A New Newsletter for the New Year?!?

That’s right — with the new year I thought it was finally time to update how I do things, given I didn’t publish anything for three months. This newsletter structure is prioritised around better quality content, fewer times a year. It’s more sustainable for me and less junk email for you. Instead of approaching this like a blog post, I’m approaching it like a newsletter. There will be three sections in each one. The first (the one you’re currently reading) will be the main “article”. This would be equivalent to a blog post in previous years, but I am hoping that a monthly schedule means I can take my time in writing these up, rather than just trying to write something for the sake of writing something. The second section will give some updates on my current projects, so you know where I am currently at and what my focus is. And the third section is a question, which I’m hopeful will be submitted by readers (one day, when I have a huge email newsletter), but for now might be invented by me or adapted from other questions online, and so on.

I’ve shifted away from the traditional blog model for a few reasons. Firstly, I personally found it really unsustainable. While the act of writing every week is probably helpful, it’s not helpful if I don’t do it at all. Particularly when I was travelling, or if I had a busy period, the post a week was difficult to find and make the time to do, and as a result I didn’t do them. If I did, the quality was often poor, leading to short articles that I hastily wrote in five minutes. That might be OK if my main goal was to practice writing no matter what. But that’s not my goal – my goal is to use this as a site for sharing information about my projects and to stay connected with my audience. The newsletter format is much better designed for that. I’m a big champion of blogs, but it’s just not the right format for me in this field of my life.

I have a lot of exciting projects coming up this year: the completion (or near to it) of my PhD thesis, the associated staging of a performance for that, as well as revamping my own performance practice. These are the things that I am most interested in sharing and hearing about – not the content of 90% of what I was writing, which was often mediocre, shouting into the void type stuff. Already writing this, I feel much more at home with the message and tone I am trying to convey. The previous posts never had a cohesive identity, because I wasn’t sure what I was writing for. Now I do.

Current Project Progress

PhD thesis: 20%

Theatrical work: 30%

These numbers may not look very high, but that is mainly because I have gone back to the drawing board for them. The theatrical work is currently halfway through draft 2, but there is still all the music to be written for it after that. I will say version 2 is coming along really nicely and I believe in it more strongly than version 1 as a creative work. I am hoping to get some grant funding to stage it later in the year, and as soon as I can share more about it I will — for now, I am conscious of promising too much and not delivering!

The PhD thesis has similarly been something I’ve grappled with over the summer. The creative work is shaping up to be a much bigger component than I had originally expected, which means the theoretical side may adjust accordingly. I am thinking my original project was too big in scope to really fit into one PhD thesis, and may in fact be better thought of as an ongoing project towards which the PhD contributes one part. So there’s a bit to think through there for me!

Question of the Week

This week’s question is: “When you’re creating new music, what actually comes first for you – a sound, an idea, a story, or something else?”

Frankly, it depends on what I am writing. My background is in film music — writing music for short films as a teenager is what set me down this path to begin with. There, you very clearly have visuals that you must try and adapt into the audio format. As a result, I think often that story, or a visual, is where I start. Often I am trying to convey a particular emotion or setting. It also, of course, depends on the type of piece it is. I do enjoy storytelling in music, and it even has a similar format to written stories: an introduction, gradual build of tension, a climax, and then a little conclusion. Often I find myself thinking of this “structure” when approaching my compositions.

The major exception to this are idea-based or sound-based works, which I also do, but tend to be more as an exercise or electroacoustic (meaning a lot of sound manipulation, rather than writing sheet music). An idea-based work, for me, might be trying to write as many variations on one bar as I can, or how often can I repeat one phrase without it getting boring? Little things like that. I have no visual for these – the idea is the exercise is the work. And sound-based works are another favourite. For example, one time I was visiting a friend in hospital, and I noticed all the different sounds made by the machines inside. I find them quite musical (and often they are in an equal-tempered tuning), and so there the thought is more “how can I turn medical sounds into music?”. Similarly, I often don’t have an idea of what the story or emotion is there, but the transforming of those recorded sounds becomes the work.

As mentioned this newsletter is based on audience engagement. If you have further questions or comments, please send me an email or reply below. And if you know anyone who might want to sign up, please do pass on the link.

Until next month,
Josh