Reminds me we're going to buy a house soon and I really ought to make sure there is a room with plenty of sunlight for such things.
Composer's room
I don't use it to originate sound - that has to be in your head, much as other people might compose a letter in their mind's eye - but it is terrific for checking the architecture (are there proportionately the right number of bars of fast music?) and for providing a score for my publishers from which they can extract parts for the individual players.
When I am composing abstract music (ie without a text), like the Piano Quintet I am currently writing for the Nash Ensemble, I tend to start with a sense of atmosphere - a feeling of something quick and frenetic, perhaps, tempered by the slow and mysterious. These amorphous ideas have to be trapped and then manhandled on to the page in such a way that they will successfully leap off the music-stand in the hands of musicians.
When things are going well, or if I have a looming deadline, I can work anywhere; I wrote a lot of my Clarinet Concerto in a hotel room in Minnesota, so having conducive surroundings is a luxury.
...well that must be easy enough when you're limited to just an orchestra... Will have to try to write that way soon. Really, would prefer to start with paper and pencil. (Have done so a little, but crudely.) But it requires I either limit myself to a few instruments, like an orchestra. Or I get a lot better at making sounds with a number of synthesizers. I can work with a few but haven't managed too well with Oatmeal or Pentagon. I guess MiniMoogV and Synth1 have been easy. Going from paper to endlessly wandering through presets is just no good. I need to get better at making sounds I guess... I dunno. Part of me wants to just keep the composing a light thing lately. Just continue with the 'duh, it sounds ...ok' composition method.
I guess there's something (a lot) to be said for just getting really good with a few instruments. But I hate to limit myself. And if I'm going to do that I want to make sure it really is a great instrument. What are a few truly great synthesizers to get really good with? Synth1 is nice in that it can be learned fast but the sound is really not quite good enough. As to orchestras, I don't know if I'm quite there yet in terms of technology. Using East West Silver instead of Gold. To really get the nuance is not so easy, especially when taking into consideration the CPU usage and the need for constant rendering. I guess that comes back to the point of having it all written down beforehand.
Oh well stuff to do in the future.
One house we looked at is really reasonable and yet has a guest house. I'd like to not have to wear headphones while composing in the middle of the night. I think it's much harder on the ears.
