EPISODE 3 - Getting Organised, BIrdsong + How Composers Work

In this episode, I talk briefly on 3 topics:

• How I'm organising myself to hopefully ensure that I actually compose!
• A 1st exploration of using birdsong in my music
• A 1st look at how "real" composers work

This is the last of my introductory episodes.  From Episode 4, I'll be talking about my weekly experiences trying to compose ... in the end, that's the point of my Unfinished Music project - so we'll see how that goes!!

Website information + fade in Suite in D

Transcript

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Just before I begin this episode, I'd like to highlight something new. Whenever you hear this sound that's a short piece of Piccolo music that I created based on a bird song recording I made. It's called a musical sting, and I'm using it to separate the podcast into sections. So, welcome to episode three. In this episode, I'm going to cover three new areas. Firstly, a new way of organizing how and when I compose. Secondly, an exploration into bird song. And thirdly, a first look at how composers in history actually worked. So let's get started. I think I've worked out a new rhythm for my weeks, and this feels quite helpful. I've borrowed an idea from aviation. You might have heard it before. It goes aviate, navigate, communicate. It's a simple rule for pilots. First, fly the plane, then work out where you're going, and only then start communicating with air traffic control or passengers. I've mimicked that and put it into my own version for my unfinished music project. Compose, reflect, report. This is to remind me to prioritize composing above everything else. Then to reflect, and only then to report back to you, my hopefully happy listener. Here's what that looks like in real life. It's a weekly cycle. On Mondays and Tuesdays, I will just compose. No pressure to make sure it's good, certainly no pressure to make sure it feels finished. Just sitting down and creating music, trying out things, getting notes down, seeing what happens, and slowly building all the various pieces of music that I want to create. Wednesday will be my checkpoint day. A pause in the middle of the week to step back and ask, well, what's working, what's not working. As it happens, I go to a choir rehearsal on Wednesday mornings anyway, so that naturally gets me out of my own head and listening to other music and participating in singing other music. Then Thursdays and Fridays, I'll be talking to you. So I'll be pulling together my thoughts for the week, thinking out loud about what's happened. I'll be scripting, recording and publishing my episode, and I'll update my journal, maybe over coffee or maybe parked up in the car. At the end of the week, I'll also be sketching out a plan for the week ahead. I'm doing this and creating this structure because I know what I'm like. Left to my own devices, I probably would tinker forever, a lot of the time with the tools and the technology, and I'd never actually share anything, or really probably get much composing done. So this way, if I do want to spend a whole week tinkering, I can plan to do that, and at least then it's a conscious choice. So this gives me a structure, hopefully, without killing the creativity. What creativity I can muster. It keeps me moving forwards, it makes me reflect, and it makes sure I actually turn up to tell you the story. Oh, and that still leaves me Saturday and Sunday. So that's my plan going forward. Compose, reflect, report. Let's see how that goes. And now to today's composing idea. I've often wondered about capturing bird song in music. As a youngster, I used to listen to my brother's records The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Jimmy Cliff, and also a handful of classical LPs from the family collection. One of those, my parents' record, had Mozart's Eine Kleiner Nach music on side one. You know the one, it goes dum dee-dum dee-dum de-dum-de-dum. I'm sure you know it. On side two was the Toy Symphony, and that includes some warbles and squawks and rattles representing bird calls. I used to love listening to that, and so maybe that's where the seed was planted. In my teens, when I first sketch out my sweet N D, I wrote a note as part of my ideas to include some bird song, but I didn't have any idea how. Much more recently, during an Oprah University music module, I used Audacity, that's a piece of software on my Windows laptop, which is for recording and manipulating audio. It's what I used to make my podcast. Back then I used Audacity to record and then to analyse the sound of my piano accordion. The analysis tools it had showed me not only the notes being played, but all the extra wrinkles that make up an instrument sound. More formally, these are called the harmonic. In theory, I realized I could analyse any sound, and that got me back to thinking about bird song. In the meantime, Andrew Nett and I, for some months, maybe more than a year, have been using an app on our phones called Merlin Bird ID, which listens to birds in real time, records files, and identifies the birds. And I thought, well, could I take those recordings and analyse them on Audacity? And of course the answer was yes. So that's the start of my unfinished music birdsong project. And here's the idea. I'm going to take a selection of birdsong recordings representing British birds that you might hear in a dawn chorus. I'm going to analyse them and turn them into short musical phrases, little themes or riffs. Then I'm going to bring them down at least two or three octaves and assign them to instruments. I've thought about using a piccolo. I've also thought perhaps the Glockenspiel would work. When I do that, I'm then going to assemble these birdsong themes, and I'm going to layer them into a musical Dawn chorus, something musical that represents the birds that actually sing in the British Dawn Chorus. And the bigger idea behind all of that is to build it into my suite indeed. So alongside other signs of spring like a rising sun or a gentle breeze in the trees, and the feeling of a spring morning somewhere in Britain, I'm going to add a layer of bird song of a Dawn Chorus. So I'll let you know how that goes. And finally today I'm starting a new thread of thought. How do composers actually work? This might be an occasional series of podcast episodes, or it might not, we'll see. But I've been curious a long time about how real composers work. People like Mozart and Tchaikovsky or Lennon and McCartney. Again, going back to my childhood, I had a book that I picked up at some point called The Composer by Michael Heard. It was published by Oxford University Press in 1968. I've recently got myself a fresh copy. The blurb inside the front cover describes the book like this: an introductory book which gives a vivid account of the composer's life, what sort of person he is, how he sets about his work, and how, if he is lucky, it is printed, published, and performed. I can't help but notice there's some dated language in there. So just to balance things up, here are some world-class female composers, Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn, Rachel Portman, Joni Mitchell, Dolly Parton, Kate Bush, Bjork, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Billy Arish, and on and on. So, back to the book. Here's how chapter 3 of the book begins. There is no one method of composing. Composers work in different ways, entirely according to temperament. And it goes on to describe different approaches, improvising, writing things down, or composing entirely in the head. My reaction to this, again, it's a bit dated in tone, but more importantly, there's an implication that composers are somehow different, almost superhuman. And yes, of course, the great composers and songwriters, some of whom I've already mentioned, were exceptional. But I don't really see any reason why the rest of us can't enjoy creating music too. Any more than we'd say only the great masters like Picasso or Rembrandt should ever pick up a paintbrush. Later in the chapter, the author compares Mozart and Beethoven, contrasts them in fact. Mozart worked entirely in his head till he had a finished piece of music. Then he spent two or three days, shall we say, probably without much sleep, writing it down. Whereas Beethoven, we know through the sketchbooks he left behind, worked in a completely different way. He would try and try and try again, till he got it right, I suppose. So what's striking about this is just they worked in completely different ways. So for someone like me, this gives no fixed method. There is no fixed method, except I have to find what works. My next episode will be out at the end of next week. It will cover what I've worked on, what I've learnt, and where this might go next. Thanks for listening.