Update For The Week

Had a lot going on this week, with moving home and somehow ending up with more stuff than I know what to do with being crammed into one place, it's been a bit crazy. Done a lot of listening but not much composing which I feel very guilty about.

I spent about an hour or so, playing with my guitar and a loop pedal experimenting with percussive sounds through the acoustic body and playing pitched ostinatos over the top. Idea's were coming thick and fast but I didn't really have a great amount of time to really sit and work at it. Over the next week or so, I'm going to attempt to record something and post it on Soundcloud so hopefully I'll have something concrete to work on.

I also saw an article in The Guardian about a series of concerts celebrating 50 years of minimalism, which got me thinking about my good friend Steve Reich, so I listened to his 'Works 1965-1995' compilation back to back as my way of 'celebrating' such a milestone. The full article can be found here.

Last Monday we (myself and the other MA composition students) had a really great lecture with Edward Caine, a brilliant York based composer who deals with 'Extended Instrumental Technique', although as we discussed in the lecture, the word 'Extended' is not an appropriate word to describe those particular techniques. That's one aspect that I found interesting. The techniques themselves are not technically extended, but they are labeled as such because they don't fall into our inherited performance practice (what we have been taught conventionally/traditionally). Essentially...

Extended = Different

In short, the lecture really opened my eyes to many possibilities within composing, especially for certain instruments (including the voice) that I had previously not even considered using because I thought them too technical or somewhat beyond me. I'm going to try some experiments using some of the techniques discussed in the near future so I'll refer back to lecture when I do. Many thanks to Ed for that day, he was full of flu and was a real gent to stick with it, thanks a lot Ed.

Onwards and upwards, hopefully with more composition soon.

LW

Thoughts Of The Day

Recently I've spent quite a lot of time on trains, and I always seem to find these a great place to listen to music. Obviously there is little more to do on a train, but still, there are times on a train where I have had wonderful experiences of listening to music. I tend to travel on the Transpennine Express mostly, and on those trains in between the First Class section and the driver there is a small area, which I dub 'The Hole'. It's essentially a larger cabin where the toilet is and there are fold down seats for passengers. Usually it's very quiet which can be very handy if I want to sing idea's to myself without looking like a raving lunatic.

Today's journey I spent listening to the album 'Iepo Oneipo' by John Tavener. Which is a collection of his works recorded by The Chamber Choir of Southern Iceland. In particular the piece 'The Lamb' has always stood out for me as one of my favourites. The way in which the first section takes two very simple lines of melody but intertwines between beautiful harmonies and harsh dissonances, and then moves into an amazingly simple second section where the four parts separate in such a delicate fashion that the transition is completely seamless.

It's moments like that when I catch my breath and think to myself "That's what I want to create when people listen to my work", a feeling of ethereality that feels like it came from somewhere else.

I'm certainly feeling inspired.

LW

The First Of Many...

Hello there, and thank you for taking the time to visit my brand new blog! This blog is my attempt to keep a public record of the processes that I go through on a daily basis, that are all part and parcel of being a student composer. Hopefully this will allow me to look back on various aspects of my work in a more objective way and also enable you (the public/internet community) to look at my work from a different angle.

I should explain WHY I'm writing this blog in the first place, in order to set some ground rules and also give anyone reading this further insight into my studies. As a part of my MA in Music Composition, I take part in a module entitled 'Practice & Dissemination' in which we (the student) look at ways we can broadcast our work to a wider audience.

- Disseminate

verb (used with object), -nat·ed, -nat·ing. to scatter or spread widely, as though sowing seed; promulgate extensively; broadcast; disperse: to disseminate information about preventive medicine.

Ignoring the example about preventive medicine which unfortunately is not covered by any of my modules, you can see that to 'disseminate' basically means for me to show or broadcast my work to a larger audience. And herein lies one of the way in which to do that. BUT, when thinking about the many ways in which I could broadcast my work, such as Facebook, Youtube, Soundcloud etc, I began thinking about ways to exhibit not just the final, finished article, but the process and the journey along the way until I get to the very last note. The decision was made for me, "I'd start a blog". Here it is.

My intention is not to take this too seriously, I'm not going to be uploading recordings of 7 hours of guitar improvisation for the sake of it, but my aim is to use it in conjunction with my compositional process to see if there is anything to be gained from the experience of documenting as I go along, and also seeing if it prompts any knock on affects into other areas. E.G, hits on the blog would hopefully mean more hits on Soundcloud and vice versa, or perhaps performance or compositional opportunities directly because of any one of those 'broadcasting' mediums.

Anyway, I won't talk any longer, I'm just of to make a cup of tea and get to work on one of my pieces. Updates coming very very soon.

Thank you again for reading,

Liam Walsh.