A wordless piece, the seed of the melody came from the bassline of yesterday's piece. Named for the clear Melbourne winter weather of the last few days.
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Here's yesterday's song. It's late, so I won't write too much, instead I'll just share the lyrics. Very loosely inspired by the etymology of Tuesday, a love song
I am the square of sun
That moves across the room
Slow and languid
Cloudy, outside and in.
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An ode to dreaming, recorded while the sun was setting.
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This one is connected to the previous piece through light-play. The text came from some exercises I did with one of my students, we were doing some timed writing exercises around the theme forest.
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Moving on from my glove mind map, this piece came out of a songwriting exercise I did with one of my young students in her lesson. I had her make a mind map starting with the theme "forest", and then make pairs of words from the map. We each chose a different word pair to use as a prompt for a three-minute writing exercise, and mine was "singing night". Here's the result of my own three-minute exercise, which became the chorussy part of this rollicking drinking song.
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My research into vista led me to the name Gwendolyn, which led me to Merlin, which led me to wildness. Merlin was also a seer, which connects nicely back to the word vista. Other vista-connections that found their way into this were kaleidoscope, clarity and vision.
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A continuation on the hailstones theme, written and recorded while camping in Marlo, which is a ridiculously gorgeous part of Victoria. I'm blaming the distraction of bird calls for my terrible attempt at bossa nova guitar. This one needs a little more practice.
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Hailstones was my starting prompt, but this was just a small snippet of text from some writing exercises that went on to inform the next day's song.
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Yesterday I was going through my videos of the past few weeks, putting them onto a USB to give to my partner's parents, and it forced me to sit back and evaluate just how productive I've been. There are a few songs I've written that have stuck in my consciousness for days or weeks after I'm done recording them, however most get forgotten as I turn my mind to the next day's work. Going back through them made me proud of not only the sheer quantity of my output, but also the quality of many of the ideas. It is not helpful to dwell on either the successes or failures of this project, however a look back through my work has given me a boost of confidence that will hopefully help me push through the dark and difficult patches that are becoming more and more frequent.
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Sunday's song, continuing with the moon theme. The rhythm and harmony were pulled from serial composition using the word moon, and the unusual 9/8 ostinato took a lot of practice to sing over. I'm not going to write any more about this one, as I need to take some time to relax before starting today's song, and it's supposed to be a public holiday today in Melbourne.
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Last week was challenging, as I never felt like I caught up from the previous weekend. I was generally exhausted all week, and by Saturday I knew I'd make myself sick if I didn't get a decent night's sleep. So although I wrote this one on Saturday, I decided to put off the recording until Sunday morning and make the most of an early night. Unfortunately that was interrupted by an incident that woke my whole apartment building at 4am, and I didn't manage to get back to sleep after that. I spent the rest of Sunday feeling pretty horrendous, trying to get through both recording Saturday's song and writing and recording Sunday's.
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I live in Melbourne's southern suburbs, and for those unfamiliar with our city there is a strange North vs South divide that sees people hating on residents on the other side of the river to themselves. I have lived on both sides, and while I was a North-sider I spent a lot of time thinking the South was inferior. But then I moved across town and realised that I much preferred the South, and I barely think about the North at all, except when I have to travel over there to play a gig (which I'm doing tomorrow). Because while I prefer to live South of the river Melbourne's live music scene is concentrated in the North.
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I delved into my experimental self for this piece, but unfortunately my audio recorder didn't pick up much of the water sounds. I was pretty exhausted yesterday, and so I allocated myself a half hour window in which to get the piece done. I used ink from the previous day as a starting theme, and a mind map led me to cobalt blue. Some internet wandering brought up Renoir's painting The Umbrellas, which was painted using two different shades of blue: the first stages of the painting done using cobalt, and later stages with ultramarine. This idea of an umbrella in two shades of blue inspired the text, and my kitchen provided the props.
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I composed and recorded this one after having a wonderful chat with an old friend of mine for next week's episode of Mind Over Myth (which is now available for you to subscribe to on iTunes). He stayed for dinner, so once again I was chipping away at my daily song late at night. Since transitioning to a career as a musician and music teacher I have struggled with the change in schedule. Unlike my old 9 - 5 jobs, I do the bulk of my work in the late afternoons and evenings. The habit of many years' relaxing in the evenings is a hard one to break, and I feel strange and guilty if I sit down in the morning or early afternoon to watch a film, knit or sew, or just do something mind numbing for a few hours. All the late-night songwriting is taking its toll, however, and I realise I really do need some downtime. I spent a few hours before lunch today watching Vice documentaries, and there was one about Romanian witches that stuck in my mind. In particular, it was the idea of the witches tearing open the sky to read the future that really struck me.
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This piece continues on with yesterday's citrus theme, but used oranges instead of lemons as a prompt. I took the melody from yesterday's improvisation and turned it into a chord, and then transposed it into a nicer key for mandolin.
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Good morning! Here's a belated post for yesterday's song. I feel like I need to prove somehow that I did write and record it yesterday, but you'll just have to take my word for it. I didn't finish getting the video ready until well after 1am last night, so I pressed upload and went to bed. I had to re-watch it this morning to remember what I had done, and discovered there is some grammatical weirdness at the end of the lyrics that is going to irritate me all day. I had been wrestling with the end of the lyrics for a while, and in the end I called time and just went with what I had. I'm glad I didn't just leave out the second verse completely, as I now have a rough draft that I can polish up.
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My friend Emilee Seymour (who is a wonderful multi-disciplinary artist) told me in an email the other day she was intrigued by the writing exercises I've mentioned a few times in this blog, so I thought I'd use that as an excuse to talk about them in a little more detail today. First, my connection to yesterday comes by way of dandelions, which are part of the daisy family. I dipped into the Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore and the Occult Sciences again, which told me "it is very unlucky to transplant wild daisies into a cultivated garden". Using this idea of trying to tame a wild daisy I conducted two three-minute writing exercises, the first prompted by wild daisy and the second by cultivated daisy.
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Week three begins, and I started today refreshed and ready to write again. The last few days had left me feeling quite stale, so I decided I needed to introduce some fresh creative material into my process. From yesterday I took the idea of the night, and did some quick and dirty Google research into night-related mythology. I was intrigued by Nyx, the Goddess of the night, and so I used her as the basis for this piece. In particular I was interested in the ways she might bring on the night, by physically casting a veil of darkness over the sky.
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Today is the first day I really didn't want to sit down and work. Really, really didn't want to. My schedule has been fairly light the past few weeks as most of my music teaching doesn't resume until the school term starts back again, but I am playing at a wedding tomorrow and spent most of today preparing for that. I had considered building rest days into this project - one day a month perhaps - but momentum is an easy thing to lose. One day off the wagon and you start to want another, and another and another. I have no idea when I'll fit tomorrow's song in, but that's a challenge for the morning.
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