Fall hath truly dropped over October, and my inner fall girl quaked with excitement. Sadly it was a very busy month in the life of Old Wilmslow Will so there was scant little opportunity to spin around in circles whilst throwing leaves into the air and listening to shoegaze before ending the day by curling up on the sofa and watching Gilmore Girls (I’m the worst I know). I did manage to have a productive month on the whole though, as all of you several sycophants and minions who read this blog shall soon see!
The month began at RNCM with a period of rather intense work as I had several important deadlines coming up. I had to finish a big band piece by October 10th, I had to finish the workshop draft for the script / score for my musical by October 12th, and I had to finish a choir piece by October 18th. I managed to somehow make all of these deadlines which was extremely hard but absolutely necessary. There was a fair bit of procrastinating as I did all of this work, but there was also a good amount of staying up late into the night to get the work done which has left me absolutely shattered over the month. I managed to finish the big band piece (Toff Heat Fab) and submit it 10 minutes before the deadline. I was rather proud of the work I had done but I did feel that it would have benefited from another day of working on it (though that is a very typical feeling that I have). I had the first workshop for this piece at the end of October and it sounded about 40% where I wanted it to be. Hopefully the one in November will be better!
Finishing the first draft of the script and score for my musical I viewed as the most important of these three deadlines. I had a meeting with Fiona Stuart at RNCM who was going to potentially help me have this musical performed so I needed to have everything ready to go. I stayed up until a ridiculous hour the night before our meeting and I somehow got everything done in time. I was truly exhausted the morning of our meeting but I somehow represented myself well and Fiona thankfully was still on board to help me and she said that we needed to get things moving along so she booked me several rooms at RNCM on the 19th of November to workshop the musical. I was elated by this news, particularly as I was rejected from the Lowry musical workshop the prior month. I quickly began organising everything. I managed to enlist the help of roughly 15 people by the end of the month, including the help of the MD Tim Jasper who I had met whilst working for BYMT over summer. Sadly some people pulled out and others had conflicting obligations, but hopefully there will be another workshop in the spring which I might be able to get more people involved in. That said, the reception I have had to the news has been quite overwhelming, a lot of people are very invested in this project and I am optimistic that this workshop will be the first good step towards getting this musical finally performed!
The final of these three deadlines was a choir piece which was, in a sense, the most important one as this music will actually be performed at a concert at RNCM. I left this project on the back burner and I neglected working on it until the prior two deadlines were finished. I managed to do some work on it, but after a meeting with my tutor, we thought it might be better to just start from scratch which is exactly what I did. I used a poem written by another composition student at RNCM to inspire a new piece which was extremely calm and unhurried, which was the exact opposite of the feeling that I have had during the whole of October (irony is a sweet drug). In the end the piece I wrote was quite good and I submitted in time. I got some feedback about it and I needed to change facets of it, but I had time thankfully so I made the improvements and on the whole felt quite good about what I had composed.
Since completing these three deadlines, the work has not ceased. This is most true when it comes to the workshop that is taking place in November which I have been working tirelessly to make sure will go well. Outside of this though, I have been relentlessly re-editing the script and score for my musical after getting some feedback concerning the formatting of both. It is an absolutely enormous job but it needs to be done and I am determined to do it. On top of this I had a piano workshop where I was talking about the piano piece I finished the previous month in front of a couple of dozen pianists, composers and staff. Several of the pianists afterwards approached me and said that they would like to play my piece which I felt great about (especially as I had had the good news about the workshop the same day). I had to make several updates to the piano score which did not take too long and should hopefully make the piece easier to play by the pianists when it is workshopped in January. I unfortunately will not be able to make this workshop as I will be in India around that time for AJ’s wedding. Outside of this, I was also busy getting stuck back into life at RNCM with lectures and so on. Larry Goves had taken over from Adam Gorb as head of department and it felt like things were a little better than they had previously been. The amount of opportunities available to me as a second year seemed to increase more than it was for my first year as I was offered the opportunity to write for the RNCM orchestra next March which I am excited and scared beyond belief about. Larry and Gary were still my tutors and reflecting on it I had improved a lot under their tutelage. They had exact opposite approaches, Larry being a sort of composition Yoda who got inside my head and made me doubt the very essence of my being, Gary being a mechanic who tells you what’s wrong with no bullshit about your composition car. It would have been too much to have just one, but to have both made the whole thing balance out very well.
Outside of RNCM I attended another music networking event in Manchester which was fantastic but I was stupidly hungover for the entire thing. It was great though and I definitely got a lot out of it even given my state. I also went to see BBC philharmonic at the start of the month with my grandad which was rather nice. They played Beethoven’s 5th symphony along with some other fairly well known repertoire which my grandad enjoyed more than the other concerts I had brought him to where they played more experimental music. I also signed up again to enter the Berlin International Film Scoring Competition which I have not started but intend to start doing once this crazy period has calmed down.
In other news, my flatmate and I did several more podcasts. We did one midway through the month with several of our friends, and we did a Halloween special which we video recorded as well. My flatmate thought what we did was good enough to put out there into the real world but I don’t think it is quite good enough yet. Maybe in a couple more episodes it might get better. I also recorded my fiancee and her friend doing another couple of podcasts (my room has become a podcast hub it seems). Possibly the best news of the month came when our landlord visited the flat and said that he wasn’t going to increase the rent for the next year which I could have cried at. My fiancee and I also planned more of our India trip and though we did not do anything to celebrate it, it was the three year anniversary of when we went on our first date.
November is set to be an even busier month than October, let’s hope that I manage to get some more sleep in amongst all of the insanity! Adios.
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