Composer and Music Producer programme online residential, October 2020

During October half term, students on our Composer and Music Producer programme took part in an online residential with songwriter/producer MaJiKer and singer/composer Sarah Dacey.

Students learnt about different approaches to writing for the voice, as well as using words for composition. They also discovered how to use graphic score, unconventional notation and mood-board techniques to plan the composition and songwriting process visually, and experimented with the use of colour, both on the page when creating their pieces and as a sonic tool when exploring texture and emotional interpretation in musical performance.

With guidance from the tutors, students created new compositions either written for or inspired by words. These can be viewed below:

Hi, my name is Tilly and this is a love song I wrote with orange and pink colours in mind, like the sunset. 
It’s about missing someone that you love and wishing they were with you. I used a very simple chord pattern on the guitar so that you can really focus on the voice and the lyrics, and I put harmonies over the top to make it have more depth. 

I really enjoyed the project, I think it was really interesting to see how different all the pieces were even though we were all given the same brief. It was also nice to meet some people interested in music because most of my friends aren’t very musical, so it was cool to meet people with the same interest. I think Matthew was really nice, i didn’t feel pressured into doing anything and it was very much up to us on what we wanted to do, it was very open to interpretation. I just want to say thanks to all the people who made it happen and were involved in the process, it was a really cool experience! 

Oliver’s piece, called ‘Siegfried’s Fear’, reinterprets a scene from Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried. On a mountain top the titular hero is captivated by Brünnhilde, who is sleeping.

I really enjoyed working on this project – as it was something new and outside of my general composing style. Specifically, I focused on the voice, emphasising different pronunciations of different words, as well as composing melodic tunes, to reflect a bird. – Josh