not music

Personal updates Aug 2022

Last month I went on a choir course, singing a whole lot of Palestrina in an Italian Palazzo for a week, as you do. If you see me, ask me more, because it was an amazing time.

Here we are:

We also had a little time every day to rehearse things on our own in small groups, and the result really was like a movie or an imagining of what musicians get up — you’d wander around the castle and literally hear five or so different songs emanating from the various rooms. Same in the morning hearing people doing their warmups in beautiful voices. I met some very lovely lasses who kindly sang my pieces, and we did a couple of scratch performance of the entire of As the morning star!

All of which definitely got me thinking again about choral music, both singing it and writing it. Something I wish to do more of! Watch this space, maybe?! At any rate after… EDINBURGH, which is fast coming up.

And also, conveniently fitting into the couple weeks between Italy and Edinburgh, I was thrilled to be quite out of the blue asked to write music for a game. I’m excited partly because of the type of music I get to write, and also because this is a paying gig off the back of my free RPG music packs on itch – feels like that’s the absolute ideal outcome, and it would be fab if it happened again. So, going to be working on that: music that I probably won’t be able to share or link to the finished game for a while, but I will let you all know when it does come out!

Where did you learn to write music?

Hi! A good and somewhat open question..! I studied music at university at undergraduate level and before that I had some very lovely music teachers at school who encouraged me with compositon. I made stuff up on piano vaguely since I was young. improvising, recording tunes on tape and writing them down, experimenting with computers, and listening to/playing/studying in an informal way music that I liked – including, very important to my development, Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy scores – that’s all part of it…