spatia inter

spacia inter is my latest experiment with sound and silences.  silentum inter is still on the go for alto recorder player Treena Hope.  Things take time...

But that is precisely the point.  I've always taken for too much time to write music.  It's a habit I've fallen into but I'm going to find a climb a way out of if kills me.  No more working for five hours in the morning, completing twenty bars or so, then going back in the afternoon (after my daily dose of Waitrose White Chocolate Tiramisu) only to delete nineteen of them.  And tinker with the rest until I forget the initial inspiration, why I started it in the first place.

I can improvise, for heaven's sake;  it's just a matter of taking the mood of one of these improvs and setting it down definitively.  This, from now on, will be my new compositional method.  Intellectual rigour will be, well, taken care of.

As those of you who have gone to the trouble of reading my older posts will know, I haven't done much composition for some time.  I lack self confidence. Maybe I even lack skill but I've been doing this now for more than fifty years - I remember reading books about composition by Reginald Smith-Brindle when I was in my early teens.  I wrote two completely tonal symphonies when I was 14 and 17 years old.  In 1972, I wrote a completely atonal Capriccio for cello and orchestra;  I know this because I still have a copy of the opening section.

I wrote ten musical theatre pieces between 1977 and 1984; numerous piano pieces, two string quartets (1970 & 1994), masses of music which I made time to begin but not to finish.

I have some sort of ability and a tremendous urge to make music.  It really is about time I let the world hear some of what I write.

I now Tweet (composerinukMPS) and I've had tremendous support from other composers and groups.  I always try to support them back whenever I can. There's a sort of fellowship on Twitter; a sort of understanding that to be critical of composers who are still alive is hurtful, pointless and nasty.  We all get enough of that from every source you can imagine.

Someone asked me not long ago what I did for a living.  I told her that I am a composer...

That sounds rather self-indulgent...

is what she said.  Well, you know, it really isn't.  I have plenty to say and I have gleaned a sort of technique simply inferred from how long I've been doing it.  I can get better.  I will get better... But I'm doing okay.

I'll upload a link to spacia inter as soon as it goes up.

Happy International Women's Day to all of us.