Music
By Frances Gill
Music is a catalogue of my music writing and composing endeavours. I have always made up my own music from an early age. I wrote plenty of silly love songs when I was a teenager. A defining moment was when as music students we were given the job of writing the ending to a Haydn string quartet from an opening four bars. I remember making up a pastiche on the piano and then transposing an arrangement of it across the three different clefs taking care with the notation. In fact writing the score by hand became an added dimension to the process. I think because I had also taken the time to write out the parts for each player, the subsequent performance of it in class went so well because the music was easy to read. It was amazing to write something by hand and get music back from it. I was privileged to study composition during this period with Gary Carpenter who always ‘keeps it real’. Now, thirty years on, I work a lot with the software notation program Sibelius but I still love writing by hand and I still make up short songs and record them without writing the music down at all.
Frances Gill writing a piece for two tubes replicating a swan wing’s radius and ulna, on the back of a piece of wallpaper, 2015. Photo by Annika Grünwaldt Svensson.