Titles and the poetry of music:

Making sense of a hopelessly abstract artform

Throughout the 30 Days in September project we have been reflecting on what composition is about, what music is and why it affects us. Here are some more of my thoughts.

I have a long-standing fascination with titles and that has been one of the most interesting aspects of the 30 days in September project for me.

On some occasions the title comes before the music because something interesting comes to mind and that sparks a creative process. I enjoy working this way round.

Other times I'll begin with the music but I have no idea what I'm going to call it. I have found some great titles pop into my head while others have deserved some poetic crafting.

Words have a sonic fascination for me which is not dissimilar to the interest which I get manipulating sound - particularly when working electronic media.

In 30 days in September I have limited myself so that I am not allowed to work at all with a computer which is sometimes outside my comfort zone since I specialise in Digital composition, but what this has allowed me to do is to think in a different way about how to signify reality. The title can be helpful in that it can change the objectival nature of a musical form regardless of how well you recognise it.Playing with titles is like constructing poetry (another interest of mine) and fits quite comfortably with the way that I approach the texts in my work - all the ones in 30 Days have been written by me under the time constraints of the project. When there is no text the title becomes even more important. It reflects the back story giving a sense of time, place, shape or process which music itself cannot give you.

The work which I wrote for day 22, for example, features a reference to Thomas Hardy the great author and also gives reference to the theatrical ideas which are happening in the piece. I am imagining a stage set in which a whole series of different miniature scenes are taking place within a larger tableau. The score is called A Village Scene (Perhaps of Mr Hardy?). The construction of that sentence with its brackets and the reference to Mr Hardy reminds me of a crossword clue, hinting at the construction of the music. The music consists of four separate parts which run simultaneously with gaps of specified numbers of seconds so the effect for the listener follows Ives' practice in which different music is juxtaposed as in real world environment.

This could be done very naturally (or at least hyper-naturally) when working with computers and recorded sound, and so to explore this using notation was an interesting challenge for me. It has reminded me above all things that music is a hopelessly abstract art form.

 No matter how hard we try to make it express ideas or reality, it can only do this because we have physical associations with other completed work or acts of nature which are inherently musical such as bird song - or we use text. This makes the poetry of the title so much more important to a composer expressing ideas through notated forms. Unlike electronic music which can use the sounds of the real world, instrumental music can only be abstract whatever the intention of the composer and yet we strive to connect and understand the world around us through this most abstract of art forms because we connect in a deeply emotional and ultimately human way with sound waves when they are tamed to behave in this musical way.

We talk about music so often because it is difficult to quantify what really happens when we hear it, but we know that it moves us. A good title helps us take a step closer to that understanding.

We hope you are enjoying following our creative process. Look out for details of performances and other artefacts which we will make after the composing phase of the project has ended.