A selection of open access updates from composers on Music Patron.
Stories and secrets behind the music.
From mixing sounds in the studio and deep-diving into song lyrics to reflections on their musical inspirations, we’ve brought together an assortment of open access updates to explore.
Deep-dives
“We often trawl the internet looking for interesting texts, and we first came upon this as part of an old book on cant song called Musa Pedestris, and attributed to W.E. Henley, 1888 as “Villon’s Straight Tip to all Cross Coves”. Cant means slang, and the idea of secret languages, particularly those of the lower classes, interests us greatly.”
“ ‘How’s the ballet going?’ was by far my most received question of 2023. So, for my first set of updates here on Music Patron, it feels right to create a short series about the process of composing my first full-length ballet score.”
“I think it’s important to tell stories like this, bringing to life the realities of people of the past of whom we have little record. It’s these kind of stories woven into traditional tunes that I feel can make this kind of folk music relevant today, and appealing to modern audiences. ”
Making new music
“I’m going to demonstrate a way of thinking about music and then turning it into a form of notation.”
“Yoga balls and cereal packets – a look at my sound design process using recorded sounds.”
“Recorded in Lockdown when I had little else to do – a pivotal choice as it turns out; it was the first proper piece I had written since being a teenager and it’s popularity on social medial is a huge part of what initiated my recognition as a composer.”
Exploring influential places
“I want to tell you about what it means to me to be an Icelandic composer and how I find inspiration for the music I write. We will, admire Icelandic mountains, dig up old memories and travel on the highway north.”
“We decided to use pictures of the lichens as graphic scores, reading the patterns as if it were music notation for the script lichen, and for other species reflecting the textures and the character that we perceived in them. It’s been a fascinating process, improvising and experimenting with sound in this way…”
“I hadn’t anticipated that what I learned there would have implications for my practice as a composer, my teaching methodologies/philosophies, and – to an extent – my everyday life.”
Sparking inspiration
“These pieces are so dizzyingly inventive, so bursting with joy, so overflowing with élan, so completely stuffed full of (I struggled for a while to find the right word here) life.
By ‘life’ I mean a kind of energy, maybe joie de vivre. But it also implies the ups and downs that life itself brings. The sadness and the elation, the agony and the beauty…”
“As a teenager I spent many Saturday afternoons in Forsyths, a music shop in the centre of Manchester. This would be followed by the Henry Watson Music library, taking out scores and chamber music parts. Then maybe back to Forsyths to try out one of their grand pianos and dream.”
“I want to share with you some of the music that has been on repeat in my life playlist recently. These pieces are sonic journeys that have been important to me in different ways and left an indelible mark on my heart over the years..”
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Discover more composers on Music Patron, explore their profiles and delve into more open access updates.
