10 ways I connect my work as a musician & writer
In my last post I gave an overview of how I wrote an EP in 48h using just my iPhone, & some specifics as to how I structured that challenge to make it easy for myself. Today I’m going to hone in on some ways in which I combine my musical and literary practices, as, yet again, there is a book accompanying these EP’s that will be released, which I am excited about… but more on that later.
Here are some obvious, and perhaps no-so-obvious ways in which I combine music & writing in my creative & academic life:
Writing own text to set - freestyle!: this goes back to my being a teenager and writing poetry and prose late into the night listening to John Peel sessions. Each morning there were fresh texts to set music to. Doing this ultimately led to me working with Lazy Gramophone Press much later on, which was so pivotal to my work as I got to explore what it meant to just write.
Writing own text to set - responding to a brief: For my ORA Singers/Tate Modern commission I was responding to this astonishing painting by Ibrahim El-Salahi, but after searching for weeks I just couldn’t find a text that I felt summed it up, so I wrote this poem specifically to fit the painting, using it as a stimulus.
Poems as metric verse: As a youngster I loved the explanation of the inherent rhythm in poetry in Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled. It made me realise I could hide extra rhythms in verses, & develop themes, structures, & patterns inside a meter.
Speech/song - evolutionary musicology: The area of evolutionary musicology that looks at whether speech or song came first, and doesn’t necessarily conclude that one precluded the other, makes me feel as though working across these fields is actually natural as a member of the species! I wrote about the developmental & evolutionary musicology aspect of this here (Poetry & Opera, vol. 47). Creatively, I like to play with imposing a form or process of one onto another sometimes & just see what emerges.
Speech/song - verses as poems: This is one thing I really love about Fado - the verses are designed to read on the page as poems, but function as verses once sung. This is another thing I play around with if I’m writing a song. There are lots of cultures that have really special relationships between speech & song, which’ve proved interesting & fruitful to research.
Music analysis: There’s really nothing I love more than getting deep inside a piece or album & extracting & discussing what I think are the key themes of the work. Writing about it is such a joy, and presenting it to a class or at a show or conference is even better. (Some recent examples include: I’m featured as a contributor in this book called Love Spells & Rituals For Another World, after an academic symposium of the same name, perform my analyses of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira for organisations such as Poet in the City, & talk on the connection between poetry & lyrics in music.)
Recording - poetry as source material: I love how things sound different off the page, & had great fun recording & sound designing the audiobook component of Books of Hours, which is the way round I worked on this. (You can get the book at Waterstones or Foyles, or via my bandcamp.)
Recording - prose as source material: conversely, sound designing to prose is another way this relationship of music & language expresses itself in my life. At the moment I am doing this for an author making my own sound using just what I can make with a prepared piano. When the time finally comes to share this with the world I will be hugely excited.
Scores: Scoring the delivery of speech is something I don’t think crosses most folks’ minds. I do a mild version of this if I have to deliver an actual speech (like when I was best man once :D… my prompt cards were written using a sort of coded direction I’d made for myself which I could just glance at & execute) but can be much be more detailed & direct about this when, say, I’m scoring speech for a piece or performance.
Field recording: I have enjoyed making pieces using both speech & sound/field recording/found sound together…. I think this still counts!
AND A BONUS! Using another medium as an intermediary: During lockdown I became obsessed with writing poetry & prose to photos I was taking of water, using the interplay of light, lens, & water as symbols for converging parallel timelines. I then set these to music in my Nightwriter series…
… which this is the book that I am going to be releasing Monday! Typeset by the wonderful Couper Street, it not only features the photographs & writing, but also sets out an academic framework for the EP’s/book as a whole. If you’re around & would like to come along & receive a copy, you’d be most welcome. There will be a short Q&A after I’ve played & read some music/sound & writing. Here are the details:
Monday 25th March, 7.30pm, free entry, Drink at Bobs, 214 Hither Green Lane
Hope to see you there… & happy writing/composing!