Fraz Ireland (c) Belinda Lawley

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On spending a week in Aldeburgh, inspiration, and the power of play

As part of the Emerging Professional Artist scheme, the four composers are invited to Aldeburgh for a week to stay in the grounds of The Red House as part of an ongoing partnership between National Youth Choir and Britten Pears Arts. The idea for the stay is that it provides us with some time that we can use to compose, or to plan creative ideas, or just to relax a bit and be inspired by the wonderful surroundings. And of course we also looked around the Red House and the Britten Pears archive. So we didn’t have any specific task to do during the week, but it did fall about a fortnight before the deadline for our second commission for the scheme. At the beginning of the month we’d all been in Blackpool for the National Youth Choir (18-25 Years) course where our first pieces were recorded, and these had been really successful sessions, so we had a little momentum behind us going into the Aldeburgh residency.

It was the final week of August, and the sun shone like it was its last chance so to do. We arrived and immediately set to the important task of making cups of tea and finding out how much work each other had already done on the pieces. We were all in pretty much the same boat: not actually having started writing anything but having ideas for the vibe of the piece, and hoping to decide on, or write, the text in the first few days. There can be a lot of pressure—especially on a scheme like this where you end up with 2 fantastic quality recordings—to be writing something that feels perfect. It’s a piece that you’ll be able to share with people for years, and it feels like it’ll represent the entire breadth of your composing capability. Of course, it doesn’t—how could it? But nonetheless, it’s a daunting place to start from, when you know that you have to go from nothing—a blank page—to something that will be shown to colleagues and recorded in a month’s time.

The burden of choice is such a heavy weight to bear—for any creative I think. You’ve always got to make decisions: which note will be best? What am I trying to communicate? 

The burden of choice is such a heavy weight to bear—for any creative I think. You’ve always got to make decisions: which note will be best? What am I trying to communicate? Can I take a risk on a tricky rhythm? And the stakes are so low—swapping a couple of notes round probably wouldn’t make much difference—but you still have to make the a choice. It’s probably partly as a reaction against this burden of choice that we had such uncreative fish and chip-shop orders: 4 medium haddocks!

I wanted this second piece to be very different different to my first one ‘400 Ways to Make a Sandwich’—a quick-paced, text-heavy sandwich manifesto inspired by 50s light music, advertising, and the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan and Tom Lehrer. So, arriving in Aldeburgh, my vision for my second piece was that it wouldn’t have very much text, would move quite slowly through the text that it did explore, and would be rather more serious, even sombre, in tone. I spent a lot of time actually hunting for a text – a poem, a fragment of prose – I was looking for something quite specific about the value that we ascribe to important places, the idea that there is something perhaps a little sacred/spiritual that stays in the spaces that have been honoured thus. I was interested in finding a kind of intersection between Brucker’s ‘Locus Iste’, Shelley’s Ozymandias and Nuclear Semiotics. It was a tall order, and ultimately fruitless, but nonetheless I enjoyed the journey.

In the absence of text I thought I’d turn to music, and spent some time coming up with tiny fragments of texture or harmony that might later find a place in something. I think in that first few days we were all struggling to get our pieces off the ground. But there was still lots of time to explore, we’d pick blackberries from beside the road on the way to the front, and stroll along the beach—even swimming in the sea—and eat fish and chips on the beach in the evening.

It’s so important to have time not only for writing but also for relaxing, and the time we spent just playing around, absorbing sunshine (through a layer of suncream) and chasing (or being chased by) seagulls was as valuable as the time spent toiling over manuscript paper.

One evening, and still not yet happy with anything I’d written, I realised that I had been going about it all wrong. I was trying to make the music happen through brute force and it all felt insincere and uninspired. So I changed tack. The weather was perfect for it; the beach was quiet; I would buy a kite! The following day, buoyed by a sense of resolve and charged with sunlight I bought a pocket kite from the RNLI shop. I decided to spend the next day or so not worrying about writing a piece, but instead playing, and seeing where that might lead me.

There is something to be said about the power of play, about the importance we ascribe to the mundane, the fun, the silly. We all took turns with the kite on the beach, battling to get it to stay up and float, often watching it career into the stones below, twisting and spiralling.

As adults we are often expected not to engage in play. But music, and creativity, is so much about play and freedom: you have to be prepared to make things up, to throw unknowns into a space and to trust that other people will catch them. By chance, lots of the music that will be on this disc has themes of childhood: we’ve all connected to it in some way – both the lightness and some darkness too.

We played make believe games that evening, passing around a magical imaginary box full of strange objects: a tortoise, a ball, a butter knife, a teapot... It was interesting that within this game, we often returned to rules, finding ‘instructions’ within the box and passing them to one another “oh these are in French, you’d better translate” – it’s hard to inhabit a world that’s completely free. Thus something is always eroded by the walls of adulthood. Another evening we spent several hours communicating purely through mouth trumpet sounds, working through as much music as we could bring to mind (to the bemusement of the fish and chip shop employees…).

So, my plan had worked—I was inspired to write by the experience of flying a kite. I ended up thinking about Icarus and Daedalus, who escaped prison in wings made of feathers and wax. The difference between Daedalus’s caution and Icarus’s ecstatic hubris. The piece is about dualities and balance, it’s about the obligation to work and the freedom to go outside and live; it’s about loss—that you’re no longer a child. That you can play, but you can’t quite escape the weight of it. That you can be the soaring kite but you also have a responsibility to be the anchor on the floor. The responsibility to fly high enough above the sea but never too close to the sun.

When you’re setting your own text you have a chance to really craft how you want to build a relationship between text and music, and even when writing the text I’m thinking about elements of setting. There’s a lot of internal rhyme and assonance, and with this poem, the structure is a little unpredictable, but with recurring shapes (kind of like how a kite flies).

I wrote some of the text in Aldeburgh but it wasn’t until the following week that I actually put it to music. I came up with a very a fragile melody, something that felt kite-like, without predictable trajectory, elusive, precarious. And a harmony was built from the melody, with chords that recur and are connected to certain fragments, but in keeping with the structure of the poem, the fragments don’t recur in the same order each time. For me, this harmony represents the waves, each one similar but with slightly different character, and with a little darkness and danger about them: though familiar they’re unpredictable.

Despite being a rather melancholic piece, the actual process of creating was full of fun. At the start of I really didn’t know what I’d end up with, and I was able to just explore ideas and meander through them, seeing where they might take me. The piece actually reflects some of the things I was initially trying to explore, but because of the way that I approached them (beginning with the decision to fly a kite) it never felt forced.

I think this is a good illustration of the power of stepping outside your ordinary. When you have a looming deadline it’s easy to force yourself to work and isolate yourself and panic and stress and end up with something similar to what you’re familiar with but without real depth or sincerity. Sometimes you can better use the short time you have by relaxing, playing, opening yourself up to possibilities that you’ve not yet considered. And probably there’s a lot to be said about the power of being outside, soaking up some sunshine, looking at the horizon... Next time you’ve got a deadline coming up, I urge you to try touching grass first.

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