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