A little spoken word piece based, using bones as a starting prompt. I've just realised now that "Funny Bones" might have been a catchier title, but that's OK, I can always change it later on.
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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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After my three improvised experiments using the glove mind map I used it for a little sung piece too.
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The third of my glove mind map improvisation experiments.
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The second of my glove mind map improvisation experiments.
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This is the first in a series of three experiments with a mind map for the theme glove. The mind map became a kind of graphic score, with a random starting point chosen and then the lyrics improvised in performance using parts of the mind map as prompts. This is similar to the way my brain works when I sit down to do a timed writing exercise, but I find it much easier to translate my thoughts to pen and paper rather than speech. This exercise was an interesting way to bypass the pen and go straight to my voice. I found it quite challenging, but resisted the urge to record second takes of any of the improvisations.
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In my chat with Lucy Roleff for Mind Over Myth we talked about being addicted to newness. When I was young my favourite Barbie doll was always the newest one I'd acquired. I adored that newest doll, dressed it in all the best outfits, devoted hours to creating stories and scenes for it to play in, and then discarded it on the next birthday or Christmas when a new one arrived to take its place.
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In my attempt to catch up I allowed myself to just play around with the previous day's video for this one.
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Another spontaneous improvisation, taking the theme ring from the previous piece.
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I am not top of this project at the moment. I am chasing it, and, like a Will-'O-The-Wisp, when I run for it it retreats and I can never catch it up. This was meant to be Tuesday's piece, but I didn't manage to get anything done that day and ended up a song behind. I caught up on Wednesday, but then I spent Thursday editing this podcast episode in preparation for my gig with Lucy Roleff on Monday night, missed Thursday's song, and had to catch up again on Friday. There's a fine line between allowing myself to take a day off and catch up the next day when I really need to, and taking the day off and catching up the next day just because I can. I need to find the balance between the two.
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This one marks the end of four months worth of songs. Goodness gracious. Still so far to go...
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A very quick one, somehow connected to kaleidoscope but I can't remember now how I got here.
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About a week before I started my music degree I met someone at a party who had studied a similar degree overseas. He told me to just do the first year, learn the essentials, and then quit. This is what he and his friends had done, and he said they were more successful and making "better" music than the people who stuck it out until the end. In his opinion everyone who finished the degree was brainwashed by the jazz education, and the music they were making was either boring, complicated or weird.
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Part three, I destroyed my installation and it was incredibly satisfying.
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The second in a series of three, playing with mirrors.
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Taking the them kaleidoscope from the previous day's song, I made a little installation out of tin foil and let it guide a series of improvisations. I played with light, breath and mirrors. This is the first in a series of three.
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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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Most of the linguistic connections to vista focus on light, and this piece explores the opposite, continuing the same camera angle as the previous day. A quick improvisation taking advantage of the background noise in my apartment. I have a new mysterious British neighbour, and ever evening he speaks on the phone in our building's stairwell. Yet I've never managed to actually see him, only heard his voice amplified by the shape of the stairwell. Perhaps he is a phantom?
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For the next small set of pieces I worked with the theme vista. To help the difficulties I've been having motivating myself to write I decided to implement some rigour to my process. I adopted the pomodoro technique, and chunked my work into 25 minute blocks, both songwriting and all the other tasks I have on my plate at the moment. I have literally been carrying a kitchen timer around the house with me so that I can set it when I get started on something. This has made the last few days fairly manageable, and I have been able to maintain my focus for the short blocks of time.
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I had a little songwriting energy back, so I took the original Scuffle text and used that as the starting point for this piece. I kept the spirit of the previous video's randomness by improvising the melody and piano part. And by improvising on piano I mean randomly hitting white keys without much consideration for what I was playing. Perhaps I shouldn't have admitted that...
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