I was back on campus at Surrey yesterday, for the first day of the rest of the second semester, and a busy day it was too.
I wrote a little while back about my recent adventures in art song, adapting three of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets for voice and guitar for submission to Surrey's annual Joyce Dixey composition competition. I'll be writing about how it all went shortly. In the meantime, yesterday I had to deliver a 15-minute talk as part of this semester's composition module and used my EBB work as a basis for this. This is the second presentation I've done on the course, and I have to say, I find it far from easy. I'm more than used to presenting in public, but always in, broadly speaking, a business context. The academic presentation is a very different beast, and I definitely have work to do in this area. I was struck in the Q&A session that I hadn't really fully closed the loop in various arguments. In particular, I opened the presentation with some comments on the controversies around setting poetry to music, but didn't really address this when discussing my own practice. In general, I think I need to be more mindful of tying theory and history to personal practice, especially if I want to take this whole practice-as-research business any further.
The afternoon involved a guitar lesson with the excellent Paul Thomas (working on some technical exercises to try to get my chops back up to scratch after a bit of workload-induced neglect of late) and a final bit of vocal recording with Yi.
The afternoon closed with another session working with Yi, Jeongyi and Chaoran on our "Butterfly Lovers" collaboration, which I introduced a few posts back. I was initially a little nervous about this project, not least with some of the potential linguistic and cultural barriers it presents, but as it happens it's quickly turning into the most enjoyable part of the course so far. We actually all got together on campus over the Easter break to do some work and have been swapping ideas, scores and recordings over WhatsApp throughout. So far we've got a structure in place for the performance, have chosen the songs and decided on arrangements for each. I'm not going to lie (as my kids say), it's going to be an odd little piece, but I think it's going to work. Of course, I'd always like to push things in weirder directions, but I think we've arrived at a good series of compromises. And in any case there's still a few weeks to go.
I've dropped ever so slightly into project manager mode. Our course leader Tom Armstrong suggested I was the group's secretary, and I do sometimes feel like my allotted role in life is to be the guy with the whiteboard marker.
Project wrangling aside, we mostly worked today on the song "Why Let Me Fall in Love with You", from an existing Chinese musical based on the Butterfly Lovers story. Here it is in all its West End-y glory (and yes, it does feel weird posting this on this blog, but discomfort is at least one of the drivers of this course module):
Here's the thing though, there's a point in this song (which is something of a classic musical theatre portmanteau) where a rather lovely pentatonic melody emerges (at about 3.30 in the YouTube clip above) which, when sung by Jeongyi and Yi, and stripped of all the orchestrational melodrama, was really quite captivating. I asked them if I could record them singing the passage a cappella, as it felt like there was some real magic here. I've ended up turning it into something resembling my usual work, and hopefully this is something we can use as an atmosphere in the final "show":
I'm not sure what my collaborators think of this kind of approach, given the lack of response on WhatsApp. Maybe they've got better things to do than respond to my nonsense, or maybe they hate it. Who knows? But in the meantime, Chaoran has sent me a recording of the piano part from this section of the song (and I should add: within about 15 minutes of me asking for it!) and I look forward to making some lovely weirdness from it.