Musical Writing Residency - day 4: The Residency Cottage

Sketch a day - Day 183/365

We have been working super hard this morning. Josh notated the melody and music for the whole of the song we have been working on over the last couple of days. At the moment it's working title is ‘Tuesday’, and we think it will open the show. So it's a big moment to have completed all the music for this number. We have a partial lyric which we will be working on beyond the residency too.

While Josh was doing that I was sketching some new musical melody ideas for other songs in the show (musicals have LOADS of songs. Guess the clue is in the name, but it's surprised me just how many songs we need).

We did some reflection on the Tuesday song writing process (because this residency isn't just for creating material. It's also about us exploring how we write together. Really interesting stuff came up.

Now Josh is doing some work with the song sketches I did earlier and is doing some solo improvisation. This is quite a different way of writing than the way we used to create Tuesday. So again, each song we are writing we are thinking about experimentation and different ways to write music together.

While he's been doing that, I have been sketching the cottage we are staying in and writing this blog.

It's an incredible thing to have a week away like this.

I think of a young man I follow on Instagram called Kareem Abu Kwaik who is a beautiful human and a UN ambassador for children, under siege in Gaza. https://www.instagram.com/kareem_abu_kwaik?igsh=MXdpcGZsOWRjbHRtZw==

He posts videos about hope to remind the world that everyone in Gaza is a human being with dreams. His dream is to be a doctor. He is extraordinary. I hope with all my heart he lives to become a healer. He will be an amazing doctor. Follow him if you can. He gets a lot of hope from knowing people out here in the world care about Gaza and stopping the Genocide

How can it be that someone who loves peace and wants to do good in this world, is daily fighting to stay alive, while the world watches?

Delight, dreaming, horror sadness, joys. All mingling and threading into a new kind of reality.

I don't have more or better words about any of this right now.

That's the news.