100 Days – Day 92

Very slow day today. I still have basically 2 lines to set of ACC1. I spent today mostly tweaking the fugal passage I wrote yesterday. The temptation to try to develop it is very real, but I don’t think it would fit in the place where it is if I did so.

The lines I have remaining are as follows:

Go saoraidh Dia ar an múr tine mé,
Ar bhuanpholl na ndeor!

Which translates as

The great God is my protection from the fiery wall,
The everlasting pit of tears.


I think I’ve been focussing on the fiery wall too much. I want to make the strings a bit fiery, but if the poet is being protected from said fire, then the singers need to be doing something more tranquil. But maybe something a bit more on edge too? I had a very clear idea for it at the beginning, but I just don’t think it works well enough.

I’m going to Belfast on Saturday so I’ll have 2 days off. Something might come to me then. Or it might come to me tomorrow. Who knows?

100 Days – Day 91

Another fugue, this time in the first movement.

To be honest I always knew it was going to be there. I’ve just been resisting. This time though, it’s got quite a long, meandering subject, so I’m only having one exposition before moving on to the next bit of text – no episodes or anything. Although it does have a tiny bit of stretto between the alto and bass just before the end.

When all this is over, I think I’ll sit down and arrange the 3 fugues from ACC into an organ piece called “Three Fugues on Columba”. It would mean developing this first one, and writing proper endings for all of them (at the moment they just segue straight into the next bit of music) but that would be ok. Could be an interesting companion.

I’m also intending to apply for a commission opportunity that would see me writing for string quartet and one other instrument. I’m thinking celtic harp, and taking some of the principal themes from ACC and arranging them into a sort of 10 minute tone poem type thing, based on the famous Fil Súil nglas fégas Érinn dar a hais poem. It would be appropriate for ACC to produce these kinds of ‘children’ , as the High King of Ireland himself decreed when Columba copied a book out without permission – in what may have been the earliest judgement on copyright – that “Each cow has her calf'; Each book, its copy.”

100 Days – Day 90

Wow. Only 10 days left!

I took the weekend and bank holiday off both composition and blogging, as I realised on Saturday morning that I was once again starting to bark up the wrong tree a bit with my first movement. I came up with some great material last week, which I’ll definitely use again (there’s a potential string quartet movement in there for sure – once this is all over I might even write a companion string quartet to go with Amra Choluim Chille!) but for now I need to get back to my original idea of the first movement being a simple invocation. There’s going to be more unaccompanied choral writing in it, and more of an establishing of the bi-tonal characteristics of the piece, rather than too much introduction of one off material.

10 days to go. I’ll definitely have this done in time! Then I’m going to go back and look at how many days I skipped and took off, and insert them at a later date. Talk about economical!

100 Days – Day 86

Some big changes to the middle of ACC1. I’m glad I decided to leave it to the end, as the middle two sections are now going to be based on new material from ACC5 and ACC7 that I generated over the last few weeks, which should tie the whole work together.

100 Days – Day 85

A slow day today in terms of real composition, other than the slightly surreal short story I wrote in the wee hours. More on that later.

I’ve been sketching out my plans for the final work on the opening movement of ACC, and then I sat down and listened to the 2nd to 7th movements all one after the other. This was a good idea because I hadn’t done so before, and it’s a good 40 minutes or so of music. Obviously I planned it this way, but the 6 movements flow very nicely one into another, and I feel like the 7th movement is really quite cathartic. I now also know how the opening movement needs to be proportioned, which means there’ll be a small amount of re-writing to do, and I’m also going to change the music for the 5th and 6th lines of the movement, to foreshadow the new material I came up with for the 5th movement. I’ll probably do that tomorrow, as I’m definitely already happy with the ending, except I need to add some strings and harp.

100 Days – Day 84

Day 84, and after a lovely relaxing weekend in London, including a visit to the opera, a documentary about apollo 11 and an afternoon of pedalo-ing on the lake in Crystal Palace, I’m back to work today. I’ve nearly finished another CCI Christmas Carol, and refined some string writing in ACC5. Tomorrow I’m going to start the big work on movement 1.

100 Days – Day 80

Well well well.

What a turn up for the books! I finished 3 movements in as many days, leaving me with only the opening movement left to complete. I thought about pressing on and trying to finish that today, but there’s more than a day’s work in it so I decided to leave off and take a day off from work. Instead I went to a piano recital, drank a lot of coffee, and came home and prepared scores of 6 pieces currently awaiting publication. More on that later!

I’m going to London tomorrow for a long weekend, so there won’t be any posts until Tuesday, at which point I’ll be starting work on the first movement. I’m hoping to have it finished by the end of the week, so that I can take the weekend off and then proof and edit a movement a day the following week, which should bring me up to day 100.

I honestly never thought I’d make up the time like I managed to over the last week. I’ve amazed myself with my productivity and creativity – and it wasn’t all just filling stuff in. Great big patches of fugue episode needed to be composed from scratch, and for some reason, the polyphony just flowed from me for two days. Hopefully I’ll be as efficient next week!

100 Days – Day 79

BONUS Early Post

Well I actually finished the final movement of ACC7 last night. I just sat down and bipped out the fugue, and then there was very little else left to do. It still needs some polish, but I think it’s a powerful movement, displaying a variety of compositional techniques. If I bip out the other fugue (the one in ACC5) before dinner today, then I could easily finish that movement before I go to London (or even before I go to bed tonight), leaving me with only the 1st movement to complete. This means that actually, I’m back on track, having completed the following over the last week:

1 song.
1 Christmas carol.
1 set of responses.
2 movements of my PhD.

Don’t ask where this burst of compositional energy has come from. It might be related to the fact that I’ve started intermittent fasting – I only eat between 12 and 8 every day. I hear that there’s substantial research to suggest that fasting for 16 out of every 24 hours increases focus, and I certainly seem to be experiencing that. It also means that I get quite a lot of work done before 12, just to have something to do between getting out of bed and having breakfast.

100 Days – Day 78

Me, to Me:

when will you make an end.jpg

Also Me, replying:

when i am finished.gif

Ok, comparing myself to Pope Julius II and Michaelangelo might be a bit much, but today I wrote the end of my piece. As in, the very end. 56 bars of sheer angelic gold. All I have to do now is finish the fugue in the middle, (which I think is mostly done, to be honest) and then I have this movement finished. With all going well, this might happen today. It is more likely that it will happen on Friday. Either way, after that I’m not doing any more PhD work until I get back from London on Monday.