Thirty Days doesn't seem like long, does it? Four weeks and
two days. One month out of the twelve; 8.2% of a year.
I can promise you, however, that writing a piece of music
every day for a month is a major challenge. What I've experienced in this last
week I can only describe as a battle with my own creative consciousness. The 28th
was the first day when I didn't write my original idea for the piece (I'm
saving it, I need something to do next month!) because I didn't have the energy
and focus to see it through properly in the time available. I am, I should say,
quite pleased with what I wrote instead. But my point is this – there is a
surprising (to me) amount of both mental and physical energy which is required
for constant and repeated creative application, and I have been fascinated to
see how this has slowly ebbed away over time.
There is also a threshold point where you get bored with
your own music and start trying wildly different things. For me this has been
particularly about harmony. My soundworld tends to fall back onto harmonies
which are based on fourths and fifths (whereas tonal harmony is based on
thirds) – if you’re wondering what this means, go to a piano and play the triad
D/A/E and you’ll get the sense of it. It produces a music which is not tonal
but is also not especially dissonant – or at least not dissonant by default
(dissonance and consonance, in my view, are elements of the music to be
manipulated for a purpose – just like the tempo, for example).
By the end of the third week I was fed up with my usual
fifth-based harmonies. I started to get the sense that everything I was
producing in this project was going to sound the same. Having sealed everything
in envelopes as I went along, I basically had no way to tell whether this was
true or not. By the end of the fourth week I had reached a point where either I
was producing music where all harmonic control was relinquished (Day 27 – Star Map – where the constellation patterns at the time of writing control the
notes) or indeed where there was no pitch at all (Day 28 – Tapping Music). So as
a composer I have come out of the other side of this project with a new
appreciation of what I guess is my style or my voice, where it comes from, and
how I can move beyond that if/when I want to. That is invaluable.
A fascinating aspect of this project has also been memory.
It may sound hard to believe, but I've forgotten some of the stuff that I wrote
in the first week. Yesterday, I almost called my piece Duo. I flicked back
through the blog and found that I’d written a piece called Duo on Day 5. The
earlier Duo was nothing like the Day 29 Duo and I didn't want to connect them
(check out Paul’s great article on Titles from last week, if you haven’t
already). So I eventually went for the (much better) title of Convergence.
The big question which Paul and I have been considering is,
of course, what to do next. We are working on putting together the performance
and we’ll put some pictures up here when we get together and open all the
envelopes. We’ll also keep you updated
about any performance dates.
We've been wondering whether 30 Days will become
an annual event, maybe with wider participation (maybe one day morphing into
something like the fantastic National Novel
Writing Month which Paul and I are both veterans of, and which I would
highly recommend). We've talked about books of the scores, we’ve talked about recordings –
all of that in good time.
What’s certain though is that we are sitting on a pretty
substantial body of work which is tied to time and place in a unique way. Where
we go next with it is perhaps the most exciting part.
And that brings us on to my last thought for the day. I
would like to offer my sincere thanks to all of you – old friends and friends
not yet met, who have followed, supported, retweeted, facebooked and generally
cheered us on. We've appreciated it. We couldn't have got here if no-one had
been interested in what we were doing. So congratulations, you are all now philanthropists who have
played a little part in creating this body of work.
And here is my reward for getting through. For those who are
curious, it is a pint of Adnam’s Ghost Ship from my local
(and if you don’t know why that is relevant, read this).
Thanks for reading.
James
