I tapped away little by little on the new cantata yesterday afternoon, solid and decidedly unglamorous work in a piece that is currently full of holes. The intention is for it to be a seven-movement work, a mixture of solo and chorus, and it is the choir sections that I am working on first.
At the moment all of the text that I need to set has something musical attached to it, often merely a single line but sometimes with more – perhaps a little bit of harmony or a countermelody. Little by little these things begin to add up until the point arrives at which one has a piece of music, and that is when the work really begins.
It is, if I am honest, pretty dull and ploddy work at this stage, for the decent writer knows that you cannot simply sit around and wait for inspiration to strike. Instead you need to provide the raw material with which to work, which, in turn, can help to trigger those moments when inspiration (if that is what you want to call it) strikes. The image that springs to mind most often in these early days of work on a piece, especially when setting text, is of squeezing a toothpaste tube.
At least there were a couple of moments yesterday when I jotted something down that I thought had potential, although at this early stage it can be difficult to be accurate about which ideas will yield most fruit. One of the most valuable lessons I have learned so far as a composer has been to suspend that critical approach in the early stages of a work. Merely getting things onto the stave is the most valuable goal here.
Rather nicely, last night I did dream about being back in Leipzig, so clearly something Bachian was going on in the back of my mind, maybe echoes of Monday’s rehearsal. I was at the Thomaskirche, taking it all in once more. It was only 2018 when I was there but it seems an entirely different lifetime, as if it were a world of brighter hues.
Nicholas O'Neill 
Hi Nock
Lovely to see you on Monday, it was tremendous to be able to sing together, and even better to read about it on Tuesday in your blog.
Thinking about what you have written today has set me thinking. We have retreated to France and are having a rainy day by the coast so time for reflection.
I am guessing that the piece you refer to is the Parliament Choir commission for a work to commemorate the pandemic. I retired as a doctor a year ago, but then returned as the pandemic kicked off in January and was very involved in the immunisation programme. If this is not helpful then please ignore, but if I were to think about what music would best represent the time we have been through it would be quite fugal with different contrasting voices telling lonely stories across a range of emotions of worry, anguish, loss but then sporadic spells of spontaneous joy and celebration of something quite ordinary that suddenly came together in harmony.
I couple of vignettes: Cold day at the vaccination centre in February and a lady is sat down in front of me for her first jab. She has her mask on, and her glasses have misted up with coming into the warm, so I cannot see her facial expression. Yet I suspect she is weeping. I ask if she is OK – we don’t really have time for this – and she says her husband is dying on a ventilator. She has not seen hims since he was admitted 2 weeks before and does not expect to ever see him alive. Her children live out of London and they phone etc but she is alone. However she has come for her jab as there is nothing else she can do. I sought out one of our fantastic volunteers who took her to one side and made her tea. 2 months later she wrote me a note to say thank you, as our interaction had been the only human interaction she had had around the time her husband died.
We had a day when we went all out to engage people from the BAME community. Again another drab February day, but a day that days was memorable for the noise and the colour. After days of seeing people demurely take off black puffer jackets, we had people in reds, oranges, greens who arrived chattering in groups. And they bought bunches of flowers for the staff and volunteers to say thank you. Again more colour, and a feeling of celebration and unity.
In the first wave before I retired, I lost a couple of close colleagues to Covid. Both very hard-working and keen to protect and support more junior colleagues – maybe their inevitable exhaustion contributed to their succumbing to the virus. It has felt strange to balance the anxiety felt by one person who is afraid of even going out of their house against those who knowingly had daily close contact with the virus with inadequate PPE and unreliable tests, as was the case early on. Information – lack of versus too much and realities and certainties that change as knowledge develops, but which requires an agility with behaviours at individual level – a pretty nuanced skill. All very demanding and draining.
But then we come back to the joy of singing, and the companionship and intellectual stimulation and happiness that brings.
I do not know if any of the above is helpful
Looking forward to seeing you when we are back
Best wishes
Julia
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