Sunday 8 January 2012

On being very glad about living in a detached house in the middle of nowhere...

I recently moved to a little house in the middle of nowhere (there is one bus a week, so if using public transport you can either get out for 2 hours, or a week and 2 hours....) and decided to experiment with completely cutting myself off from the outside world. I find composing ridiculously difficult, even though I can’t imagine ever doing anything else for the rest of my life, and the more I do of it, the more difficult I find it. So any distraction is a temptation as a result of this, and in episodes of particular writers block I frequently end up in a pit of over-email-checking-induced self-hatred combined with an encyclopedic knowledge of every item on the Topshop website (often with too much of it arriving at my house several days later...). So, in this new place, I have neither phone nor internet, and a mobile that only gets reception if I sit on the kitchen windowsill. Quite how long I’ll keep this up I don’t know, but it seems to be working incredibly well for composing...


Anyway, on several days this week I’ve been particularly glad that I don’t share any walls with neighbours. I’ve been setting a rather steamy (and at times hilarious) love scene between Amy and Jim. As I’m sure every pioneering aviating couple do, they choose to seduce themselves in the language of aircraft parts...


So, most of today has been taken up with trying to first vocalise, work out the rough notes of, and then notate, different ways of saying “Oh Jim” and “Oh Johhnie” (Jim Mollison’s nickname for Amy Johnson) in a variety of sexually provocative ways that would be more than at home in a particularly saucy scene in a Carry On movie. I think the postman may think I’m a total nutcase. But let’s just say there are lots of different ways to say/sing these words, and some of them contain intervals as large as a 10th...


I’m setting this entire number as a somewhat deranged 30’s music hall number, with instrumental improvisational-like interludes which gradually get more and more overexcited and harmonically unhinged as Amy and Jim find more and more innuendo-laden airplane parts to use as euphemisms. I have been having the time of my life doing this and am wondering whether I’m wasted in the classical world and had better move into B movie sound track writing...


Anyway, more about the music that is currently inspiring the opera another day I think. There is still plenty of innuendo-laden text to set....”Yes, yes, yes you are my Tiger!”*


*(as in Tiger Moth.....)


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