Category: PhD

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Reassessing productivity: 2018 in review

It’s quite late to be thinking about new year things, but as this new year marks the first full calendar year of my vlog, I thought it might be a useful exercise for me to review my compositional activity for the year and make a bit of a summary. 2018 was a pretty awful year in many respects and my feeling at this point (before reviewing what was actually documented in the vlogs) is that I’ve achieved very little compositionally. Off the top of my head, while there’s been a lot of activity, I think I’ve only completed one new piece which doesn’t seem a lot for a whole year – but perhaps some statistics might show a happier picture.

Compositions

Pieces worked on:
* Whitespace
* dot drip line line (a new version with Bastard Assignments, a new solo version for me which became 8918: EDGE, rerecorded 8317: Fall and thought a bit about how to make it a solo piece)
* Aides Memoire/POV
* Community of Objects
* Scratch
* a new piece for Plus Minus Ensemble
* Britten Variations
* Quiet Songs and
* some contributions for my Trio project with Misha Penton and Leona Jones.

Of these, the only new pieces ‘completed’ (and I use inverted commas because, for example, POV was a realisation of something that was really made last year and Whitespace could still be developed further in spite of now having a [possibly] settled score) were dot drip line line 8918: EDGE and Scratch, the viola improvisation recording which I’m not even sure is really a ‘proper’ piece – I certainly have no intention of trying to score it. But looking at the number of pieces worked on and thinking about the other stuff that’s happened this year, I begin to question whether ‘completed’ is really as much of a measure of a year’s compositional productivity as it seems.

In particular, the trajectory for dot drip line line 8918: EDGE has taken me a very long way from where I started, insecure in my abilities and possibilities as a performer, unsure about how to combine gesture and sound, deeply suspicious of creating work for myself that was reliant on improvisation, even if within certain composed parameters. I started work on that piece in February, hated it but couldn’t quite abandon it, fretted at it without doing much practical work on it until July when I had a breakthrough, recast how I thought about it, got some fresh feedback at Darmstadt, committed to performing it at the Snape Maltings’ Festival of New, then worked intensively on the form of it in the week leading up to the festival and gave the premiere performance in September. Eight months. There’s been some further work on it since, and I’m still refining the score, but that’s been the main trajectory of the piece. It’s been hard but rewarding and with hindsight I can see that most of the hardest work on it wasn’t the sounds, the ideas, or even the gestural elements which I so struggled with at the beginning, but a turning-around of how I was thinking about the piece, to start from the sound that existed, strip away the gestures, and then let them find their way into the sound.

In contrast to this, Scratch was a multitracked improvisation recorded and cobbled together in my studio in one afternoon. It has no score and I don’t see any future for it as a live piece, but it was a useful step in starting to develop how I think of myself as an improviser on (untuned) viola, as well as logistics of performing and recording in my studio.

The only piece that’s been completely abandoned of all these is the new Plus-Minus piece, which related to an opportunity that turned out to not be available. I’d been struggling with the concept anyway and while I still quite like the visual idea behind it I’m not really feeling any strong sense of how it could be a piece. Maybe it’ll turn up in something later.

The Britten Variations are still very much underway and will be finished in the first half of 2019 (God willing). The Trio project is ongoing for all three of us and hopefully will move towards some collaborative work later this year. The Quiet Songs I’m quite fond of but first attempts at Snape (as shown in this week’s vlog) have ultimately proved disappointing and going in another direction from what I’d planned and that I’m not particularly happy with. It’s not dead in the water, but it’s definitely floundering right now.

All this sits within a context of a LOT of Bastard Assignments work (3 of our own gigs, a tour to Chicago, improvising with Swan Meat for BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, the Snape Maltings Festival of New gig and we recorded an album too), performing in works by Nick Snowball/Weilu Ge at Darmstadt and Maria Maltezou at Bath Spa University, and a gentle scattering of other delightful people performing or presenting my work. And of course two weeks at the Darmstadt Summer Course and a bunch of uni work and travel. So a hard year, but perhaps not as unproductive as I’d thought?

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Taking the private public

NotebooksThere’s something rather odd, really, about making a decision to share private material in public. It’s a process which is attended with questions like ‘why would anyone care?’, ‘but what if people are mean about it?’ and of course ‘what if people think I’m a raving narcissist?’

These are all quite possible of course and perhaps, with what I currently have in mind, even probable: what I’m currently considering is publishing my composition notebooks online.

Perhaps some context is needed. My notebooks pretty much ARE my creative life. Those of you who visit here often, or follow me on various forms of social media, may already be aware that for the past 6 months I’ve been creating video blogs of my composition work – regular updates where I talk about what I’ve been working on and how pieces are developing. Just about everything I talk about in the vlog episodes started out in the notebooks. It’s where I make notes of peculiar ideas, develop my thinking around those ideas, build them up with notes on things I’ve read or listened to or watched, paste in photographs or screensnaps of related image-based work, and generally develop my thinking. It’s also where just about everything in my professional life gets noted – meetings with Bastard Assignments, meetings with website clients, lists of library books I want to check out, lists of what I’m reading and listening to, great long rambles about how I’m tired and stressed and don’t have a clue what I’m doing. Everything.

I write a lot in these books – normally I go through one 250-page notebook about every 2-3 months, although this current book I’ve had for 3 weeks and am already 115 pages in… So we’re talking about serious volume here.

At this point, perhaps we need to address that last question above: ‘So, Caitlin, are you in fact a raving narcissist?’
Erm… no, I really don’t think so. The idea behind this plan isn’t that I think I’m so very special everyone’s going to want to read everything I ever wrote. It isn’t that I think this stuff needs to be preserved for posterity. Instead, the purpose is transparency of process and to see what effect this private-work-in-public might have on how I work, the quality of work produced perhaps, how I feel about my work, where my own boundaries are, and other questions that are being raised as my PhD research investigates the line between public and private.

Something I really need to work out though as I try to fathom how to go about this, is the question of redaction. I feel quite strongly that as little as possible should be removed from the books – too much editing and the whole enterprise would lose its purpose. But it’s a tricky line to tread – where do you stop? At what point does discomfort with openness become actual redaction? I feel there needs to be solid, objectively constructed rules so that mere embarrassment doesn’t decide whether something is hidden.

A recent spread from my current notebook
A recent spread from my current notebook – click to view larger

At the moment, the key to redacted content seems to be to protect the people in my life who are a significant influence on my work (Bastard Assignments and my supervisors, for a start). I’m considering obscuring or perhaps coding names, and I’m considering a blanket rule to remove the notes I take in my supervision meetings because I’d rather my often quite scrappy note-taking didn’t have the chance to reflect negatively on my supervisors. Most of the things raised in these meetings end up being discussed in other forms afterwards as I get around to looking at them in detail, so nothing of consequence should be lost as regards process.

After the question of content comes that of logistics. And much of that will rest on what level of engagement with the content should be facilitated – the setup to just allow browsing of pages is much less complex than that which would allow, say, viewing of all content relating to a particular piece or topic. And of course, the whole system has to be able to be streamlined enough that I’m not spending hours and hours and hours redacting and categorising content which may – realistically – never actually be looked at!

Are you aware of other creative artists who routinely post their working notes online? Do you have any suggestions for software or approaches I might consider? I’d love to hear them!

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Composition vlog – new venture!

I’ve been blogging (intermittently) for several years now about my creative process, and this week I’m launching a new approach which I’m thinking may be more useful/successful/helpful/interesting (or not) for being a little less formal. I’ve started a composition vlog to talk more specifically about my process when composing – and to look more closely at things like the sorts of things that get in the way of the composing (often while simultaneously enabling it), what sort of time periods are really involved in the gestation of a piece, what sort of things influence the development of my ideas.

So not so much a “how to compose” vlog, but rather “what does a composer do?” one that will look more at the frustrations, failures, excitements, setbacks, breakthroughs and conceptual dead-ends that are part and parcel of the composer’s life. The sort of stuff that doesn’t really get discussed except with other composers.

So this is episode 1, which as you’d expect is largely an introduction to the project and what I’m working on now. A starting-point. I’m aiming to create new ones every 2-3 weeks (every week being likely to drive everyone, including me, insane and ensure little actual composing gets done; once a month probably being too long a time-span so that I’ll lose track of the ideas which have been tested and discarded in the interim).

I’d love to hear any constructive feedback you have on this project, so please leave a comment or thumbs-up(/down) on YouTube and subscribe to the channel if you’re interested in seeing how this progresses.

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Roland Barthes, composition and the public/private creative continuum

There now, that’s more the sort of title you’d expect from a PhD student, isn’t it? Don’t take this as a sign that I know what I’m doing now, though, because I really really don’t, and part of the reason I’m writing this post is to get my thoughts in order because I think I’m on the verge of being able to tie a bunch of stuff together to at least give me a vague direction to follow!

The other day I got hold of Roland Barthes’ Image Music Text and finally read his tiny essay ‘Musica Practica’. And then I wanted to give good old Roland a hug because (a) he writes beautifully and (b) there were a couple of things in this piece which seemed to be particularly relevant to what I’m doing.

Have I even talked about what I’m doing? Maybe I should, just to give you a quick context to what comes next. The topic I proposed originally was (*deep breath*):

Questioning the division of ‘public’ and ‘private’ creative spaces through an interdisciplinary approach to composition derived from a performative interpretation of visual art processes.

The plan was to investigate the working process of the German artist Anselm Kiefer from a performance aspect, drawing ideas from that to explore through composition but limiting the application of those ideas to the exploration of public and private spaces (and especially the idea of normally-private things being public and normally-public things being private) to keep it all manageable. Over the course of the past few months, Kiefer’s role has shrunk and shrunk until he’s but a glint of an idea that started the whole thing, and the public/private idea has taken centre stage. Somehow the interdisciplinary composition thing has also increased in importance, even though it’s really just how I work.

So when I read the opening of ‘Musica Practica’ –

‘There are two musics (at least so I have always thought): the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two musics are two totally different arts, each with its own history, its own sociology, its own aesthetics, its own erotic’ (p. 149)

– I pretty much squealed with joy (although very quietly because I was in a library). And when I got near to the end of the piece, I silent-squealed again, because Barthes’ definition of composition seems to me to be wholly open to the idea of interdisciplinary – or indeed postdisciplinary – composition. New Discipline FTW.

‘To compose, at least by propensity, is to give to do, not to give to hear but to give to write’ (RB’s emphasis, p. 153)

Squish these two together and there’s my project really.

So in thinking about all this, I worked my way towards a diagram of a creative continuum which moves from the private area of studio, score, rehearsal and performing towards the public arena of performance and exhibition of varying types.

Barthes continuum of public/private creative spaces
(Click diagram to view full size in a new window)

Because of the inter/postdisciplinary nature of what I do (still trying to work out whether inter- or post- is the more appropriate prefix here) I’ve tried to look at this continuum from both a music and art perspective to see how and where the process differs. The aim of the diagram is to consider what results if the private process is made public at certain points and the names at the bottom indicate some artists/composers who engage with crossing the public/private divide. For example, one we’re all used to is the private act of performing happening in public which results in a performance that other people are listening to – but how about the other end of the spectrum? Visual artists routinely send their work into the public arena directly from the studio because they are creating a physical finished artwork. But in music, the type of work that goes public from this point tends to be pieces that perhaps don’t need live performers – fixed media pieces, for example – so there’s a question right there of what sort of work could involve a live musical performance in the studio and how to send that out to the world.

As it’s early days for this work yet, there’s no doubt gross generalisations and my examples are just who came to mind instantly – I make no claim to any of this being thorough! But of course I’d be delighted if you have suggestions of work to follow up that might be useful/interesting – please leave me a comment if you do! Since originally creating this diagram, I’ve also developed ideas a bit further to acknowledge that the studio location may also be a stage, especially for visual artists (e.g. Nauman, Acconci, as the location where they performed alone for the video camera), as well as the wall of the gallery (a public stage as opposed to the private stage of the performer playing the tuba for a houseful of people – the difference being that the artwork is complete when it goes up onto the gallery wall while there is an ongoing private act of creation still happening with the live performance) but this is still a bit hazy.

Similarly, the line about unseen/unheard/seen only by performer/heard only by performer is the tentative beginning of what may or may not be an actual idea regarding levels of privacy. More work required here!