On that note, I said I’d mention the scale of the piece. Well, a long time ago I said that I’d written 80% of this work already – and yes, at that time, that percentage was probably pretty accurate. By that stage, it had already grown way beyond my original plan for this work, which was basically a 6 track EP; I think it had reached 18 tracks and I figured it must be nearly complete at least in structure, even if a lot of the detail still required refining. However, by now it’s a different beast entirely. Those 18 tracks have been pared down a little – I’m not going to talk about numbers any more, that’s ridiculous – down because the concept has moved on and some of the music and themes in the lyrics just aren’t relevant any more. That rejected music will appear somewhere, sometime, but probably not in this particular work. However, what’s also happened is that the 80% unfinished work now seems to be approximately 50% of the work I have planned to undertake by this point.

Did I say I wasn’t going to mention numbers? Numbers are cool. I can’t help myself.

I think the reason I wanted to make this my first blog post on this new site is that, having had such a long absence from the web in this context, I wanted to explain how these things change, move on, develop. You already know I’m sure that I’m not really interested in the commercial nature of my own music any more – I’m only interested in whether it’s right. If you happen to enjoy it and take something from it, then so much the better – audience is vital when the work is complete – but the main focus is on getting it right so that it reflects what I want it to convey and achieve. You may remember back in 2008 or maybe early 2009 I said that I was interested in interpretation; well, this work has come full circle in that respect and interpretation is likely to be a central theme in terms of how it’s presented and performed. I’d love to say more about that, but I’ve learned that silence is the best option where unfinished work is concerned…

That brings me onto another point, and that’s the performance of the piece. For years now I’ve been obsessed with my inability to record the music I hear in my head. Anything you have heard to date has been a reflection of what I aimed for, but never what I actually wanted to present to you. Recorded music baffles me more and more, because it’s the recording process (for those who don’t understand the features that are required to make music live and breathe) which is killing music. I mean that wholeheartedly; I’ve studied music for almost my entire life, but only in the last 2 or 3 years have I really understood what it is about music that makes me increasingly not want to listen to it – yes, seriously – and the conclusion I’ve reached is that it’s not so much the music itself, but the way in which the life is compressed out of it during the recording process. This is a whole topic on its own so I won’t expand on it here; however, suffice it to say that this has been a major factor in determining where I personally go from here. POAEM is a work to be performed, no question, and I hope to God I can not only get it finished but also performed in my lifetime. As you can see, my thoughts are tending more towards the performance than the recording now, in the hope that it can be presented a little more closely to the music I’m hearing in my head. If I could only plug a PA system in to my brain, it would be a much more straightforward process.

So, onwards, forwards, but probably not skywards. For now, anyway.

Hopefully from this point on I can post about music, and other ramblings…

k

I should pehaps add that if it wasn’t for the great support team at 123-reg, I wouldn’t even have come this far. They’re brilliant, and I would highly recommend them if you’re thinking about putting together a website of your own.

As you can see, this new website is now packed full of features I was never able to offer you before. My blog is now integrated here with everything else (to be known as News and other ramblings), and you’ll notice that my ancient MySpace blog posts are here too, preserved for all eternity…Best of all though, the blog means there’s still a way for us to keep in touch.The single thing which made me hesitate for so long over leaving MySpace and other sites was the knowledge that I’d lose that contact with you – so now I’ve found a way to incorporate that social feature into my site I feel happier that the move was a positive one. I hope you’ll agree and continue to comment and interact both with me and with each other as you have done in the past.

Additional little features include subscription and sharing options on the blog…also, you can search for what you want quickly and easily using the Search box near the top right of the screen…and so on. No need to list everything as it’s all here – just browse and enjoy!

Music news is small but still significant I think. Writing for ‘POAEM’ continues but has extended still further to include a second work, ‘Maelstrom’. At this stage I won’t say too much about either, other than to say this is not another ‘Pathos and Exaltation’. Commentary about this will no doubt appear on the blog soon enough. It’s time I started doing that again I think.

Hoping this finds you well, happy, and at peace in the world.

That’s that, but what I really want to tell you about is this new piece I have just put on my player. For a couple of weeks now I have been away from the actual notes and instruments while I plan the final stages of the album; however, the music is still pouring out of me and so I have begun to record a separate collection that seems to be evolving alongside the fuller work. I have had many long sleepless nights over the last few months in which I have come to realise that I am not content with simply writing songs. That’s not meant in any way as a derisive comment towards songwriters; however, as you know by now, my interest has always been in more expansive forms and so I have started down that road with this new work and it is actually happening, finally working in a way that I never thought possible for me. There are still plenty of songs in the full album, but dotted amongst them are an increasing number of  instrumental pieces, many of which have been improvised. I am loving this new improvisatory style that has seemed to come out of nowhere – this is not something that I have ever been able to do with any real confidence in the past – and so, given that it is working well and giving me such joy, I have decided to make this the focus of the second collection. I have called it “Metamorphosis”, and my thinking at this point in time is that it will be a short collection of improvised solo piano pieces with not a hint of a vocal. “Perfect Peace”, the new piece on my player, is there to give you a flavour of what’s to come. I guess you could say that these improvisations are “mood” pieces – they reflect the mood that I am in when they are created. I’m not sure that improvised music could really be anything else (discuss?). So this one, as its title intimates, is something I played while feeling a kind of perfect peace that I only ever feel as a result of a very few things. I don’t mind telling you that, before I sat down to “create” this particular piece, I had been listening to a song that always gives me that sense of calm no matter what mood I am in. I am talking about “This Is The Last Time” by Brookville. Every time I hear it, I wish that I could create a piece of music that has that effect on the listener. It’s utterly magical and I continually wonder what it is about it that does that to me. It has a beautiful simplicity that is rare, and is executed with such incredible style and skill, particularly with regard to its underlying textures. Of course, you cannot deny the musicians who created the sounds in this song; it was here that I first made note of Eric Matthews, and in this you will hear one of his many awe-inspiring trumpet solos. I love this song with all my heart and soul. How dramatic! But true nonetheless.

Anyhow, I digress onto other musicians as ever. I hope you like the new me. “New” me? No. Another thought that has been permeating my waking hours recently is the one in which I realise that this is the “old” me. This is the me of my teens, just as I was waking up to myself, and just before I had all my musical sensibilities wiped out – albeit temporarily, thankfully – by that wretched academic education.

Enjoy..

The long and the short of it is that I have put recording for Part 2 on hold for a while. For nearly a year now I have been itching to get back to writing again, but wanting to get Pathos done and out and to have produced a completed album. So the plan was to stop live appearances, finish recording for Part 2 and then start writing new material. Sounds simple doesn’t it, but finally I realised before Christmas that the old and the new were conflicting and essentially stopping any progress in either direction. Much of the material on Pathos is around 4 years old now, and was written over quite a long period of time. That’s not to say that I don’t value that work any more, far from it – it still holds so much of me at that time and I am deeply proud of each and every song, so I still fully intend to complete the album as a whole when I have the right time and space to do so. However, since making the decision to halt Part 2 the new writing has taken a firm hold and I’m becoming increasingly excited about the direction it’s taking.

So what’s so great about this new project? Well, I find myself writing in a way that I have wanted to since I started out on this musical journey. I spent many long years blindly rejecting my past experience, the academic formality of my classical education, but in the last couple of years I’ve come to realise that it’s an inherent part of who I am as a musician and so I’ve been unpicking the parts of that which are relevant to what I’m doing now and how I want to develop my work. In generic terms this comes down to some basic compositional elements that have always fascinated me in music – namely structure and form – and this work is encompassing those elements in a way that I’ve never really tried before.

What does that actually mean in real terms? Of course I’m not going to say too much about it at this stage; the work is still in development but I’m clear enough about it to be able to give you a broad view of what’s to come. It’s almost the complete opposite of Pathos & Exaltation which is essentially a collection of individual songs. Yes, there is a common thread running through many of the lyrics in Pathos (some of which you still haven’t heard of course), but it was written as a series of individual songs and they just happened to fit together. The new project, by contrast, has one very definite theme – “interpretation” – and this pulls every part of the music and lyrics together into one whole piece. Structurally the work is likely to be presented in sections, according to sub-themes, almost like movements in a symphony or concerto, and as such I’m working on relating keys and other musical elements to make those sections flow seamlessly where possible. One of the other key differences (pardon the pun) from Pathos is that there will be instrumental pieces scattered throughout. You may have heard one of them behind my nattering on Radio Devon. This is a source of huge joy to me because previously I have never really connected with any kind of instrumental music (other than that of composers from past eras and orchestral music from film soundtracks) and that’s really bothered me. Finally – for now anyway – I want this work to be rich in instrumentation. Pathos was very minimal, for the most part, in order that I could play it live. I’ve said before that I never felt that a lot of that work was really finished, and so this time around I have made a conscious decision to let the music lead the way, and when it’s done and feels complete I will address the issue of how and if I will perform it live. That will involve dealing with multiple piano parts, string sections, and more.

That’s a pretty broad overview for now, and as it’s a work on the theme of “interpretation” I suspect that I won’t tell you too much more.  I want you to make up your own minds about the finer details when you hear this and I am working on adding some puzzles and clues that might tell you how I see it  (if you can solve them!) – but you may interpret it very differently and for this work that’s as it should be. Also, and as with all works in progress, it may well change and develop still further, but this is the bare bones of the piece as it is now and I wanted to share that with you for two reasons: the first is that I know some of you have been waiting for Part 2 for a while now, and so I feel that I owe you an explanation and an apology for it not appearing. Secondly, nobody ever talks about this kind of thing. I’m a firm believer in artists saying what they want to say and nothing more, nothing less, and I wholeheartedly respect whichever direction people choose to take in that regard. Equally, I respect the audience’s right to choose whether they want to know what’s being offered or not. I of course sit on both sides of that equation as both a musician and a fan of those artists who I hold in high regard. A friend told me recently that I study artists that I listen to,  almost as if they are “dead composers”, and I think that’s true – again, a throwback to my roots I suppose, but you know you can read about and hunt down all kinds of historical documents about the likes of Mozart and Shostakovich if you want to. But living artists? Not unless they give you the information, and on the one hand I personally find that difficult as I want to know as much as I can about the music I’m listening to (I don’t actually like interpretation, there are too many possibilities), but on the other hand I understand why they might not want to impart that kind of detail. So this is my way of offering you some kind of choice I suppose – it’s here if you want it, but if you prefer to stay in the dark and like the mystery then I respect that and promise to use the word “spoiler” on anything further that may jeopardise your enjoyment of what I do.

More news as it happens…

Kellie