Opening-up to Openness in Music

Since putting the word ‘openness’ in my Twitter bio I’ve been asked on numerous occasions, online and in person, what I mean by this. In fairness, the idea’s been gathering steam in my compositional practice over the last couple of years, so I’ve been discussing the matter on the back of other mentions, too.

It turns out there’s a lot to say about openness, and it’s really not a new topic. As I sit here now Eco’s 50-year old tome The Open Work stares down at me from a high shelf – a book I really ought to re-read. I’m not going to squeeze all my thoughts on the subject into one blog post – that’d be silly. I’ll write a few of them over the coming months, probably years, especially in relation to individual projects as they take form. There are several in the offing that ought to generate some activity fairly promptly, so watch this space!

This post is a kind of personal introduction/contextualisation for the things I’ll post in future. There are lots of little bits-and-bobs I feel I ought to say that I can’t see fitting easily into posts of a more specific nature. So I’ll post them here, comfortable in the knowledge I’ll always be able to refer back to them at a later date!