I may live to regret the title of this post, as I've not received marks for my assignments yet. A mark of less than 50% would mean working over the Summer and re-submitting them. However, I'd rather be positive and assume that all is fine and dandy!
I haven't really blogged about the course this year, and that's mainly down to the fact that we've been pretty swamped with work. Even us part-timers had a fair bit to do, so I really feel for the full-timers who had an extra double module and will be doing their recording plan assignment over the Summer. Mind you, there are more tedious academic tasks out there than recording music! I love this course :-)
So for me, this term has been all about collaborating and re-writing. It's been a funny kind of term because it's been all about self-study and doing things off our own back, rather than having set tasks. So basically, we had to write with a minimum of five other collaborators and re-write at least four solo songs, then document the process and learning outcomes in the form of assignments at the end of term.
The collaboration module was great fun, everyone threw themselves in head first! Of course, the natural tendency was to write with other MA students, but there were some other very interesting collabs; for example, I wrote with someone who had never written a song before and another student wrote a song with their 4-year old daughter! I'm sure there were some other crazy collabs too that I'm not aware of - the essays must've made fascinating reading!
Rewriting was a much different task, one that a few people (myself included) found fairly awkward. We received a collection of critique after last year's solo songwriting module, and the challenge was to implement suggestions made to improve our songs. I made a bit of a hash of my first rewrite - I made the error of listening to too much critique and trying to implement everything. After that, I learnt the lesson that you must pick out only valid and constructive points - and always keep the focus of why you wrote the song in the first place.
It's an interesting task for any songwriter if you've never tried it before - seek a load of critique about one of your songs and try and rewrite it based on what people say. It can be really difficult to detach yourself from the song, but you may just find that you get a much better result. If the finished song is better, it doesn't matter how you got there!
Here's a couple of other little songwriting tasks that people may find helpful, especially if you're stuck in a bit of rut with your writing. You may find that some of these help to get you over writers block, or just get you back into it if you haven't written for a while:
- take a really old song that's long forgotten about (maybe the first one you ever wrote) and rewrite it completely. There's bound to be something in there you'll want to keep. Maybe use the concept and write new music, or keep the music and write totally new lyrics. It's an interesting idea - I did it with a track called 'Communication Breakdown' for the course. The original song was one of the first things I ever wrote - very average singer/songwriter stuff - so I turned it into an RnB pop song. You can hear the result here: http://www.myspace.com/patrickmcintyremusic
- take someone else's song and rewrite it. Again, you may end up changing little bits or creating a completely different song. This was one of our tasks this year; we had to rewrite another student's song. I loved this task. I chose Rebecca Cullen's song "You and Me", and didn't change it massively - just rejigged a few lyrics and did it in my own style. I don't think she has the original online but you can hear my rewrite at http://www.reverbnation.com/patmcintyre
So that's just a little taster of what us MA Songwriters have been up to this year. It's been great fun and the quality of music has improved massively since last year, especially some of the collaborative work. There is a school of thought out there that believes Songwriting can't be taught. This course is positive proof that it can be taught, in my opinion. The fact that every single person on the course is writing better songs than they were this time last year tells it's own story! Bring on year two :-)
I'll end with a little group photo of the MA Songwriters (unfortunately there's a couple of people missing). A diverse group of people I'm sure you'll agree, but with a reassuring bond of madness! I'm the one with the freakishly small head. I'll miss meeting up with everyone on a Tuesday, but look forward to staying in touch and making lots of music with them in the future.
PS - if anyone reading this is interested in the Masters course in Songwriting, I highly recommend it! Check out the Bath Spa website http://www.bathspa.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/songwriting.asp and get in touch with Mr. Andy West, who will be more than happy to answer any questions.
Over and out!
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