The Spaces in Between...

This week I saw a TV documentary (on the sainted BBC4) about the painter and sculptor William Turnbull who died at a great age last year.  In a fascinating and enlightening show, I found great inspiration from an artist whose work I have admired for many years.  Needless to say, in any creative activity, there is cross-fertilization and he said a couple things which made a lot of sense to my continuing progress as a 'baby' composer.

He spoke about his early sculptures:  "They didn't refer to something else they only referred to themselves".  Quite.  I couldn't have put it better myself.  Unless I am setting words, the music I write is self referential and rarely anything else.  I've always disliked music which set out to sound like something else; the sea, a storm, a storm at sea.  My music lives in my imagination first, then it is put on paper (with all the inevitable consequences and compromises that entails) and then offered to an audience. If I'm ever asked, 'But what is it about?' I always facetiously use the old Andre Previn line, 'It's about thirty minutes.'

I imagine that abstract artists have the same problem.  In fact I know they do.  I was once in a gallery which was showing the work of a young female sculptor and while admiring one of her clearly abstract pieces, one authoritative sounding female voice from behind me said, "Of course it screams about the pain of childbirth!"  Well, it didn't to me and nor did it to the artist, with whom I enjoyed a very pleasant chat over coffee after the doors closed.

We search for meaning and patterns.  Of course we do; our brains are hardwired to.  In the paintings of Mark Rothko we might see windows; in Kandinsky (whom I also love) we might see ships or mouth organs.  Does it matter?  Of course not.  We each take away from a painting or a piece of music our own, unique experiences.  And I really don't think it matters all that much if we 'get it', by which I mean that we come to understand the work on the level the composer/artist might.  Only in music which is intended to convey or conjure the sound the proverbial storm at sea do we 'fail' if we think it sounds like falling crockery.

I write mostly abstract music.  I'm very drawn to music known by the rather redundant tag 'new complexity'.  I say redundant because if you see a score of it or heat it in a concert you will be in no doubt that it is complex;  and, often, somewhat jarring to the unaccustomed ear.  But it is something the ear can be attuned to, as I learned back in the 1970s while studying a remarkable piece by Peter Maxwell Davis called, Eight Songs for a Mad King.  Then, it jarred.  Now, it thrills.

But there was something else I drew from the programme about Turnbull; he married an extraordinarily talented sculptor called Kim Lim.  She died some years ago and there were no direct quotes from her but she did inspire me by something that was said of her.  The speaker was talking about Brankusi's The Kiss.  Her take on it inspired this blog; she was quoted as saying that she was fascinated by the spaces in between.  In an object so seemingly devoid of spaces this struck me as being a seminal moment in her own career.  And possibly mine.

Composers often talk about the importance of silences; the spaces in between the sounds.  I was looking for a starting point for a completely new piece - I still don't have sufficient mastery of Sibelius to write truly complex notation - which includes, along with its quiet gestures and freaky flourishes, moments of complete repose, demonstrated by silences.  The whole first section of this new piece came to me in a flash and you thank your nearest god when that happens!

It hasn't been a very productive week.  I'm stumbling back into composition after this yearning eight year absence rather than launching myself straight back in to it.  I now have a much greater capacity for self editing and criticism.  I hope it doesn't stifle me but I think it won't and I think it will make me a better, more consistent composer.  One can only hope...!

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I want to conclude with a word about this blog itself.  It is, really, for me to set out my ideas a little more formally that if I were to commit some scribbled words in a journal.  But, in truth, it is little more than that.  Sometimes I may write amusingly and with my usual dose of self deprecation.  At other times the subject matter may be more esoteric.  But what it isn't is an academic exercise.  There will not be any 'composer notes' to the music I am working on at any one time.  As I said, it's written for me and for anyone who might like to get to know me or my music a little better.  I won't edit it or try to improve it, it really will just me me with stream of consciousness ramblings.

I really am taking baby steps back into serious composition.  And these steps may be tentative at first and I may well stumble a lot.  Or fall on my face if you prefer.  But I shall do it.  And I hope by the end of 2013, with a combination of my 'orphaned' pieces (see my first blog) and completely new works, I may well have a small body of work in which I can take genuine pride.