The Compositional Road

I have only been a serious composer for twelve or so years now, though I have composed music for the last fifty years. Excluding the forty or so songs I wrote before I converted to classical music, I have been composing, in a not serious manner, since the mid-70s. It wasn't until I moved to Mexico and around 2008 finally sat down and wrote settings for some poems by Robert Graves, something I wanted to do for years, that I decided that what I wanted to do was compose music in a serious way. I think that no-one at university ever took me aside and said "you should study composition" because I was good enough at guitar to be able to plausibly contemplate a career as a soloist. That ultimately proved to be only half-true. I achieved quite a lot of success in Canada, but despite being the first Canadian guitarist to do an international debut at Wigmore Hall, did not quite manage to build a real career beyond that.

So I got around to composition quite late in life! At first I composed purely through intuition as is evident in my song cycle Songs from the Poets. Some of those songs are not bad, but while I was doing something, I didn't actually know what I was doing. I had read Schoenberg saying that he had the whole plan of the piece in his mind before he started to write it down and that made no sense to me. I just wrote when I had an idea and an urge and there really wasn't much of a plan.

I kept on like this for a several years, but with an increasing frustration as I realized I didn't know what I was doing. Slowly I started building a personal musical "language" often based on ideas from Russian composers, don't ask me why, I just liked what they were doing. I started doing more and more experimenting. The piece that was really a breakthrough for me was "Dark Dream" for violin and guitar which took a couple of years to finally come together. I re-wrote that, from scratch, about five times!

My Quartet 2 continued this process, but I began to be able to plan out the piece as a whole, though the first movement, again, took extensive re-writing. My Quartet 3, on the other hand, really came together and I had a sense of the overall form from the beginning.

I am just starting to write a piano piece for the local chamber music society and I am doing nothing but pencil sketches until the whole thing is clear, then I just have to write it down. This is sounding more and more like what composers do! The piece will be titled "Remembering What Is to Come" which is a line from a poem I wrote a long time ago. It will be about six minutes long and will use the Locrian mode. It will also have a lot of harmony! I have pages of melodic ideas and harmonic ideas already.

Here is "Dark Dream" that was a big step for me: