A [kind of] Credo

Prelude

Music is how I enter the world - it is the oldest of abstract forms. Located within that music is the voice, the original and most ancient of instruments. When you sing you blend your sound, your ancient story, passed down through thousands of generations of time to arrive at you, today, in this present moment.

When you sing you access the long resonant tones and long held reverberations of time, memory and experience. You can tune in, listen to what people that came before you heard. And every song, like every person leaves an imprint, an echo across millennia.

It’s in the echo that I am interested, in what is left behind, in what resonates. 

it’s where I work

I sit uncomfortably in music theatre, opera, contemporary music and theatre mostly because of all the contradictions that each of those terms bring: I’m a musician that thinks visually; a composer that thinks like an actor; a director that directs from the piano; a theatre guy that thinks like a dance guy; and a choir boy that really wanted to be in a band.

I think the best house for all of that is in theatre and live storytelling. It’s the house that best holds what I do…because I love how theatre people think. Theatre is flexible, immediate, caked in a contemporary language, knowing its tradition but unlike Art Music (often)…it’s not seeking to replicate…. Theatre is comfortable in not knowing, and it’s not precious.  

That being said, I like stories… but I don’t like narrative. A narrative asks you for your undivided attention, and then sometimes it’s hard to listen to what’s around it. A story you can see what’s under the hood, listen to it and listen around it. I like to hear its texture, its polyphony. The narrative is too concrete for me and is afforded too much time in our culture. Not enough time to be left not knowing.

I felt quite limited by what I saw when I was younger. It was all so binary. Either this or that. There was something so much more freeing to use methodologies of theatre and music as giant blocks to stand on but, in the process of standing on each of them becoming the linkage point.

So what about this AND that, together at once

After I realised this could no longer make in traditional music theatre or opera. Not that I discount either of those mediums or that I at some point will return to them, but the resonance would have to be strong, the forces that create them in equal partnership, not one leading the other.

So here are some principles that underpin me and (the extension of myself) my work:

Preface all of these statements with

– in art, in people, in community…

Fugue

Part I

Begin with listening

and listen to our ancient song

Find the ‘why’.

It’s the strongest force

Quieten the world and the mind

The more noise, the more chaos

It’s all part of one thing

don’t just learn the song

but find growl and groan under the hood

there is consonance dissonance and unison

Consonance is different than unison, although unison can be consonant.

In unison everything must match,

but in consonance things can be relation

and still be together.

That’s the kind of world I want.

We are all in a constant fugue state: 

Pictures, sounds, spaces, stories, relationships, cultures, memories, abilities

are consonant and dissonant,

rhythmic and harmonic,

textural and timbral,

hetero and poly phonic.

Like a transient fugue you play a small part,

a line that is as great and small as an instrument line in a symphony.

The Fugue links present space, memory space and ancestral space.

So

look to the operatic moments that exist in the everyday

Part II

                    Address the trauma through celebration,

                    not pity or anger

                    Use art to agitate (subtlety).

                   Set the new order in train not with conflict

                   but with gentle change and generosity.

                   (Move the tanker 1 degree, over time you shift continents)

                   Decentre the dominant canons

                   deconstruct them and learn from them

                   they are the classics

                   but not the gospel

                  So love them

                  and also

                  take a big humble dump on them

                 Fuck the geniuses,

                 Bach had 21 kids

                 He had no time to be a genius

Part III

Stop trying to be so fucking clever

bring kindness and humility,

even to those you despise.

Kindness to the people that I know,

and also do not understand and those I don’t.

Truth, mostly because I find it personally excruciating to lie;

and

humility in sharing –

and

because I often value your story over my own.

Be ok with

big-glorious fuck ups,

and silliness,

and profanity

Take what you know to your community

And

Start singing in your own village

Use your voice

(either physical or metaphoric)

to empower

and

shine lights on unheard

or

unseen people.

Ultimately,

People make the music,

and you can’t separate their story

from the song

– in art and in people

Amen

(I’m not religious but fuck I’m hoping that God shows up sometime soon)