I want people to post about their musical lives, about composition, there works, about the nuts and bolts. I encourage people to think of themselves as part of music history. To take documentation seriously.
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The creative process and the editorial process are completely different things. When you are creating things, encourage the editorial part of your brain to take a nap, so you can work fearlessly, with no inhibitions. Then, when it is time to edit what you have done, make amendments, and focus on the detail, wake the editorial part of your brain back up.
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Before beginning one of your compositions, it is useful to think carefully about the instrument(s) you are writing for. The sound, character, or register of an instrument should have an impact on your composition; for example, a solo tuba piece is likely to be quite different to a work for violin.
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Due to COVID-19, and the necessary lockdown, I have had a large number of concerts postponed or cancelled. I decided it was important (for my career and my sanity!) to stay as creative as possible, and so I begun looking for opportunities to have my music played by others.
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When students write essays they often avoid planning; they launch into their assignment without a solid idea of how the assignment will end and what it will say. When students do this, they often think they are saving time but this is a false economy, temporally speaking. Planning properly saves time and makes the writing process less intimidating.
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Every assignment on the Music Degree requires some form of written work; whether through listening and learning logs, critical reflections, or essays. Cultivating an academic writing style is often a long, difficult process and it wasn’t until I had finished my PhD that I believed my prose was of an acceptable standard. In assessing work at OCA, I have encountered a number of common problems with student submissions; in this blog post, I will deal with issues of verbosity and lack of clarity. I frequently read essays where far too many words have been used; where sentences are so overlong that they become confusing. Fortunately, these issues are easy to fix!
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Research is an essential part of the music degree, and appears in various guises throughout all modules. Research points, essays, listening logs etc. all require the student to engage in some kind of research.
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Robin Haigh is a composer from London. In 2017 he became one of the youngest ever recipient of a British Composer Award at the age of 24. As well as being commissioned by the UK’s most prestigious ensembles and institutions such as the LSO, Britten Sinfoniaand Sage Gateshead, he has collaborated closely with leading ensembles of his own generation including the Ligeti Quartet and The Hermes Experiment.
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I thought I would use this blog as an introduction to Spellspheres; a large series of small works I started writing in early 2019. In future blog posts, I will discuss specific works in detail, but for now I am going to discuss the overall series and what I am hoping to achieve.
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Music is, of course, a sonic art form but it need not deal only with sound. Music is kinetic; certain pieces might feel different to play or sing when compared to others (as a pianist, I have always preferred playing a B Major scale to a C Major scale, for example, because of how the […]
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