An Introduction: Doing Music & Being a Musician

Welcome to my new blog, Without Barlines – a space where my professional experiences and creative motivations can be shared openly and publicly. In line with my working philosophy, I’ll be treating musical practice and culture as a diverse field of interaction whose often-encountered partitions, which are many and varied, I see as serving only the most superficial functions.  On a personal level, I hope to be able explore and understand my own ideas more deeply by going through the process of preparing them for public consumption. I also hope (perhaps fancifully) that discussing and analysing my experiences in the musical field will provide musicians and those that care about music with new insights or perhaps simply alternative viewpoints to counterpoint their own experiences and ideas.

The context for starting this blog is colourful and varied. I’m generally classed as a composer. Indeed, this is perhaps my greatest strength as a musician and it’s certainly the area in which I’ve invested the most time and effort undertaking training. But I class myself as a musician – a more general term certainly, but one that more accurately portrays my professional activities and one that tallies with my firm belief that greater things can be achieved in the arts by embracing the diversity of the field. So, as a composer, I can talk about upcoming projects and work that I’d like to complete if only for the fact that I think it will make great music. I can talk about my processes and methods, the abandoned ideas and the surprising revelations. I can also talk about my disenchantment with parts of my back-catalogue and the various things that cause me to have identity crises as a composer.