loud. The sound of the words, the shape of vowels and consonants, the distribution of sibilants and fricatives and plosives – this is the SOUND of the text. And when articulated in a musical texture it is these sonic qualities that will be more clearly discerned than the ‘meaning’ of the text. Even with the clearest enunciation, it is almost impossible for an audience, on a single listening, to fully comprehend a text that is being sung, even by just one singer, let along a whole choir of voices. As a composer I cannot assume that the text will be clearly heard and understood. I cannot just hang my music on a text and expect the music to absorb its meaning.

There is quite a lot of technical skill in writing well for voice. The human voice, like most other instruments, has quite different characteristics and capabilities at different points in its range or register. What is easy to sing in the mid register can be extremely difficult to sing up high or down low. This is where the SOUND of the text is important and how these sounds are arranged across the range of the human voice makes a huge difference. For instance, in the high register it is much more difficult to sing a closed vowel such as an “ee” sound with good control and projection. Try singing a high “ee” then try the same note with an open “ah” sound – it is quite a different experience. Without going into the physics and physiology of how vocal sound is produced, the reality is that certain vowels or word shapes sound better at different parts of the vocal range and this has an impact on whether or not the words can be easily heard when sung.

So what was I looking for in a text? Before I started thinking about words, I already had a fairly clear idea about what the piece was ‘about’; something of the emotional trajectory, of the sound world, of the morphology of the work. The search for text was from this starting point, which in some ways made it more difficult. I knew the kind of thing I was looking for but I just didn’t know where I was going to find it. In the process of tidying my workspace (the usual first step when I start a new piece) I found some printed information on a Bill Viola work that I had taken a group of students to see at the NGV. The work, ‘Ocean without was partly inspired by a poem by the Senegalese writer Birago Diop – a section of which was printed on one of the pages and caught my eye. I had also been writing words of my own for the new piece as a way of sketching out sound and text ideas. A couple of days later I sat down with the Diop text and my own texts and started trying to shape a kind of skeleton for the work. The original text by Diop is in French so I looked up a couple of different translations of the poem ‘Les Souffles’ (including a computer generated translation!) and looked at the different nuances in meaning and word shape. I went back to the original type written MS in French and noticed some slight differences in the ordering of the lines of the poem. With a very rusty grasp of French, I got our French dictionary down from the bookshelf and worked out which of the various possible translations worked best for my purposes. I then went back to my own text and reworked it, pulling it into a shape that would work with the Diop text. The text I now have is full of possibilities – the Diop poem is very much a poem to be heard and the rhythm and structure of the poem is subtle and evocative. My own text is quite paired back and explores different ways of expressing a single idea. Together these words give me a ‘way in’ to the new piece without being too prescriptive or limiting of the musical world that will be built around them.

the bodybox - part two

2010-12-07T00:07:00.006+11:00

I find an old envelope containing several old photograph negatives. On the outside of the envelope is written “Very Old Films (My Father’s time) and the only Photo’s that I am left with !!” The handwriting, I am fairly certain, is my grandfather’s. The negatives are unlike the modern ones I am used to dealing with. These are larger, more square in shape and each of a single image. I hold them up to the light and see very shadowy images of people but nothing clear enough to make out. I’m in the middle of scanning a pile of letters and old photos so I scan in the negatives and then find the function that allows you to reverse an image – from negative to positive or vice versa. In a moment I have transformed some fragile pieces of celluloid into images of people – the first time these images have actually been seen in a very long time. It is a strange feeling. I wonder how it was my grandfather had the negatives but not the photos themselves. And of course I look at these people before me and wonder who they are.

There is an image of older man with a bushy grey beard sitting at a dining table; beside him is a young girl, probably in her teens. The table is covered with plates and glasses and bottles – the photo was clearly taken midway through a meal. I can almost read the label on one of the bottles but not quite. I can almost see what they have had for dinner. So on a particular day, over a hundred years ago, my great grandfather sat down with his family for a meal and someone decided to take a photo. And over a hundred years later I am looking at that image on a computer screen, in a large house in Edinburgh, probably not that different from the house in which my distant family sits, having their dinner. I feel completely drawn into this world of image and memory.

There is a series of photos of family members, all taken in front of a rather imposing sideboard, on which sits a vase containing some tall spiky leaves. I’m not sure if these photos have all been posed for comic effect or if it was just by chance but in each photo the spiky leaves almost seem to be sprouting out of the subject’s head. There is a young boy, whose shoulders only reach the top of the side board as he stands in front of it. There is a young girl with a rather dreamy expression on her face, with lovely brown hair. Another shows a middle aged woman, also seated, this time photographed from a slightly different angle but still with the sprouting head. Another photo shows a baby sitting propped up in a leather arm chair. I cannot make out the features of the child’s face but would guess that they might be about one year old, maybe a little older.

Perhaps my favourite photo from this collection of “very old films” is the image of a young girl standing against a shingled roof-line, as though she has just climbed out of an attic window and someone has decided to take her photo. Maybe this was her favourite place to go to escape from her brothers and sisters. Maybe she liked to go out onto the roof to look across the chimneys and rooves of the New Town and up to the sky and think her thoughts. She looks like a thoughtful girl. And although the image is partly obscured by marks and stains on the fragile negative, she seems very present in the photograph. She reminds me of other photos of the girls in my family, often with this same intense look. My mother, her sisters, my cousins, me, and my own daughters. I feel a great fondness for this girl who was more than likely one of my great aunts.

By looking at a list of birth dates that my grandfather wrote on a piece of paper I can begin to work out who is probably who. I am fairly certain that the baby in the leather armchair is my grandfather Richard who was born in 1903. The bigger boy in front of the sideboard is probably his brother James (‘Uncle Jim’) born in 1896. The girl on the roof could be Jane (born 1891) or Margaret (born 1890) – the age seems about right if I work backwards from the baby Richard in the chair. The older girl at the dinner table, and maybe also in front of the sideboard, is probably Clara (born 1888), later known as ‘Aunty Cissie’ – another story to tell. But I am just making partly informed guesses based on a scrap of paper with some names and dates and a series of not very clear images. I think I have given them their names but I may have it completely wrong. It could be a whole different story, but I feel like I am close. As I gaze at these images that only exist as light on a computer screen, I feel very strongly connected to them and wonder if there is such a thing as blood memory. I feel as though I am looking at captured moments of time in the lives of people whose blood I share, if only in part. People whose lives have long since run their course. How strange that I should be sitting here, over a hundred years after the photos were taken, several years after I first ‘discovered’ these images in an envelope in the body box, now on the other side of the world, and still feeling such intense fascination and wonder at this art of light and memory.

taking stock

2010-11-30T08:48:00.002+11:00

I have been a ‘blogger’ for a year now (actually a year and two weeks). I wouldn’t say that I have taken the blogging world by storm and no one could accuse me of writing when I had nothing to say. Six weeks between posts is not unusual. In fact there are a couple of un-finished posts that never made it onto the page. As I write this I have a 5 year old calling out to be helped with something, the garden is rapidly turning into a jungle after all the spring rain, there’s a load of washing in the machine, a pair of curtains to be shortened and the usual housework needing to be done. That is the mundane stuff. Then there is the piece to write for a concert in October 2011 – an actual performance, with my name already in the brochure, so I’d better get on with it. There is a course to prepare for July next year: books to read, lectures to plan – and 15 students already enrolled so, again, I’d better get on with it. A year has made a difference. Writing music is back on the agenda and the cogs move a little more smoothly than they did this time last year. I haven’t strayed too far from the path that I wanted to be on this year and things are starting to fall into place, slowly. I am beginning to see where I would like to be in five years time. And as far as the land of blog goes, in many ways it has been a revelation to me. There are so many interesting and inspiring things out there and although I don’t have much time to meander in blogland, I often come upon lovely things that make me think about something in a new way. I enjoy the community of people who think and write about the things that interest them. So although I now have a toddler about to have a meltdown, a load of washing to hang out, and a book about phenomenology to read, I will continue to post things and put my thoughts out there and read what others have to say.

The Bodybox - part one

2010-10-05T22:05:00.007+11:00

I am sitting alone in an imposing Georgian terrace in Edinburgh, it is late at night on Christmas Eve 2002, in the middle of a Scottish winter. Beside me is an old black wooden box, about the size of a small travel chest, with a large lock on it. This box in known to my mother’s family as the ‘bodybox’ – a collection of family papers and photographs assembled by my grandfather. Inside is a jumble of old newspapers, letters, photographs, bills, telegrams, miscellaneous scraps of paper with names and dates, a note from a young boy to santa claus with a picture of the particular Hornby train-set that he would like for Christmas. Some of the bits of paper are annotated or dated. The Christmas request is marked “Note from Ritchie, Xmas 1936. R.Orr”. ‘Ritchie’ is my uncle Richard, ‘R.Orr’ is my Grandfather, also Richard. It is the photos that claim my attention. Most are of people that I recognise – aunts, uncles, grand parents, great-grandparents. There are some photos that are unmarked and I have no idea who these people were, and it is these photos that pique my interest.

There is a photo of a woman in a grove of tall slender trees. She wears a large black and white sun hat, a white blouse and dark full length skirt nipped in at the waist, a long strand of beads hangs down below her belt, she holds something dangling by her side – probably a purse. By her dress I would say the photo dates from around the turn of the 19th century or early 20th. The only clue is the word “Bill’s” on the back. There are two ‘Bill’s that I know of – my Grandfather’s eldest brother or the German Bill that my great aunt married.

There is another photo printed as a kind of card with rounded edges; a woman is seated outside in front of the door of a house. She is holding a baby, maybe six months old, the woman’s gaze is downwards towards the child in her arms, her face in almost fully obscured. I don’t know who this woman is, I don’t know who this baby grew up to be.

There is a photo of two young girls by the sea, the waves crashing against a rocky shoreline in the background. The girls are small figures, indistinct against the sea, cliffs and hills behind them, there faces aren’t clear enough to pick out a resemblance. Perhaps they are my great aunts as children – my Grandfather was the only child of his family to have been born in the 20th century. I could estimate the photo to be early 20th century so that might fit.

Another very old photo shows a young woman leaning up against a haystack with her face turned to the side. Her dress looks late 19th century, quite a narrow waist, a cameo choker around her neck. There is something about her face that is very familiar – the same strong brow that seems to crop up in my mother’s family, she reminds me of one of my aunts. She seems to be tolerating having her picture taken, a slight look of amusement around her mouth but also I suspect impatience. I look at this woman and she could be anyone but I wonder if she is my great grand mother as a young woman. My mother doesn’t recognise her and there is no one else to ask.

These images of women and girls intrigue me and draw me in to this guessing game. I could be related to them or not. I see glimpses of family characteristics but perhaps only because I am looking for them. I try to fill in the gaps with the limited information that I have and make guesses and assumptions. I want these people to be my family. I want to know who they are and what they were doing when these pictures were taken. And there is a sadness that I will probably never know who these people are and what kind of lives they led. My grandfather could have told me who these people were, since he is the one that collected all these photos and put them in the bodybox. But he is long dead. The connection has been broken. My mother was born long after these photos were taken and the people in them bear little resemblance to people she remembers. At least I have these photos (albeit as digital replicas) and I look at them and wonder, and know that I have at least some tenuous connection with the people in them, and perhaps much more than that. Although these photos are locked up in a box in a solicitor’s office in Edinburgh, at least I know that I am still interested in them and that my generation of cousins will still look through the bodybox from time to time and wonder who these people were. There is some consolation in knowing that they are not mouldering in a cardboard box in a second hand shop or under the floorboards somewhere, ready to be thrown out or crumble away to nothing. This is I’m sure the fate of hundreds and thousands of old photos that have lost their connection with the families that once held them dear.

(And on the subject of old photos, I happened upon a blog called Forgotten Old Photos which tries to find homes or at least connections for old forgotten photos. What a lovely idea.)

Five things...

2010-08-24T22:01:00.000+10:00

... that I have learnt from my children.

1. ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen…?’

Well, now that I know what the worst thing that can happen is, nothing else seems to matter. What other people think. Public humiliation. Career Interruptus. Professional Rejection. Poverty. Middle Age. Once I had children, a whole new world of terrible possibility opened up – that one thing that no mother ever wants to even contemplate. So really, nothing else comes close. As long as my babies are safe and healthy, all the rest is incidental.

2. Love

3. There is no place for cynicism.

How can one continue to be cynical in the presence of a child experiencing something for the first time? Life is beautiful and amazing and constantly surprising.

4. Shed some skin.

Having a child is like having a gaping wound or losing one’s epidermis. As well as a terrifying new vulnerability (see 1,) and an increased inclination to cry, there is the openness that shedding a layer of armour brings. I can now talk quite happily to total strangers, people in supermarket queues, at railway stations, just crossing at the lights – something my previous self was not inclined to do.

5. Life is full of new beginnings.

Rather than see the ends of things, I am now more able to see the beginnings. A different approach to the next piece of work, a new phase in my life, a fresh way of looking at something, a radical change in direction. All possible.

Why I listen to music

2010-08-01T23:36:00.000+10:00

fractal image by Peter Raedschelder

“Is music written by a computer still music? Can it make us feel?” That’s what caught my eye this morning as I had a quick flick through the Sunday papers. For a start, it’s not often a whole page of the weekend news is given over to discussions of contemporary music aesthetics. The article in question by Tim Adams, which originally appeared in The Observer , discusses the work of American composer David Cope who for the last 30 years has been exploring the possibilities of ‘computer aided composition’. The original publication of this article opens with “David Cope: 'You pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas'” - an opening almost guaranteed to raise the hackles of classical music lovers and musicians. Tim Adams’ article is not about how David Cope programs his computer to write all his music so he can have more time to do whatever composers wish they were doing when not composing. David Cope uses a computer as a tool to generate musical material that he, the composer, can then use, or not. Plenty of composers use technology for various aspects of the compositional process. Some composers use computers to generate material that they then translate into sounds and textures. Some composers toss coins to decide which notes to use. Some composers leave many of the ‘compositional’ decisions to the performers that play their music. I myself have been known to use games with numbers to work out the order of notes. Each to their own. It is all part of the bag of tricks at our disposal and as with any ‘tool’, it is what you do with them that counts. David Cope’s work seems to sit at the blurry edge between computer programming and composition but I don’t have a problem with that either. He is very open about what he does and how his music is created – it is not as though his computer is whipping up “hundreds and thousands of sonatas” that he is then passing off as his own. It is an interesting field of study and no one is seriously suggesting that composers are going to be out of a job because of it (assuming there are jobs for composers in the first place…).

This article and the ideas it raises are interesting to me on a number of levels. I can remember discussing the role of Artificial Intelligence in Music with some AI post graduates, trying to understand why getting a computer to write music is anything more than a high tech party trick – this coming from the post graduate composer with her own ideas about aesthetic value. The answer that I got back was quite enlightening: (and I paraphrase) … in finding out how to make a computer compose music, what you are in fact finding out about is how people compose music. The project of AI in music is not about creating computers to write music as a substitute for people-written music, it is about understanding human compositional techniques: how humans think and create. So, that was me told, and I will never make disparaging comments about AI music nerds again.

So I asked myself, in response to the questions posed and implicit in the article about Cope’s work – what is it that interests me about someone else’s music? Is it an analytical appreciation of the way they have generated and constructed a piece of music, the systems they have used and the rigor with which these systems are applied? No. Is it an appreciation of the agility with which they have mastered various musical styles or compositional techniques? No.

What interests me in listening to someone else’s music is what the composer had to say. I listen to the way they chose to arrange sounds through time to evoke a particular idea or concept. I listen to music because I am interested in how some other person, who has lived and experienced and felt happiness and sorrow and many things in between, has attempted to express something of themselves in sound. I don’t listen critically, trying to find holes in their technique or inconsistencies in their music language. What I actively listen for are these things - the bits of grit or glitches or quirks that throw things off centre, the imperfections, the unpredictable moments of something strange and unimagined. I am listening for the traces of the person who wrote the music because the fact that a person composed a piece of music is what interests me.

Out of Exile

2010-06-22T23:15:00.002+10:00

(photo by Daisy Noyes)

I have just been to a live recording of a chamber opera / music theatre work by Australian composer Helen Gifford. The work, Exile , (after Euripides' Iphegenia in Tauris) was composed in 1985 and has never been performed. This beautiful work has sat on a shelf for 25 years, unheard except by the composer, until David Young of Chamber Made Opera (and until recently artistic director of Aphids) 're-discovered' the work and got the project rolling. Exile has been recorded as part of an ambitious co-production between Chamber Made Opera, Aphids and Speak Percussion to create what may be the world's first iPad opera in conjunction with new media artists Champagne Valentine (Amsterdam).

There are several reasons why all of this is worth writing about.
Exile is a beautiful and powerful piece of music. The performance featured soprano Deborah Kayser, a phenomenal performer whose voice defies description. The work was performed un-staged, un-costumed, in a very un-atmospheric auditorium but Kayser's performance transcended all of this. Watching her perform was like being given glimpses of another reality, almost a sensation of something else being lived and experienced behind a curtain - not visible but none the less palpable. The music itself was restrained and subtle and intense. As a listener I was completely transfixed.
And this work that lay unheard for 25 years is about to be transformed into something entirely new, a second incarnation - an "interactive music-video iPad application" - not something Helen would have envisaged when she wrote the piece in 1985. I find it incredibly heartening that a composer in her 75th year can hear a premier of a work composed decades earlier and then see / hear the work take on a previously unimagined second life. As a composer it is easy to become disillusioned when works don't get performed and sit on a shelf un-realised - this is actually quite common. The process of presenting a work in a public performance can be very involved, complex and often costly, particularly when larger groups of musicians are required. After 25 years I think I might have given up on ever hearing this piece. How wonderful then that others, several generations younger, have had the commitment and energy to bring this beautiful work to life and to an audience.

A love of dots

2010-06-01T23:12:00.003+10:00

I receive a flat parcel in the post, from Germany. It is a score of a Trio for clarinet, violin and piano by Galina Ustvolskaya. I leave it on a chair and then get distracted by the day, taking children to crèche, doing housework, paying bills, cooking dinner. The next day I find a window of time to myself, open the parcel, look at the lovely white newness of the score, find the recording on my ipod, put on my headphones and settle into a chair to read. This is one of my great loves. One of my other great loves, a two year old, is asleep on the couch next to me. She stays asleep long enough for me to read the piece through but not long enough to write about it. That will keep.

I wanted to write something about the joy of score reading. It is a difficult thing to describe to the uninitiated. I read the black spots on lines that another composer at another time has arranged in a particular way to represent the sounds that they hear and want others to hear. Could I describe it as like reading an x-ray of a poem, if such a thing existed? The black marks on the page are such an abstraction, a visual shorthand so far removed from the music that they represent but somehow reading a score takes me somewhere quite strange and profound. I can read the dots and lines that someone else has made and I can almost imagine their thoughts as they write; how they imagine each of these sounds, the shape, the colour, the taste. I can imagine my own hand holding that pencil as it hovers over the page, as I try to grasp that fleeting shadow of imagined sound and pin it to the page before it disappears. I listen to the music as I follow the score and the experience of listening becomes something quite different – an experience of being inside the piece of music. Not just of being inside a sound but of having an insight into the idea, the intangible inexpressible thing around which the piece of music has grown and given voice to. Words are beautiful and I love the written word. But these strange circles and lines and curves and dots, and the sounds that they attempt to capture, have a more powerful hold over my imagination. And remind me of why I write music, and that I will keep writing music, even if no one else hears it.

(a little bit from my new piece)

Something about Beauty

2010-05-27T23:01:00.006+10:00

I've been reading various things relating to Japanese aesthetics and came across a rather lovely essay by Donald Keene in Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader in which he discusses four key elements which he believes reflect something of the Japanese sense of beauty. One of the main sources for Keene's approach is book called Essays in Idleness by a 14th century Buddhist priest, Kenko.

Suggestion
"In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting."

Irregularity
"In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth."

Simplicity

image from 'Tea and Zen' at the NGV

Perishability
The cherry blossom falls from the tree after only three days but this impermanence is part of its aesthetic significance in Japanese culture.

These four elements are not necessarily equally prized in a Western sense of aesthetic taste. Keene discusses how Irregularity and Perishability in particular are qualities that fly in the face of much of Western art tradition. Versaille or Ryoan-ji. Marble or Cherry Blossom.

But how beautiful they are. For me they sum up that intangible, indescribable thing that I aspire to in my own work and that I am drawn to in the work of others.

Things that make me a better composer

2010-05-02T14:54:00.002+10:00

'Teaching'* other people how to compose

I’ve been back teaching composition since the start of semester and am really enjoying the process. My classes range from one-on-one composition lessons to group classes focusing on writing cross-media work.

I love teaching one-on-one; trying to find out what someone is trying to create and helping them clarify their creative intentions and develop the skills to realize their work. Sometimes there are issues of confidence (lack of) or focus (lack of) that need to be dealt with. Sometimes my job is to suggest possibilities, a different way of approaching a compositional problem or just to play some music they might not have heard before. I love the occasional ‘light bulb’ moments and the enthusiasm that the students have (most of the time) for the process of writing music. And there are the really interesting conversations about music, different composers, different ideas that make me re-think my own views or re-visit music that I haven’t listened to for a while or discover music that I have never heard before.

I love working with groups of students because the sum is always greater than the parts. Sometimes things go off on tangents but the range of ideas that a group can bring to the table is usually surprising. One of my favourite classes is a group of composers working with a group of choreographers to develop new work. My job (and that of my choreographer co-teacher) is to bring these two groups of students together, to dissolve some of the cross-media barriers and hopefully encourage a shared creative language. There have been some very beautiful moments of work to emerge so far, one in particular that was extremely moving – watching as a group of people from different arts backgrounds, who had only recently met, let go of their reservations and preconceptions and apprehensions and made some work that was neither music nor dance but something else rather lovely.

My Inner Critic has been quite vocal of late and one of her pet subjects is 'why can’t I find more time to write my own music?'. Why am I spending valuable child-free time teaching when I should be writing? (never mind the obvious financial reasons). Then there is the old saying, one of IC’s favourites, which goes something like… “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach". I think I can now categorically blow this one out of the water. There are some VERY good reasons for teaching, not just the desperation of failed artists. There are the obvious altruistic aspects of teaching – fostering and encouraging young creative minds, contributing to the future cultural life of our society etc etc. And then there are the very clear benefits to ME as a composer (and a human being). I learn things – about music and about myself. I find new ways of looking at problems. I am enriched by the beautiful things that are created. I feel like I may have done something useful. And I am reminded again and again why what I do (writing music) is important and not to be abandoned the next time the Inner Critic lets fly.

* I’ve never actually thought that anyone can teach anyone else how to ‘write music’ – only to give them some tools to realise and organise their compositional ideas.

A fresh pair of ears

I was inspired by a recent post by Cath in Musings in Mayhem where she mentioned handing her work over to her writers’ group for critical feedback and how useful this was. I have long thought that composing music can be one of the most isolated and introverted of creative pastimes. Lots of time alone at a desk, creating a piece of work with very little consultation or ‘testing out’. Generally speaking, there are no music editors to give constructive criticism and feedback. Once the work is finished it usually goes to the performers and then there is often little opportunity to tweak or refine or edit anything other than the surface details of the work. In its written form, it is difficult to really get a sense of what the sounded work will be like unless you have a highly developed inner ear. I realized that what I need is a writers’ group, of composers. So I have made a small start and asked two composer friends if we could set up our own ‘composer self help group’ where we can show each other our work for critical feedback as well as support and encouragement. I have happily sent my recent piece to them for a fresh perspective and their comments and encouragement have been invaluable (many thanks to K and L). I’m looking forward to casting an eye and ear over some of their work and responding in the same generous and constructive way. On a purely personal level, this process also has a quite significant side effect as it cancels out a very negative tendency I have noticed in myself to be highly competitive with those I consider to be my peers. So rather than comparing myself (usually unfavourably) with my peers, it feels much better to open myself up, offer my work for scrutiny and benefit from their feedback and generosity.

A love of stones

2010-04-14T22:47:00.005+10:00

C'est fini. I think I have finished my piece - more or less - pending further refinements and editing - unless I change my mind again. This piece has been driving me round the bend for a while now. Things would go swimmingly and then I would lose the thread and the vision would start to unravel. It started off being about one thing and now it is about something else, but also still about the first thing, kind of. I wanted the piece to be about moments but the moments became bloated and over-written. And then they were pruned into something different again, and again.
There was one notable evening when I very nearly gave up on the whole project - 'I can't write music, I've forgotten how, I am pathetic and talentless and clearly deluded' - that kind of thing. I vented at my partner, the air was blue, then after a cup of milo and some calming words several helpful realisation were reached. (i) There is no point giving up now because it [writing music] will only get harder if you don't keep doing it. (ii) It wont seem so bad in the morning. How true.
I knew I wanted the piece to be in small sections, with the spaces between (notice a recurring theme?) being significant. I also wanted the piece to be about a process of de-cluttering and simplifying, each smaller section reflecting stages in the process. The image of a path of stepping stones came to mind - each stone with a shape and character of its own but part of a larger function. I scribbled in my note book
"... idea that transformation, change, growth, happens in the spaces between... kids grow in their sleep; the mind/subconscious at work when we sleep. The spaces are significant because this is where thought / reflection / awareness happens and this enables growth..."
And again I am drawn to the Japanese concept of 'Ma', particularly as it is reflected in Japanese stone gardens, such as Ryoanji in Kyoto , where the placement of stones is carefully judged, with equal attention to the spaces between the stones as well as the qualities of the stones themselves. I love this idea. So I think the piece is about the careful placing of musical moments in stillness and time. Which is what I wanted it to be all along.

something like a holiday

2010-04-06T17:45:00.001+10:00

There has been a lot of frustration in the air recently, most graphically brought into focus by the appalling tantrums of our two year old. These are becoming a daily occurrence. Her expression of pure rage and frustration is something to behold, and beholding it is about all one can do. Like any force of nature, they just have to run their course. Watching these tantrums is like seeing an intensified and physicalised manifestation of what I’ve been feeling for the last month or so. At least I have the words (occasionally) to articulate what I’m feeling and can see lack of progress within a larger context. My darling daughter is instead buffeted by waves of utter frustration that have no way of dissipating other than through crazy tsunamis of rage.

That I am actually sitting and writing something is a step forward and is largely due to the fact that we have had something approximating an Easter holiday – ie we went somewhere else (my mother’s house) and did things together as a family (some time at the beach) and mind numbing domestic tasks were minimalised. And although it was only four days it was a much-needed circuit breaker. So the work (music) is progressing slowly, so I have failed to meet my self-set (and completely arbitrary) deadline, so my teaching load is messily and inefficiently spread over days when I could be doing my own work at home… oh well. It is not ideal (things rarely are) and I feel a bit frustrated (less than I did a couple of weeks ago) but my life has many facets and they don’t necessarily fit together neatly. I haven’t got the ‘child-rearing / paid work / MY work / miscellaneous-personal-stuff’ balance right yet and it will probably never be perfect but then things rarely are. Yet again, I have to be reminded by my nearest and dearest that maybe my expectations need to be reviewed. OK. I’ll adjust (and re-adjust) my sights accordingly and remember that the only one that has these expectations of me is ME and not some imaginary panel of peer assessors ready to mark me down if I don’t come up with the goods in time.

Seven things that inspire me

2010-03-02T14:57:00.004+11:00

Sandra Eterovic tagged me in this lovely cyber-parlour game – inviting people to reveal seven things about themselves. I’ve thought of seven things that feed my soul.

Silence – no television, no radio, no telephone, just listening. When I’m feeling stressed or tense it is often because there is too much noise. My particular dislike is of multiple sound sources in the same space – tv / radio / talking – and when it stops I feel instantly calmer.

Clouds – for looking at and contemplating, lying on the ground and gazing upwards and just thinking.

Water – for looking at and being in and listening to.

Spaces – open spaces, enclosed spaces, hidden spaces, curious spaces; the sound of spaces and the memories held by spaces.

Old things – pre-owned, lived in, well loved, forgotten about; the patina and palimpsest of age.

(Asylum 1994 by James Casabere)

Other People's Art – how other people distil their ideas into reality; a painting, a sculpture, an installation, a piece of music.

People – my friends, my family, my partner, my children. People who create things/ make things/ do things/ write about things and people who have ideas. People I have known and people that I wish I had known.

Dear Reader - Please feel free to carry on the game and post your own 'seven things'. (And let me know so I can read them!)

A change in the weather - in surround sound

2010-02-10T14:17:00.001+11:00

For those who don’t live in Melbourne, we have been having a rather warm week. Hot days, hot airless nights, grumpy children, grumpy naked children, grumpy not-asleep children and grumpy parents. As mentioned in an earlier post, I find it hard to work in the heat and we have so far done without air-con. I’ve been knuckling down today with an upright fan, lots of water to drink and minimal clothing… trying to keep the work going and not doing too badly. Having done a morning’s worth of work I sat on the back step of our house and spent some time listening to the unfolding drama of the weather; lots of rumbling in the distance, panning from one side of the northern sky to the other. It was lovely to just sit and listen to the whole thing in amazing surround sound; low thudderings taking shape, moving and changing as they shift from west to east or east to west. The gradual picking up of the wind as the change starts to come through, the leaves registering the moving air and then the birds getting excited at the prospect of a break from the heat and some waited for rain. I could have sat out there for much longer, just listening and being in the midst of it all and experiencing the shear scope and scale of the sound and its aliveness and character and transformation through time. But the desk calls, the piece needs me to write it while the ideas are there and the cool change is on its way.

confidence

2010-02-01T21:22:00.002+11:00

"I have confidence in confidence alone

Besides which you see I have confidence in me!"

My children are obsessed with The Sound of Music. I am also obsessed with the sound of music but not so much the Julie Andrews / Rogers and Hammerstein version. More the sound of sound as it relates to music, and how to make music with sound, and how to arrange the sound of music so that it makes sense to me and doesn’t sound too much like the sound of anyone else’s music. Which brings me back to the very beginning – in this case the quote from The Sound of Music (lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II).

I’ve been working on a new piece for a couple of weeks now (by weeks I mean two days in each of those weeks) and generally speaking it is going really well. Ideas are flowing, notes are being written down and whole sections of the piece are emerging. There is no shortage of material, there are sheets of manuscript paper everywhere and it certainly gives the outward impression of a composer hard at work – which is the case. But now I am getting to the stage where I need to refine and condense and structure all this material into a coherent piece of music. This is usually one of my favourite parts of the compositional process but doubt has started to creep in. Will this really work? Will anyone want to perform it? Will anyone want to listen to it? Is it going to be a ‘good’ piece? In short, I need to have more confidence in me.

I’m not sure whether I ever really thought about confidence as such an important part of the creative process before. Of course you have to be confident in how you promote your work and how you project yourself to other people when it comes to getting work performed or commissioned. Not that I’ve ever been that good at brimming with confidence in the cause of self promotion, but I know it is important. But when I’m here alone at my desk, just writing and dealing with ideas, confidence is actually really crucial. If I start listening to that voice of self-doubt I will lose my nerve, I will lose my focus and end up not writing the piece I want to write – or most importantly, the piece I know I can write.

listening and thinking #1

2010-01-15T22:44:00.000+11:00

Am about to start writing a new piece of music - for violin and piano - hoping to start it on Monday (creche day!). For me, the pre-compositional process has various stages: thinking about concepts and ideas (not necessarily sonic ones) and researching and writing about these ideas; and then the listening - another kind of research. So I've been listening to various things, trying to get a taste for the sound world I want to work in, different colours, textures, ways of thinking about time and space in the music. Already I am reading this and thinking what a mixed bag of metaphors it is - taste and colour and space and time. But that is how it works for me - I often think about sound in terms of taste or feel or space as well as sound. Not as clear as a synaesthetic sense of sound but more the way the senses can overlap when you are trying to define or articulate a particular quality or essence. As I write this I am listening to music by Galina Ustvolskaya, a remarkable Russian composer to whose music I feel very drawn for its extreme and uncompromising quality. I love her music for its force and clarity and even sometimes for its violence - it is far from 'easy listening'. I love that it is difficult, that she was 'difficult' - not in a Stockhausen kind of way but because what she had to say was difficult and different. And the other reason I love her music is that it is often about the 'essence' of something, distilled and expressed in a simple but powerful way. Definitely something I aspire to in my music. As I have been listening, casting a wide net and listening to a range of music, it is very clear to me what I DONT want to write or hear. I don't want clutter or hyperbole or expansive extravagance or pointless turmoil. I remember reading something that Liza Lim said about her work many years ago and it has always rung true to me - that she writes the kind of music that she wants/needs to listen to (sorry for the paraphrasing, Liza). This is not just about being your music's first audience or implying that composing is a form or sonic narcissism. I create things because I want them to be in the world, because I want to hear them and I want other people to hear them. So, a bit more listening and thinking and soon, some writing of notes and making of sounds. And hopefully someone, apart from me, will get to listen to them eventually.

some pictures

2010-01-15T21:48:00.003+11:00

I had some time so I spent it taking photos and playing with them in photoshop...

and remembered why I used to like taking photographs of things rather than people...

creativity on holiday

2010-01-10T21:51:00.002+11:00

Ah summer... I wish that I could show pictures of a lovely holiday somewhere or at least describe some interesting outings. Really, there's not much going on apart from a bit of moderate New Year sorting and tidying (very short-lived) and some catching up with friends. There is something about this time of year that makes everything slow down. It is possibly the heat and with a forecast of 43 degrees C tomorrow (that's 109 F for any readers in the USA) I should say definitely the heat. I have long had a theory that intellectual/creative activity is harder in a warm climate. I lived in Scotland for over 5 years and I was very productive - did a Masters and a PhD and worked part-time for an orchestra. Since moving back to Australia things have definitely slowed down but there were contributing factors... a full-time lecturing job, then babies. But even so, I do find it very difficult to get motivated after a run of hot days and nights. Clearly so do a lot of other people so I wont feel too bad. This Saturday's AGE (Melbourne's broadsheet newspaper) was really terrible. I know it's summer, there's nothing happening in the world (apparently) but the writing was pitiful. Front page about nothing. Features about nothing. Opinion pieces about nothing by people with nothing to say. Which I can understand, given that we're all in summer-creativity-shut-down-mode (apparently) but why bother filling the paper with drivel about kittens and the Y-gen? Oh well, hopefully it will pass. Meanwhile, I'll just sit it out, under the ceiling fan with a cold drink and then re-engage my brain in about a week when the kids are back at creche and hopefully the temperature will stay under 35.

start as you mean to continue

2010-01-01T16:35:00.004+11:00

Nothing like starting the New Year on the back foot. The house is a tip. The children are sleep deprived (as are their parents). The garden is overgrown. No New Year's resolutions have been made. I am quite happily eschewing New Year's Resolutions as, in my opinion, they only lead to disappointment and self-criticism. I am not making a resolution to get up every day at 5am to work. I am not writing lists of things I want to achieve in 2010. I am not creating positive-affirmation-mantra-type things to contemplate every morning at 5am. Once I have caught up on some sleep, got the house into some sort of order (with the assistance of its other residents) and cut the grass, I shall endeavour to pick up where I left off in 2009. I shall continue to create space for creating: music, words, things. I shall avoid giving myself a hard time if I am not always able to create as much space as I would like. I shall also continue to remind myself how fortunate I am to have at least some space and time in which to create, and people I love to share it with me, and that we are all blessed with good health and a roof over our heads. Bring it on 2010.

on a related subject...

2009-12-26T22:14:00.000+11:00

Emerging from the fog - Composing and Motherhood
I wrote this article for the online music journal of the Australian Music Centre. On a similar theme to an earlier post here but for a more specific audience. Although I was initially a bit ambivalent about writing the piece (even though it was my idea) I am glad I did. It is certainly a perspective that could do with a bit more airing.

more than a momentary pleasure

2009-12-11T16:20:00.000+11:00

A couple of months ago an email arrived in my inbox with the subject "call for scores: momentary pleasures" - enough to make me curious. This was an open invitation for composers to write a piece of music for piano solo, of up to four minutes in length, in any style - the only stipulation being that the piece had to be composed within a single day. The whole idea seemed perfect - a single day is about all I can devote to composing at the moment. I filed the details away for when 'the day' became available, and Monday was the day. Writing a whole piece in a day was a fantastic discipline. I had to think through a lot of ideas ahead of time, work out my plan of attack, get myself in the right frame of mind, drop the kids off at creche, rush home and START WRITING. And I did it. I wrote a five minute piece that I had to edit down. The ideas were there, things felt a bit rusty at first but I applied myself to the task at hand, working with an intense focus and discipline that I had forgotten I was capable of. At the end of the day I was fairly exhausted but the sense of achievement was fantastic and I think I have written something good. So, for anyone who is feeling apprehensive about launching back into work, I can recommend this approach. It was great having the external directive to 'write a piece in a day' - another version of the deadline as inspiration/motivation - but the other option is to just do it. Whether or not the piece I wrote is selected for performance is in a way irrelevant. The task gave me the jump start I needed to get back into writing properly, to finish the piece, to regain some confidence and remember that amazing feeling when you finish a piece of work that you feel proud of. It was also a chance to draw together some of the strands of thought that have been preoccupying me of late - ideas about space and silence and simplicity and also something about the depth of feeling for my children. And it may seem strange but in my twenty years of composing music, I have never dedicated a piece to anyone - until this piece. Here is the title and the brief program note required for the submission of pieces:

a million moments
for Eleanor and Freya

Composing is a pleasure I have had little time for since the birth of my children. I have given my time to them with love, while carrying ideas of music around in my head, ready for the time when I could write them into pieces. This is one of them. A whole day to write seems a luxury when once I may have squandered many days writing in circles. A focussed mind and necessity are the mother of invention, and for this I thank my children. A momentary pleasure is easily eclipsed by a million moments of love.

my progress so far

2009-12-02T22:52:00.001+11:00

or Acts of Creative Desperation
or Desperate Acts of Creativity
or Creative Acts of Desperation

Today I made curtains.
I've been thinking about music and listening to music and last week I even wrote some music. But this week things are just not happening. A 'training day' at our creche has conspired against me and my day of time and space disappeared. I was having a look through a blog called Studio Mothers and came across a post called '5 ways to be a writer when you're not writing' which certainly struck a chord. I'm not overly interested in cooking but some of the analogies were quite apt - there is a lot of simmering and preparing the pot. Rather than feeling frustrated at the slowness of my progress, I know there are things simmering away and when I lift the lid on them some time soon, I hope I am pleasantly surprised. I also agree with the importance of engaging in "cultural activity" to get ideas moving. I often have 'light-bulb' moments while listening to someone else's music or looking at a painting. Of course I would love to be gadding off to art galleries and performances and all manner of things although it's not so easy at the moment. But I have made a point of planning ahead to put a few interesting things on the calendar and then to actually go and see / hear them. So things are moving along, slowly, my plan is falling into place, gradually. But today I made curtains and totally enjoyed it. I love making things and making curtains fed the urge to create something, even if it wasn't music. And you can make curtains in the midst of domestic chaos while talking to two small children and interruptions to bring in washing / make tea / bathe children don't actually make any difference to the final product. I don't know if curtain making can be classed as 'engaging in cultural activity' but sometimes creating something is better than creating nothing and desperate times call for desperate measures.

Listening and Watching - soundart films

2009-11-23T10:51:00.000+11:00

Recently went to a performance of 'soundart films' - Carte Blanche - by Ros Bandt and Brigid Burke at Dante's Gallery in Fitzroy. Cross-media / Intermedia / Hybrid work is probably the area I am most interested in as a composer so I was keen to go along to this performance and see some new work. Ros Bandt and Brigid Burke are both well established and highly original artists in their own right so I was particularly keen to see what this collaboration had produced. They presented six works ranging from live instrumental improvisations responding to visual images / video to sound and image works where the relationships and interconnections between media were much more complex and dialectical. 'From the Train' and 'Stargazer Remix' were perhaps the two works that I found most interesting. These brought together sounds of images and images of sounds, resulting in works where meaning and association are layered and often ambiguous. The relationship between sound and image seems to be most engaging when the connections are not obvious or one dimensional but rather blur the boundaries between the visual and sonic. Nicholas Cook discusses this relationship in his fantastic book Analysing Musical Multimedia where he talks about the possible 'emergent meaning' that is produced when sound and image are combined. The soundart films by Bandt and Burke certainly explored these possibilities.

On reconnecting

2009-11-22T23:26:00.000+11:00

Having a long 'break' between pieces (of music) can be a daunting thing. Can I still write music? Have my technical skills and creative spark deserted me? How did I used to do it? I remember one of my composition teachers in Edinburgh saying that having a baby would not make me a worse composer but quite the opposite (I’m sure he expressed it more eloquently). I have held on to this idea over the last couple of years when I’ve felt like that part of me was slipping away out of reach. In the past I think the longest I have gone without writing music has been about 12 months - either due to exhaustion or business in other areas (like teaching) or perhaps disillusionment. My most recent 'break' has been in many ways quite liberating. Having decided to focus on child-rearing, and found my own way around the guilt/frustration minefield of motherhood, I have given myself permission not to write for a while. But now I am starting to re-engage with that side of my self, trying to get the cogs moving and the connections firing. I have been carrying pieces around in my head for some time now and mulling over ideas and concepts and the challenge is to find an ordered way to articulate all these things. Sitting down to work again has been an enlightening experience - I feel like I am embarking on 'My Creative Life version 2'. I find that I am approaching things in a different way, partly because of the imperative of time and partly because of a shift in the way I think about what I am doing and why I am doing it.

to blog or not to blog

2009-11-17T21:24:00.000+11:00

I've been thinking about setting up a blog for a while now but must admit to feeling a bit ambivalent about the whole idea. Part of me thinks blog time would be better spent actually making work. Part of me thinks that interaction should be conducted in person with real live people. But another part of me sees this as an opportunity to find a way of exchanging ideas and thoughts on the subject of creating things (music, words, images) that recognises the fact that face to face interaction is not always an option when one has two small children at home. Going out, seeing/hearing work, meeting new people and exchanging ideas is not always a realistic option (although it is becoming more achievable) and traveling is certainly off the agenda for some time. The idea of a blog seemed like a solution to some of the dilemmas of creativity and motherhood - isolation, lack of interaction, and the lack of confidence that can come with this. So the vision I have for this blog is a place where ideas about creating things can be exchanged and shared and reflected upon and expanded upon: not as an alternative to actually creating work but as part of the process of getting there. The 'spaces between' my own musical works are quite lengthy at the moment and I hope this blog can be part of my return to a regular practice and also a forum for discussing ideas about creating work, finding material, inspiration, focus and maybe even potential collaboration. We shall see.

thinking about spaces between

2009-11-14T22:43:00.000+11:00

an unquantifiable metaphysical space (duration) of dynamically tensed absence of sound

Toru Takemitsu

The Japanese concept of ma refers to the space between things, a concept approximated but much less poetically expressed in the English language as ‘negative space’. The idea of ma can relate to the physical space between objects or images or the temporal space (duration) between sounds or sonic events. The idea that the space in between things is just as significant as the things themselves offers a different way of thinking about ‘emptiness’ or ‘silence’. Space doesn’t need to imply an absence of something – it can be full or meaning and implication.

Hence the name for this blog…Spaces Between.

Spaces between things: spaces between events, spaces between actions, spaces between ideas. And these things, these events, actions, ideas, are shaped by the spaces between them. There is the space of contemplation or waiting or distraction or anticipation or boredom or irritation or frustration.

For me this idea of ma or ‘spaces between’ can apply equally to my creative practice (as a composer, sound artist, writer, occasional video maker) as well as to my life and how creativity and everything else fits into it.

In my current life situation (being a mother of two small children) there are large spaces in between anything resembling creative activity; long gaps between chances to sit and think; extensive intervals between doing things for me (like seeing a film or going to a performance); lengthy periods between catching up with friends. My life is full of ma.

In terms of music and sound, the concept of ma is particularly relevant. I believe silence is one of the most powerful elements of music – in the way it shapes the sonic space and the way it impacts on the listener. I am in the process of writing a paper (or at least a proposal for one) about Listening. It is a strange experience to be writing about listening when what I really want to be doing is writing something to be listened to. That will happen soon and in the mean time I am enjoying this particular space between.