Thursday 30 March 2006

Having made a start on my new mass, Kyrie drafted out and Agnus Dei started, I began to realise that I'm in danger of repeating myself. The music written so far is rather close to the motets that I've been writing recently. So I have stirred my stumps and started sketching out a new orchestral work.


For years, I have been thinking about a piece based on a Sylvia Townsend Warner short story from The Kingdoms of Elfin, the one about the Welsh fairies who use faith to move mountains. Instead of an extended choral piece, I'm doing it for orchestra; quite a challenge. So far there are just a dozen bars and I'm struggling with the music for the fairies; I can hear the shapes and texture of the music but am having trouble getting the actual notes right. This is a problem I sometimes have; I hear a texture or a shape rather than detailed melody and harmony, so I have to experiment to try and re-create the particular texture. The fairies are coming out rather Tippett-like (think Midsummer Marriage, but I'm not going to look at the score of that work or I'll end up writing real pastiche.


I have also acquire some rather neat PDF creating software so that I can now produce PDF's out of Finale, my music writing programme. The result looks rather handsome on the web, there's a sample here.

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