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My latest piece is now finished and consigned to a dark corner of my hard drive for the next week or so, at which point I shall return to it and tidy up bits which might need a little cutting or pasting. Then it will head off to its competition with my best wishes in tow.
I read a slightly dispiriting blog post a few minutes ago by a very successful composer in which he said that competitions are great for motivation but you will never win one. Well, I beg to differ on that latter count, and believe that somebody has to win. Said composer seems to harbour some sour grapes about his lack of success, as I must admit I do about pretty much every rejected entry, but he probably bathes in paper currency these days to pass the time, so to tell other writers that they will never win simply because he has not seems a little disingenuous to me. Besides, over time I have come to realise that the bulk of my competition failures were simply not good enough as music. There are even some iffy moments in the winning entries as well, but that is another matter entirely.
I now need to decide what to write next, and, while I await confirmation of the texts of two pieces, I think I shall return to an instrumental work I began sketching about a month ago. The writing is ticking along quite nicely at the moment, and I am keen to keep up my current momentum, neither overburdening myself with expectation nor allowing myself unearned time off.
There’s a new JEBO video up on the web as of this morning, the audio taken from our performance at the Colston Hall earlier this year, the video from rehearsals for that and the HMV Apollo gig. It is hard to believe that those gigs were all the way back in March, but the video is a pretty accurate depiction of what happens when we get together to work. It has also served as a timely reminder that one of the tasks I need to get down to is recording some keyboard parts for a couple of new tracks. If you are interested in watching, it can be found here.
Nicholas O'Neill 