Dé Domhnaigh, Iúil 27, 2008

Sætre Brygge

It's finished. I used to be a real advocate of dispensing with pen and paper to compose; now, I know that I'm not composing properly if I use only the computer.

I'm beginning to learn to use Sibelius properly - as a notational tool and not as a playback tool. The playback needs to be in your mind. The rest will simply flow out if it is.

I have also realised that I can't write descriptions of what I write very well. Below is part of the programme note for Sætre Brygge. I think I hide in the music. Is this a good thing? Should I be able to communicate what exactly I have done through music?

There's still a need to justify things to others it seems.


"It was once said to me that a composition is a postcard. Not merely a pictorial postcard, but also an emotional one – here a description of the emotions that I encountered on an entirely random trip through what seemed an untouched landscape at the end of a Scandinavian winter.

When I choose a postcard, I often find that it’s not representative of the place. I chose it because of how I felt there and then and what it meant to me there, much to the bewilderment of the recipients!

Still, windless, soft, solid, enveloping, comforting, penetrating, discomforting, caressing, silent…

The atemporal icescape is empty yet it fills you. With what is hard to say, but it slowly pulls you away, freezing your conscious thought, leading you to that subconscious flow which we fleetingly access from time to time.

My words never explain fully enough what I mean to write, which is why I write."

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