Halfway down the path
by Caitlin, 17 June 2015
It feels strange to be starting up a new website and ‘starting’ to blog about Crossing Dartmoor at this point. I feel like I’m coming in halfway down the path and like there’s far too much to catch up on in a single starting post. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, “Let me explain… No, there is too much: let me sum up”
Crossing Dartmoor began long before I even thought of it, when I encountered Richard Long’s work in a solo exhibition, Heaven and Earth, at the Tate Britain in 2009. I loved that show. Was totally blown away by it, so when Simon Marsh asked me to write him a song cycle about Dartmoor, I remembered that Richard Long had made a number of textworks about Dartmoor. I asked for his permission to use these as song texts and, much to my delight, was given this and started work in late 2013, as I started the year-long research project which makes up the second year of Trinity Laban’s Master of Fine Arts Creative Practice degree.
Over the course of that project, I blogged several times about the work, so this might be an appropriate point to link to some of these:
- The power of the single idea: How playing the comb is improving my composition [20 February 2014]
- Chance vs choice: Composing with dice [12 March 2014]
- Justifying normal [27 March 2014]
- Adventures in amateurism [14 April 2014]
After April my blogging kind of petered out as I became engulfed by writing up my dissertation, so while it seems odd to be starting again here, it’s also kind of nice. Putting together a performance of a work also raises different questions to composing it, and I’m looking forward to seeing what my performance team for Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival (Simon, Alex and Omar) find to write about their parts in the process.