Composition update

I'm currently in the process of composing the music for my show Ditto which will be on in January next year. Following an exciting development week with my four musicians a couple of weeks ago I felt powered and energised about going into the composition process.Having five days with my creative team was really great because I learned about all the players' strengths in performance. I'm not going to say I learned about their weaknesses, but I did learn where some were more comfortable than others. For example, two of my musicians are very used to improvising, whereas the other two are more used to note-learning. This is a really interesting mix and will hopefully lead to quite an exciting balance of styles in the final performance.

I am inspired by many things when I'm composing this music. At the forefront of my mind is an interview I read with the British composer Rebecca Saunders. She, like myself, is very interested in silence and she talks of teasing threads of sound from the silence when starting a new piece.She looks at the blank manuscript paper and doesn't think she necessarily has to start at the top, rather she can allow the sound to organically evolve from out of the white blankness. I think this is a really poetic way of working and it's something I've been experimenting with myself.

I'm also really interested in blending various styles of music together and this is having a profound impact on the soundworld of Ditto. I had a niggling idea ages ago that there should be some Renaissance music in Ditto. I have no idea where this idea came from but I couldn't shift it so I'm just running with it! In a way I feel that it will be a great contrast to the stark, rhythmic soundworld of the rest of the piece. I also presented some Renaissance music to a group of children when they came to see some work during the November development on the piece. The children really liked the quality.

I'm inspired by contemporary composers who blur boundaries between various styles of music. Works like Asyla by Thomas Ades - with its rave-influenced heavy beats and repetitive melodies, and Ayre by Osvaldo Golijov - with its frantic switching between operatic and pop vocal styles are really exciting. I'd quite like for Ditto to take the audience by surprise - to lull them into a false sense of security with its blankent of bleak silence, only to jolt them with loud outbreaks of noise and rhythm.

Here is a link to the third movement of Thomas Ades's Asyla:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRQr33PdyiQ

Here is a link to a piece by Rebecca Saunders called Traces:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QMzcHuNmbc

And here is a link to a song from Osvaldo Golijov's Ayre:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6SZ-KGVQvI