100 Days – Day 64

Mostly just fuguing around today.

I oscillate between feeling like there’s very little left to do, and so much left to do. This is partly because what is left to do is spread very widely across the 5 unfinished movements. I’m aiming to have the 7th movement finished by the time I go to London next week.

100 Days – Day 63

Well, I got basically no work done in Sweden, because our schedule was extremely busy – this was nice, as it meant a complete and forced break from any kind of composition work for an entire 4 days – probably the longest I’ve gone without writing any music, or thinking about writing any music, since the beginning of my PhD.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my former life as a horn player. For some reason, it’s come up in conversation an unusual amount, and a few weeks ago, I actually dreamt that I was buying a horn in order to get back into it. Just now, as I was showering (it’s always in the shower, isn’t it?), I thought “why not add a horn to my PhD?”

There are a few places where I’ve found the string textures a little limiting in my piece. There’s one section in the third movement where there’s quite a distinct countermelody, and I’m just not sure it 100% works with just strings. It would actually be quite something with a horn part. Of course, the celtic horn (Carnyx) and the celtic harp are two of the instruments most closely associated with ancient Ireland. They’re also both mentioned in Amra Choluim Chille, but I’m not setting the text that mentions the horn. I’m also using tubular bells and crotales, because of the frequent mentions of bells in the Amra, and to evoke the ancient Dowris Crotales. *

I couldn’t, at this stage, write the horn into every movement of the piece, but I think there are enough places overall where it would fit that it wouldn’t feel like crow-barring it in. Just a natural expansion of the orchestration. And now that I’ve thought of it, it feels like it would be a dis-service not to include an homage to another instrument used so widely in pre-Christian Ireland.

Food for thought.

*To read more about ancient Irish instruments, see this very informative blog post.

100 Days – Day 58

OFF TO SWEDEN IN THE MORNING

And I’m leaving my laptop here in Dublin, just to get a bit of space from it. So there won’t be any updates on this blog until next Tuesday.

I’m bringing PhD work with me though – I’m going to try to get some good work done on the the fugues in movements 5 and 7 of my PhD. I’ll also be bringing my O Riada book, and singing my O Sacrum Convivium no fewer than 3 times.

Speaking of my O Sacrum Convivium, I finally got around to digging out legit sources for the 6 pieces that Cailínó will soon be publishing: Carol of the Field-Mice, Comrades, This is my Prayer to Thee, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, I see His Blood upon the Rose and O Sacrum Convivium. Watch this space!

100 Days – Day 57

Apologies for the silence over the last several days! It was end of term in St Patrick’s so I’ve been enjoying the sun and maybe one or two cocktails, and also taking some much needed time away from my laptop. This is actually the first time I’ve been on my laptop in nearly a week, and I think it’s been very good for my mental health.

Which isn’t to say I’ve not been doing any work at all on my PhD. I’ve been making a bit of a plan of action as to how to proceed, and I think I’ll be going in reverse order – Movement 7 back to Movement 5 initially, then the first two movements.

I’m going to Sweden with St Patrick’s on Friday for 4 days, and won’t be bringing my laptop, so I might not blog between now and then, but I’ll be printing out the 7th movement and trying to get a good bit of work done on the big fugue, as the rest of this movement is pretty much finished, except for a few proportion issues at the end.

Of course, there are other elements to my PhD too. I’m leaving my write-up (ca. 30,000 words I believe) until the very end, but part of what I have to do in that is justify why my music is PhD-worthy. A part of what I’m going to be talking about is the general lack of pieces of music of this scale in the Irish language, that aren’t wholly dependent on Irish traditional music material for their main focus. To this end I’ve been reading about Sean Ó Riada. Other than his most famous work, Mise Éire, most of Ó Riada’s large scale work seems to have been totally separate from his work as a traditional musician. Indeed, they are almost all based on Greek sources. There’s a lot more work to be done in this field, I think, but I wonder if the fact that Irish traditional music grew up apart from any classical tradition, while that on the continent was always aware of it and surrounded by it, explains to some extent why there has never been “An Irish Bartok”. Not that I think there should be. But it’s an interesting thought all the same.

100 Days – Day 52

State of the PhD

Well, I’ve just written the longest to-do list of my life! I just sat down and went through all 7 movements of Amra Choluim Chille and made a list of almost everything that remains to be done – I say almost everything, because I’ve left out things like page turns, missing dynamics, that sort of thing, which I always do in the final edit.

Of the seven movements, I consider one to be completely finished, and one more to be all but finished – the string parts could use a little tweaking to enliven them.

The other 5 are in the following states:

1st Movement:
This is now the movement with the most work to be done, but I’ve actually discovered that I had more work done on it than I thought I did. All the text is set, which I didn’t realise. The middle section is very threadbare, and needs a good 10 days of work, I’d say, but the basic ingredients are all there, waiting to be mixed together and poured into the mould. I need to add a coda, and decide on a texture for the opening (do I want the strings tremolo-ing on one note, or on two notes like the beginning of the Sibelius Violin concerto?), and I’m going to take an idea that I’d thrown out from the 5th movement and inject it into this movement, where it will actually fit perfectly!

2nd Movement.
I’m very happy with this movement. The beginning is basically settled except for a few places where the strings need to be thickened. There is an alto solo that needs to be completely re-written, but I’m re-writing it to be the same as the Alto Solo in the 6th movement so that won’t take long. Then there’s a section at the end where I’ve written it as Alto Solo again, but actually I’m just going to change that to be a repeat of the material just preceding it, which needs one more play-through anyway, and which will make this movement more cohesive.

3rd and 4th Movements.
These are the movements I’m pretty happy with.

5th Movement.
This is the movement that had been giving me so much trouble, but is now in a very good place. It opens with about 3 minutes of absolute chaos. I need to add some harp special “thunder” effects, and finish off the fugue, but otherwise it’s in a very good place. The very end also has no orchestration yet.

6th Movement.
I’ve written 76-82 IN THE BIN which I know Phill will be happy about! Other than that bit going in the bin, this just needs some orchestra filling out, and a bit of crotales playing the tune Columba, and a bit of a coda and then it’s there!

7th Movement.

Bars 1-70 just need dynamics. Bar 71 makes me practically cry with happiness every time I work on it, because it’s just so good. Again, the fugue in this section needs to be finished off, but there’s very little to do – just the very end, and one of the episodes, and there needs to be a proper modulation into A major before it, but otherwise, this movement is almost there too.

Looking over it all, it could well be more than 50 days work. Either way, my hopes of submitting in October probably won’t be fulfilled, but I think I’ll definitely be finished the piece by September, at least in first draft. Anyway, I’d rather submit the piece in its best possible form than rush through it.

After the first draft, I need to put it away for a bit and focus on Christmas Carols until November, at which point I’ll probably go through the big-time editing process, with the aim of writing up over Christmas and submitting in January or February. If everything goes well. I’ll hopefully have sat through the Viva by this time next year!

100 Days – Day 51

I did a bit of orchestration of ACC2 today, but my heart wasn’t quite in it. I think it’s because I’m not really taking into account the bigger picture.

Tomorrow I’m going to sit down and go through each movement, no matter how much of it I’ve written, and just make a list of what needs to be done in each. A very specific list, so I can set myself very specific tasks. Then I’ll tip away at a few bits over the weekend before I really tuck into the big work on Monday.

100 Days – Day 50

Wow! Halfway there! Living on a prayer!

Where does the time go?

I’ve written a lot of my Christmas Carol “The Morningstar” today. I decided I’d write that instead of ACC to act as a little bit of a sorbet. It needs a good bit of work but the basic piece is there – 5 minutes or so of quite mushy, ethereal music based on an ancient Chorale tune.

From tomorrow I’m back to the PhD – with 50 days to go, and 5 movements to finish, I think I’ll probably allocate 10 days to each movement. If I finish early, I’ll focus on a Christmas carol for a while, then move to the next movement. Some movements (the first, fifth and seventh) need more work (the second is all but finished, and the sixth seems to auto-write whenever I work on it) so I’ll not be keeping to an exact 10 day schedule, but that’s just a way for me to put a rough structure on things.

100 Days - Day 49

I’m taking a bit of a rest day today. I have a supervision in 10 minutes, and because the big-re-write took so long, I only have a draft of one movement to show for it, rather than the 2 completed movements I had planned to have shown for it.

Also, as tomorrow is day 50, the big halfway mark of this blog, I’m having a bit of a rest in order to get a good run up.

I’ll inevitably get some work done tonight though. Can’t get away from this thing for too long.

100 Days – Day 47

Apologies for the lack of updates the last 2 days. I had gigs both nights and by the time I got home I was too tired to write any words – although I did write some music on both days! Not a lot, but a little, and all very worthwhile.

Well, I think I’m finally at the beginning of the end. Today I put all the vocal parts for ACC5 into one single file, making it the last movement to have all of what I’ve written of it in one single file. The only bit of text now I have left to set is a few lines of the first movement, but I’m leaving that till last as I have a pretty good idea of how it’s going to flow.

However. The closer I come to finishing, the more work there seems to be. Every time it takes 5 minutes to decide on a few bars, the farther away the end seems. It still seems like I’ll have it done in (I hope) about 7/8 weeks time, maximum, but we’ll see. My worries about it are now manifesting in quite strange dreams:

On Friday night, I dreamt I had a beard.
On Wednesday night I dreamt I owed someone €3,000, and they kept bringing it up but wouldn’t let me pay them back.
The previous week I dreamt that because the electricity bill had gone up by 3%, I was now going to have to pay 100% of the electricity bill instead of my current 33%.

Meeting with Phill on Tuesday, and I’ve only got one movement to show for it, but it’s a completely re-written, re-structured movement, that’s taken me 4 weeks to get on top of. It’s been like pushing a giant rock uphill at times, but one day, when it rolled down, I realised I could just walk to the top of the hill without the rock. There was a new, better rock on top of the hill, and I gave it a nudge, and it went tumbling down. At the moment it’s rolling fairly easily. If I can keep up the momentum for the next 53 days, we’re home and dry.