Egg

Egg

to Mora Beauchamp-Byrd

When you get there, you breathe out.

And, I suppose, going by Darwin's calculation,

We did pretty well to travel this far,

Through the seas of so many names -

German, Abyssinian, Jewish, Scots,

Spanish, Mayan.

Family tree.

Your name sounds French to me .

And you sing the blues, Mademoiselle Longhair

You sing the blues!

So, friend, we are connected by ships,

And rice, and sing-song stories of vanished mammas

Who couldn't be mammas to themselves

And our new gleaming world,

So nearly impossible. Blinding. Bejewelled. Impossible.

Encircled. We are

History circling. Forever. Impossible.

For she is dancing fearful

Jaguar whispers

At our strong, smooth backs, and

She is coming for us.

She is

History

In an ermine coat.

'Take what you need, girls.'

And so, at last, we did.

Before planes, telephones,

Answer machines, paper.

Or the knowledge of water

Brought us again

To this.

*

I am beginning this book carrying only what I can hold in my hands: manuscript paper, pencil, eraser, words to a friend that will open the latest work in progress - a solo show that opens soon.

I am starting from now. Now I am folded into myself and my dreams are mixed with all the music I have ever written or will ever write. For I am writing time for myself. I am lost in time, making space. I am in the strange solitude of a composer. A midnight plane.

'Why wait? Write something down.' This is how it always starts. And then the sound of a dripping tap, a door slam, a motorboat, breathing, a distant laugh; all of this becomes material. You enter the subway of your unconscious and start writing from memory. You stay home all hours and share secrets with yourself. You get yourself to a point where you can't turn back; you trick yourself; you sit still. I can't turn back.

*

When I was nine I was walking along the road with my Uncle Arthur - we were on our way to Ridley Road Market to buy fruit and vegetables for the week. I told Uncle Arthur that I could hear 'all these sounds in my head' but I didn't know what to do with them. Uncle Arthur suggested that perhaps I was a composer.

I am a composer. A composer of classical music. As I read that sentence again, I am not completely sure how this happened to a girl born in Belize and brought up in Tottenham. My life has often felt as if I've been walking backwards and forwards through a maze of a thousand reflecting glass doors with no handles. Nevertheless, here I am. Composing found me. It crept up on me, tapped me on the shoulder, tackled me to the ground and wouldn't let me out of its grasp. As a baby lying daydreaming and singing in my cot, or as a little girl, trailing off mid-sentence while talking to someone, as a fledgling dancer, moving to whatever music I heard, as a recalcitrant schoolgirl walking along the road singing intervals, making up imaginary television jingles for washing-up liquid as I stood at the sink doing chores for my parents, I always lived in a parallel world - gripped in the vice of the immortal, invisible world of music. As I dreamed about playing the piano, dreamed of myself as an opera singer on an imaginary stage, as the fire raged inside, I was composing. There has always been music and sound in my head and I have always tried to shape those sounds, whether consciously or unconsciously. I was making up music way before I recognised that that was my essential activity and purpose in life. I am glad that I didn't ask permission for any of this as I would have faced even more derision and ridicule than I did. I am glad that I eventually gave myself the permission to do this thing, which, to me, is as natural as breathing.

 But it has made 'normal' life tricky.

*

There is not one way of being a composer, just as there is not one way of living on this earth, or of walking on it, but being a composer is a distinctive way of inhabiting and looking at the world:

Tree. I am looking out of a window. I am looking at a tree. I am looking at a line of trees.

To the edge of my vision is the Thames, a faint gash of blue-grey. People walk up and down the long path, passing the line of trees. Some limp, a few sway from side to side as they walk. A woman stops to check her phone. Three people stand chatting. Children skip and hop their way along the path. A dog leaps.

What can you see? This is a question I ask my students when I instruct them to notate the rhythms of the movement of the wind in the trees.

Everywhere is motion at thousands of different speeds. And that doesn't include the layers upon layers upon multilayers of motion and micro-motion which is the River Thames.

I tell my students that they can focus on a single leaf or the movement of a clump of leaves, a branch, the whole tree or the entire line of trees. I say, 'Write down the rhythm of the movement that you see. You can collect these over several sessions. Come back next week with bars containing only rhythmic patterns; forget about pitches. This is a looking exercise.'

*

Because my acceptance as a composer has not been a straightforward journey (perhaps because of the colour of my skin and the ingrained perceptions of what a composer is and can be), in my work and teaching I feel impelled to fling wide open the doors on my world for others to walk through with me, sharing the pathways and practicalities of creating music, as well as illuminating the personal experiences that shape it. It gives me pleasure to share the joy.

It is rare for me to keep a detailed record of the process of composing a piece right up to the performance but in a demonstrated talk I gave for ResCen (a research centre founded with fellow artists Ghislaine Boddington, Shobana Jeyasingh, Richard Layzell, Rosemary Lee and Graeme Miller) at Middlesex University and later at our conference NightWalking: navigating the unknown at the Southbank Centre, I decided to document, as honestly as I could, all the stages of composing and rehearsing a new work in order to shine a light on this activity for a non-specialist audience.

Dervish is a piece that was inspired as much by the sound of the word as by its meaning. I worked my way into the music from the word 'dervish' and what it meant to me. Early in the year 2001 I had received a call from Matthew Sharp inviting me to compose a cello and piano piece for him to perform with Dominic Harlan at the Wigmore Hall. This piece would form part of a series of miniatures. Matthew is a dear friend and as he was speaking on the phone - asking me if I would compose something for him - I came up with a title immediately: Dervish. I had no idea where it came from but it was as if I immediately knew what sort of piece would capture his and Dominic's personalities. I could somehow sense the piece without having a note of it written. From Matthew's commission to the point of me actually sitting down and composing it was six months. To be precise, I started putting notes on the page only three weeks before the concert. Here is the programme note I wrote for it. It describes what I wanted to achieve:

Dervish dances are different from many Westerners' perception of them. There is absolutely no hedonistic wildness; the swirling skirts move from rapt and still devotion. An intense, trance-like state is where the music begins. I wanted to capture this atmosphere and also set it beside the passion that is in speed. The Sufi dance is solely for worship; my Dervish is in celebration of the rapturous sound of Matthew and Dominic playing together.

In the months before composing the piece I'd listened to a recording of Turkish Sufi music and had been struck by how spellbindingly concentrated it was. You could hear that prayer was at the heart of it. At the time, I was finishing off an opera and was highly...