Ongoing projects and suchlike

I love Chopin. I love Tchaikovsky. I love Dave Brubeck. I love John Frusciante. I love Frank Turner.

But however amazing they might all be in their own right, they are all totally incomparable, as they work(ed) in such different fields. So on that theme, when I say that 16th century choral music is the best thing ever in the whole wide world I do mean it, but I don’t mean that it’s better than any other type of music, just that it is totally in its own little world.

It’s definitely a bit strange, but pumping out some Palestrina really loud at night time is pretty much unbeatable. I’ve always wanted to compose jazz stuff, and my dream is to one day write at least one opera and one ballet, alongside a couple hundred fugues and sonatas, and maybe six symphonies, but right now I have such a weird desire to write some choral music.

I’m not too sure exactly what it is about it that draws me in quite so much, but it really is amazing. I need to find books, lots and lots of books, about any type of ‘classical’ composition. I’m thinking Fux’s ‘Gradus ad Parnassum’ to start, but also some Schoenberg stuff. I just can’t wait for university, when I’ll have a laptop and a nice little MIDI keyboard, and I will spend my free time sitting in cafés (or hopefully in some Oxford college’s library/chapel/quad) composing as much as I can (when I’m not reading classic literature or learning languages, of course…).

I do love to play instruments, and I could never give up any of the ones I’ve started I don’t think, but however shockingly bad at composition I might be I am so enamoured with it that I know it’s definitely something I need to feed. The idea of being able to discern so much about people long dead for as long as their music is heard is such an exhilarating one – the same goes for literature (but in that field I really do have no skill at all, unfortunately)

Anyways, I’ve written enough rubbish to make up for never updating this for my two regular (weekly, it seems) readers I think. Have a link to my created-just-this-moment choral playlist on YouTube:

The Playlist

Just putting this here so I can use it in my Music Tech lessons in school, but I suppose it’s a useful resource for anyone who’s cool like me and is into all this stuff?

Today I borrowed a viola from school. Just thought you’d like to know really.

I find being organised very difficult, but I am always trying to organise my things. This generally leads to a tricky life.

I currently have five different places I’m keeping all my music compositional and practising-related stuff, so I guess that partially explains why I find it so hard to ever finish anything, to be fair to me.

Have some pictures to show how useless my attempts are: Read more

what I think is genuinely years after signing up to WordPress I decided to do something with this blog and make it a nice little repository of any recordings/compositions/works I ever get around to doing. Also, if I get a small readership (or even if, more likely, I don’t) I think this blog will help me to actually do something, as opposed to my normal routine of coming up with what seems like an amazing idea at the time, frantically scribbling it down, only to finally remember and come back to it weeks later, having forgotten whatever part I couldn’t write down that made it feel so wonderfully amazing to me at the time. Basically I am useless.