composer as guest, music as gift

For New music café - November 2021

Caught between leases this summer, some dear friends offered their spare room to tide me over until I started studying in a new city. They'd recently moved to Manchester and had acquired a very beautifully odd eighty-five key grand piano through one of those mystical, serendipitous exchanges where it cost them nothing but hiring a van. I'd been struggling to write music for a while in my crowded lockdown flat, questioning my place as a composer and the years I'd devoted to such a niche corner of the world; contemporary music had been my raison d'être since I was sixteen, but the musical isolation of the past year had left my joy for it dissipating. With the promise of their company and this curious piano, it seemed a sensible and timely idea to accept my friends’ kind invitation. 

Awkwardly grateful to be welcomed in their home, I grappled with my British sensibilities, overcompensating with bottles of wine and constant offers to cook. They were the model hosts – generous with clean linens, delicious food and long conversation. I was nursed through heartbreak, illness, epiphany… even the sleep deprived ugliness of completing score and parts. With restrictions easing though, my diary was beginning to trickle full again and I realised Manchester was making less logistic sense than I’d hoped. As I made arrangements to travel around the UK, visits to friends and family stacked until I’d inadvertently created a summer tour of homes. The pull and possibility of this change was an old companion in itself, familiar and welcome after many years habitually on the move. I have always been drawn to the opportunity of travelling in this temporary way to drop in on the lives of those I love; perhaps an expression of having separated parents and more than one place to call home.

Leaving Manchester, I wanted a way to truly thank my hosts, but also acknowledge the walls that had offered security and the piano that had nourished me back to musical health. I wrote a short, one page piece, centred on resonant, repeated chords that filled their living room with sound. Company to this was a small text about my time in the house, following the structure of the 5-7-5 haikus I’d been enjoying at the time:

few places so safe

to open this grief again

your love surrounds me

I wrote this on the back of a leftover postcard I’d been carrying around for a while – David Hockney’s 1968 portrait, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Fittingly, Isherwood and his culturally rich life had been a subject of recent conversations in the house. With the portrait’s addition, this musical offering felt complete somehow, reminding me of the ‘card and a gift’ format ever-present in the etiquette of birthdays and Christmases. I left the score and the postcard on the piano, then left for my early train to London.

It was around this time that I’d been reading Hello, Stranger by Will Buckingham – a wonderful and very moving book about connection with others through journeys, and the willingness to trust in the goodness of the world. Buckingham’s reflections on being a guest articulated much of the way I had felt about making plans for my friendly expedition; the awkward etiquettes of not staying too long, being sure to contribute but not overstep. Allowing my thoughts to wander, I was struck by the similarity this held with being a composer and the nomadic way we interact with musicians; moving from ensemble to ensemble as a kind of troubadour of sound, offering up our creative labours as scores in the hope our hosts enjoy them. Within this exists the same nuances and unwritten rules as when we are a guest in someone’s home; as composers, we learn to be humble yet assertive in rehearsals, and avoid shabby parts out of respect for musicians’ time and dedication. For better or worse, the way we dance through these delicate exchanges may mean the difference between the beginning of a longstanding collaboration or not being invited back again.

Moving on to my next temporary home, I began to think of composing and gift giving as both providing a similar sort of kindly catharsis; there is something tangible about these types of offerings that witnesses our connection with others and communicates good intention. Of course with my dear friends in Manchester, a thank you would have sufficed – but a piece especially for them left no doubt of my gratitude. With the piece I’d written for them being both a gift and a score, I also noticed a parallel in the way I carefully presented my music as a composer, and how I lovingly like to wrap up presents for friends and family. It would be a lie to say these visual processes are purely selfless though; resonant of my pedantic love of stationery, I find a deep aesthetic satisfaction and joy from making things look pretty.

The idea of gift pieces was not unfamiliar to me; I’d thought for a while that music written for composers’ friends and loved ones, was so often steeped in a special kindness and intention. There is a natural history to composers gifting their music, perhaps emerging from the way art so often responds to the people and places that surround its beginnings. Beautiful stories of these origins are woven into the fabric of musical saga, documenting and articulating love in its many forms. When Alice Roberts presented her young beau, Edward Elgar, with a poem she had written, Love’s Grace, I wonder if she had thought it would later form a part of her engagement gift from him. Elgar went on to set the text in a piece that became Salut d’Amour (1888) – a loving and very sweet example of artistic exchange between two parties, that later manifested in an art shared with the world.

Over the remaining weeks of summer, I stayed in eight different homes, writing a piece of music for each one. I established basic parameters to ease the process and help nurture a direct, unfiltered simplicity. This was both for consistencies’ sake, but also to ease myself back to writing music again. Each piece would be written in one sitting in its respective home, marked mezzo-piano throughout and have an accompanying haiku. With each dwelling that welcomed me, I added to this collection until arrived in my new city a few weeks ago. This motioned the end of my nomadic summer and a fresh appreciation for the comforts of home and steady roots. The opportunity to observe and respond to homes in this purposeful way has helped me during a time of great personal transition in my life; in considering where and what my place in the world might look like one day, I have a better idea of what will be important in finding where I belong.