Creating Art
Author: Stephanie Devlin, Blogger in Residence
Picture the scene… For weeks, you’ve been lying awake at night with concepts and ideas flooding your head. You’ve spent hours writing this piece of music, and now it’s finally finished. You wait with clenched fists as the singers rustle their music and the audience shuffles their feet in anticipation. What will it sound like?
Is it just me who fears the moment when you hear your piece performed? Suddenly, the power and the control rests in someone else’s hands rather than your own, and you’re entrusting that little piece of your heart, disguised in music, to those performers. Maybe I’m sounding a little overdramatic, but it is genuinely daunting. You’re relying on the people at the front to do your piece justice (whatever that means), and to deliver it in a way that speaks to people as you intended it to. It’s freeing in a scary sort of a way.
But then sometimes I mistakenly think that I’m the only one who cares, who understands the music and who wants to use it to make people feel. And that’s just not the reality. The actual written music is just one little piece of a much bigger puzzle! If you didn’t have performers, your work would just be a piece of paper, and if there was no one to listen, there would be no performance.
Recently, I heard the Strathearn Chamber Choir sing the premier performance of my piece, Still, at the Ulster Hall in Belfast. If you remember, one of my very first blog posts was on this piece, so it’s really special to be able to mark its journey in a sense. When I watching the girls sing, I was so struck by how much this piece was their piece. They understood what their role as performers was. Each one of them sang from the heart, singing about what their school meant to them and why it was worth singing about. It would have been hard for me in that moment to take any credit at all, for it was their singing that mattered, not my writing. And it’s humbling in a really good way!
As cliché as this whole blog post may have been, I just want to encourage those of you who compose to remember that your little role (and I’m constantly needing to remind myself that yes, it is a little role) is part of a much bigger process of creating art. And why is art so special? Well, art is all about creativity, expression and feeling. It’s about sharing something with others that is meaningful and personal. It’s beautiful and it’s unique. And isn’t it a privilege it is to be a part of making it?
I would love you to have a listen to my piece, Still, performed by the Strathearn Chamber Choir. This recording to me is ART- and I don’t say that to blow my own trumpet. I think this piece displays at its core what it means to create art – people working together to express something, and to make other people feel what they feel. I really enjoyed being involved in this project, so I hope you enjoy watching this video:
Strathearn Chamber Choir
Music: Stephanie Devlin
Words: Íde Simpson
Directed: Heather McIvor
Filmed: Seismic Media NI.
Written by Stephanie Devlin