On Composition

Most of the really good stuff tends not to be a flash in the pan

Yes…I did it.

In a gratuitous act of delusional self-importance, I have titled this weeks’ post On Composition.

I hate myself already.

Let’s be honest; at 38 years old, I am still but a mere compositional whippersnapper. I am not sure I can lay claim to have been going at this for remotely long enough to have the necessary self-aggrandisement to be positing wise kernels of “truth” in such a way as to pedestal oneself to the level of sharing a thesis - a doctrine, if you will - definitively pointing the way towards creative and expressive actualisation.

Arnold Schoenberg, I am not he.

However, I have learned enough in my time to know when nice people ask you to do something nice, it’s usually a good idea to say yes; and so…when the lovely folks at Westwood Instruments invited me to test out their new Alt Grand instrument earlier in the year, they asked if I might share some thoughts on composition (!), which is why I feel less bad about it now.

Most of the time, the feelings evoked whilst watching content back like this sit somewhere between torturous and pure embarrassed shame. However, on this rare occasion, I actually quite like both a lot of what I say and the way in which I say it. Shock horror. Perhaps it had been a three-coffees-by-lunchtime day.

Anyway…grab a coffee for yourself and find out more about how I go about making music in this BTS video conversation, and treat yourself to nuggets of wisdom such as: ‘time is really…long’.

You’re welcome.