Ending/Beginning

I’m feeling a little shellshocked at the moment. I had my final recital for my Master of Music degree on Friday and am now trying to regather my thoughts.

I was really thrilled with how the recital, titled Colour and Shadows, turned out. My performers all did amazing things with learning and performing my music – some of it really quite difficult – in a short period of time. My huge thanks to all of them: Valentina Pravodelov (piano), the Hanley Quartet, The Peacock Ensemble, Julia Weatherley (soprano) and Clemmie Curd (cor anglais). The response was great too – so many people said such kind and encouraging things afterwards! – it was a really lovely experience. And both Julia and Valentina’s performances of Breadcrumbs and In Detail, respectively, in their own recitals, were fantastic too.

So now I’m regrouping, finalising my transfer into the Master of Fine Arts degree, and thinking about how to approach my projects for the coming year. And these are mounting up! A chamber opera for Julia Weatherley, a song cycle for Simon Marsh, a requiem for solo voice and (possibly) viola for David Jones, some short pieces for violin and cello for the Chapel Hill Duo, and a 5-minute piano duet for Rebecca Cohen – plus a small assortment of other pieces I’d like to write too!

The second year of the MFA is focused on project work – similar to the work I was doing on A Sketchbook of Mushrooms a few months back, but an entire academic year’s worth. ‘Personal Project on steroids’ is how I’m describing it to people! My project is looking at the intersection of art and text in composition. The topic is a little vague right now, but I want to look at different approaches to text-setting, text-creation and the use of speech rhythms in instrumental music.

The pieces I have lined up to write will use a broad range of approaches to text. For the opera, I’m planning on writing my own text (as I did for Breadcrumbs); for the song-cycle I have permission from visual artist Richard Long to use some of his textworks about Dartmoor (hugely excited about this!) so it’s using textual visual art as lyrics. I’m still working on concepts for the requiem, but David’s real strength lies in characterisation and I want to see how I can use this gift while using a standardised, non-narrative text.

Of course, the project will doubtless traipse into other areas (I’m already doing some reading on dramatic form and thinking about how this might relate to instrumental music as well as operatic) and may veer more in one direction than another, but this is all part of the fun…