Mon 28th August

Arrived at school at 7.45am.  After being introduced to the head teacher and Ulla, the other music teacher involved in the project, Kirsten and I proceeded upstairs to the classroom to arrange the seating and instruments for the day's session.

From about 8am the students started to appear and I encouraged them to take out their instruments and warm them up for the session.  When everybody had arrived we played a few noisy games to get the quieter students used to volume.  Whilst we were doing this, my two guest musicians (Henrik and Helene) arrived and joined in.

 
At 8.30am we began the session properly with myself explaining that over the next three days I was going to work alongside them and jointly compose a musical piece based on Bjorn Nørgaard's glass-frieze picture, 'Jeg Gik Mig Over Sø Og Land', and that the plan was that we would all perform this piece with slide projection accompaniment on the Thursday morning at the town's main theatre.

The classroom teacher (Kirsten) then showed the students the slides of Bjorn's picture that we would be using and explained to them the general idea behind the work.  Afterwards she gave each student a two-page colour photocopy of the work for their own reference and then discussed with them what all the various parts of the picture might signify.

Colour Photocopy page 1:  The Left Hand Side of Jeg Gik Mig Over Sø Og Land

Colour Photocopy page 2:  The Right Hand Side of Jeg Gik Mig Over Sø Og Land

I then asked the students how it might be possible to write a piece of music about such a picture.  Trine had the idea that as the work depicted life's journey, so too the music should travel the length of the picture and depict (in sound) the various images.  I asked her to give me some examples of what she meant.  She chose a couple of sections from the work, for example the symbol of the wolf, and described how the music might sound.  (In this case, she chose dark, low, but quick sounds, suggesting a combination of piano low rumblings and rapid low trombone sounds).  Henrik and I tried out her idea on the piano and trombone and with a bit of help from Trine refined our playing until she was happy with what we were producing.  We then discussed the effectiveness of the idea with the students.

I then asked for other suggestions from the picture and the rest of the students gradually chipped in with their ideas, describing sounds that might be associated with the different parts.  In the same manner as before we tested the ideas with instruments, allowing the initiator of the idea the opportunity to alter the sounds to his or her liking.  For example, it was recommended that the sounds for the rabbit (symbolic of the rushing rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland") was played first of all with the xylophones playing a repeated rhythm (to signify the ticking of the rabbit's clock, a cymbal smash to show the rabbit's surprise when he looks at the clock and sees just how late he really is, and some ascending flamenco style guitar chords to depict him rushing off in an even greater hurry.  This whole section was then repeated a few times but with increased speed each time to enhance this fight against time.

After break we began on the composition proper starting with the first part of the picture (Thor's hammer and the waves) and gradually worked through.  We carried on like this till the end of the morning, and then I recorded the student's work.  Although, by this stage, we had only covered the first two segments of the work (out of a total of eleven) we had actually covered a lot of ground.  The picture had a lot of information contained within its beginning frames, and the students had now gained enough confidence to work at a speed I was happy with.

When the session with the students was over I worked alone with Helene and Henrik, my guest  musicians.  We talked through the music composed so far and discussed their involvement with it as co-performers and also as helpers.  We then played through the various sections that had involved them and experimented with extending some of the ideas.  This was done really to enable the three of us to become more familiar with each other's playing rather than simply rehearse any parts.