How to start?

I find starting a new composition terrifying. And the more I compose, the more terrifying it gets. Whether it’s a short piano piece or a large scale chamber work, I still devote much of my time and energy at the beginning of the compositional process to not starting. In fact one of the only times you will find my house in a tidy state is when I’m “starting” a piece. So as the prospect of actually having to write something huge actually became a reality, I decided by far the most sensible thing to do would be to block it all out and go and book a flight in a Gypsy Moth, the plane that Amy flew to Australia in in 1930. During this time I also read copious literature about blind flying (flying with only the instruments in the cockpit, necessary in low/zero visibility conditions), became an expert on thermal air currents and how to tell the different types from each other by examining the different cloud formations present, read a whole dissertation on David Beckham’s accent, transcribed lots of big band music, five Lily Allen songs, and watched a fair amount of 1960‘s BBC newsreader clips and several The only way is Essex episodes on Youtube, ALL in the name of research....

Although in part my insistence on understanding exactly how an “Artificial Horizon Indicator” works in a Gypsy Moth may have had something to do with delay tactics, in reality, really getting under the skin of what you are going to write about it vitally important. I’ll try to give a few instances to convince you below...

Unfortunately, when the day came to fly a Gypsy Moth, the wind conditions were too high, but my would-have-been instructor nevertheless took me out to see the plane in the hangar and let me climb inside. The most amazing thing about it was that you couldn’t see in front of you because the cockpit came above your site line, so, in order to see ahead you had to stick your head out the side! This was quite easy when on the ground...but at 80mph in heavy rain things would be very different...

Coincidentally I am the same height as Amy Johnson: a rather stunted 5 foot 4 inches, so I really could appreciate what it would have been like for her, stuck in that tiny cockpit for hour upon endless hour. This is something I’d not have really ‘known’ if I hadn’t experienced it, and that sense of not seeing ahead of you will be constantly in my mind when I’m writing the music to the scene where Amy and her husband Jim Mollison cross the Atlantic together. During the crossing they had to really put their trust in the instruments in the cockpit’s “dashboard” (I’m sure you don’t call it this but you know what I mean...) All those dials continually altering, and the skill in deducing the aircraft’s position through reading their combined data, will really have an effect on the musical fabric at this point in the work. For instance, when the plane is tossed about like a car on a bumpy road on the air currents, the altimeter would be varying by small-to-large amounts at a frequent rate. Whereas the compass would vary at a much more gradual, constant rate. The combination of these two types of movement, one erratic, one more constant, could be portrayed directly in the rhythm and melodic movement of, for instance, two of the instrumental parts. The way that all the dials come together to make some sort of sense, but are fairly useless individually, could effect the contrapuntal treatment of a particular passage (e.g. each part could be ‘incomplete’ itself, but add up to a coherent melody of texture when in combination with the whole ensemble).

Of course, one doesn’t need to take things so literally - this is just an example, and that sense of not being able to see out the aircraft will just be more of a ‘feelling’ that I keep in my mind whilst composing, which will very likely affect the harmonic and melodic choices that I make. But as I write this (and before I’ve tried it) I’m rather warming to that contrapuntal cockpit dial idea. Somehow that sense of individual elements (or instrumental parts) coming together to make more than a sum of their parts (as the altimeter, artificial horizon indicator and gyroscope can be interpreted together to give the pilot a very good or exact idea where they are in the world) seems rather appropriate both emotionally and compositionally. There’s something about subsuming the reality of what is inspiring the music into the compositional fabric of the music that seems to work, for me at least - not in order to make the audience think “Aha! that music represents the dials in the cockpit” - of course, that’s both impossible and rather inane, but, more specifically to recreate a mood or atmosphere that might help to conjure up the feelings that Amy and Jim might have experienced at that time in the minds of the audience. I don’t know. I’ll have to try it out....I’ll let you know how it goes...

But why David Beckham/TOWIE and BBC Newsreaders from the 60’s you ask? Well, each of the characters in the opera have very specific accents (Paula, a girl living near the Thames Estuary in 2010 has an estuary accent in my mind, whilst Jim Mollison spoke in very proper RP...), and in order to really get under their skins, I wanted to be able to really get as near to what would have been their voices into my ear in order to intuitively place these essentially-melodic vocal inflections into the music. Again, it’s not an exact copy I’m really after - this isn’t a big budget biopic where every gesture and vocal inflection of the lead role should be copied and perfectly reproduced after all. But our voices are so much part of us, and convey such a great deal of our characters, that it’s really important to me that I fully understand this before composing.

One specific example is Amy Johnson herself. I managed to find a ten minute clip of her which included quite a bit of footage of her speaking on Youtube. Even before she had touched down on Australian soil, Amy had become one of the first ever celebrities after being an unknown, underestimated pilot who many people thought should be occupying herself with finding herself a husband and cooking his dinner when she left Croydon airport at the beginning of her trip. One of the clips shows her being driven through the streets in an open top car, with a man supporting her elbow while she waves (as she was so exhausted after her flight that she hardly had the strength hold her arm up, but the public appetite for her was such that she was given hardly any time at all to herself to recover). She was a girl from Hull who had been thrust into superstardom, but in the video clips her slight awkwardness (or perhaps just exhaustion) is very evident. She tends to speak a little too fast, with fairly frequent awkward pauses where she struggles to think of things to say, and she has a tendency to place stresses on words which you wouldn’t usually stress. Melodically her voice is a fairly high monotone, with the odd much higher note when she says something like “I’m having such a wonderful time”. This overemphasis on the word “such” gives a sentence like this a kind of forced nature - a feeling of having to perform for the public and pretending to be oh-so-delighted see everyone - which perfectly conveys her situation at the time.

Amy said she felt more at home in the air, so one of my ideas was to let her sing completely fluidly and un-stint-edly when she was either flying or talking about flying, which would contrast to parts of the opera where she was talking about other aspects of her fame which she was uncomfortable with, whereupon some of the vocal traits noted above might come to influence the content of the vocal line. It’s amazing how an awareness of this has really helped me define Amy’s character and give her an identity in the actual musical material of the opera. And exactly the same goes for Paul with her estuary accent, and Jim with his plummy Queen’s English...

Oh, more about Lily Allen in a later post...