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Starting out, a new piece for Rambert - Mark Bowden
Posted by: Mark Bowden on 31 August 2011
Composers are often asked to write or talk about their music, but more often than not after they've finished writing it. I'm going to try and blog here about my experiences writing new music for dance and about collaborating during the actual process of composing a new piece.
I'm working with Rambert's very own Malgorzata Dzierzon (Gosia) to create a new piece for the upcoming Season of new choreography at The Place in London. When Gosia and I decided to work together she already had a very clear idea about what she wanted to create; an energetic work drawing on her observations of people on the London Underground. We spent some time thinking about the music and we decided together that I would write a piece for electric violin and electronics with some recorded sounds from the Tube itself.
Writing a new piece in collaboration with another person is a completely different experience to creating something on your own. When I compose I normally lock myself away at home where I can work uninterrupted. In the case of the last piece that I wrote I even took myself off to live on a Swedish island for a month so that I could get the peace and quiet I needed to write! But making music for dance is different. Dancers and choreographers work in a different way to composers. New work evolves in the dance studio, often in a two-way process between the performers and the choreographer. Ideas are tested, refined and experimented with as gradually the work begins to take shape. I sometimes feel a bit jealous of this way of working and wish that composers could also have the resources to work in such a way. Imagine if a composer could write their music with the performers present throughout most of the process - it would be a real luxury and I think they would create very different music. This does happen, of course, in lots of types of music making - band members, for example, often create collaboratively - but it's quite rare in the classical music world.
So, I'm very much enjoying the collaborative approach. It's my favourite way of working actually. I recently explored music and dance collaboration on a course that I taught over the summer with young artists from Dance East Academy and Aldeburgh Young Musicians. On the residential course the young artists created a new 15-minute work, from scratch, in five days and performed it at the end of the week. Watching them work and helping them to realise their ideas was a real inspiration!
So, back to Gosia's and my piece. I've seen some of the movement material that she has already made, which was hugely inspiring, and we've also been on a ‘sound-walk' - recording live material on the underground. Gosia has given me a very detailed structure for the piece, a real gift to a composer. She has also given me some ideas about music that she likes; a list of pieces that have inspired her in the different sections of her work. I decided that I would use these pieces too. I'm not using any of the actual musical material but I'm trying to match the tempi and the general energy of the pieces in my own composition. Most of the pieces Gosia has been inspired by are very upbeat with driving rhythms, so that energy is finding its way into my music as well!
The next stage in the process is for me to get on with some writing (locked away at home, sadly - sometimes it's the only way!) and then present my ideas to Gosia in a few weeks. I'll be back with further updates as the piece unfolds.
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