Composing Confessions
The Writing and Writing of a Song Cycle
Overview
Researcher: Courtney Cousins
I write (music) and I write (text). I have often done both simultaneously, whether in songs, choral works or even an entire opera, but I have yet to investigate how this dual writing of mine complicates and enriches my creative process. How does the choice of word affect the music, from surface detail to the underlying structure of a composition? Further, how might engagement with literary concepts translate to, and thus innovate, my compositional approach?
In literature—novel, poem or essay—experimentation with technique and form has reinvented how readers engage with a text and the world it creates. Poststructuralist theories of representation have encouraged techniques that break with linear narrative and emphasise a text’s constructed nature. How relevant to non-fiction, which exists in constant tension between its constructed representation of a thing and the thing itself.
In this project, I propose the writing and writing of a non-fictive song cycle. I have chosen a personal subject: the life and stories of my grandma, who has asked me to write her memoir for many years. This raises challenges: the ethics of writing about family, translating the technique of novel, poetry and essay to libretto, and negotiating music’s imposition of linear time on text. By documenting this process, I hope to prove how together, writing and writing might be understood as simply composition.
Image: Judith Gruer on the occasion of her debut, 1957. Used with permission from Judith Cousins.