Digging for inspiration

Making yourself compose is nothing new. Many of the great composers living and dead have worked to a tight schedule, setting out time every day to ensure they write something. It's part of the job.

So, what is so special about our 30 Days in September?

What is exciting for me about this project is the unique challenge of writing music every day which we must be published on line and shares through social media before the midnight hour (UK time). 

This constraint means that we must find inspiration, even if that great natural resource is not available at the time.  While I am certain that the inspiration/ compositional process is always taking place in the background as we engage with the world (our comprehension of sound, light and shade, texture; the way we interact with others; an emotional response to the news etc. ) the act of drawing those experiences down through a compositional process is one of mining. Find an idea, make it make sense, define a process, get it on paper. 

Would that we were keeping this process to ourselves, like the composer filling his sketchbook with ideas from which he will choose, when he decides to show us his work, we would have the time to make greater choices. We could ruminate on inspiration and spend time dreaming and deciding. For 30 Days in September we have thrust ourselves into a different, challenging and sometimes uneasy place in which there is no time for vanity and little time for choosing. I love this. When the pieces fall into place the results seem close to the inspiration, and attached intrinsically to the initial idea in a way which I have rarely encountered when crafting a work over a period of weeks. Of course, some if the ideas are merely a sketch which may well bear fruit, but all of them will form their own chapter in a much larger performance. Some will be fleeting glimpses of structure and form while others will make bold statements which stand above the rest. 

Making a performance (but not just yet)

Most exciting is that when James and I bring my work together and begin to view It we will have a whole new challenge.  The 60 pieces are likely to last a couple of minutes each and some could well last much longer. So, how do we perform them? Where and when would be appropriate? What order should they be presented? Who's composition comes first, should they appear in consecutive date order? This is a substantial task above and beyond normal concert programming because we are so deeply invested in a process which has shaped our thinking over the course of a month. We set ourselves rules about how we should approach 30 Days... beyond the scope of the main project. (I am only allowed one sheet of A4 paper per day and NO electronic means). We have talked at certain points about what we are doing, where our journey has taken us and what we are excited about, but neither of us have seen each other's work in more than a smartphone snapshot. 

Will you post clips? We want to hear it! 

All in good time! For now this is a descriptive journey for our future listeners but we have agreed that we will not look at each other's work in more detail until the month is out. 

After that, yes we will begin to play these and capture them and share them. And of course there will be a concert too (if you read this far and have ideas of where you would like to see 30 Days performed please let us know.) 

So we made ourselves compose - and we have looked hard for inspiration. At the time of writing there are 14 more pieces to write. I will fetch my metaphorical spade and keep digging.