Hi all,
I’ve finally decided to start a blog to share the experience of writing music on a daily basis, what triggers ideas, how they’re put on paper, to show the good inspiring days and the bad dry ones, and also to describe the cultural surroundings around this experience.
The blog is called 5 bars a day and it is is directly connected to my PhD in music composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire and to its final work, the opera The Cry of the Double Bass.
All of a sudden I’ve realised there is not much time left to the end of my PhD, and I am supposed to deliver the hour-long opera in a bit more than a year. I figured out I will have to write constantly every day if I want to deliver my final work, and it’s going to be hard, very hard, especially when for me writing music is not a daily routine but it is only an activity related to rare inspirational moments.
Considered the amount of music there is within an hour of music for at least nine instruments and six voices, it is important to produce material every single day, never mind if it is good or not. This is only the first step towards building a significant piece of work, which will need coherency, emotions, sense of narration, fluency, musicality and technical skills.
Without the bricks constituted by notes and bars, all the above could not be achieved whatsoever. Hence the necessity of giving myself some discipline, trying to write at least five bars of music every day for a year. This can be anything for the forces I intend to write for in my opera, in any combination. Whether everything is going to be used in the final work is not important, the main thing is ending up with a massive amount of material to be possibly used.
Five bars is a reasonable amount of music to write even in those days where you don’t have much time to compose. This project will also give the chance to finally use all my Moleskines manuscript paper diaries! I can’t wait to show you the result of this experiment!
Seb