A well-worn expression and very apt although a little modification is necessary: facing the blank manuscript where the music will emerge.

About composition, the two questions I am most frequently asked are, where do you start and are you pleased with what you have written? I’ll deal with the second one first!

Are you pleased with what you have written?

It’s really not up to me to be pleased or not with what I’ve written. Rather it is up to me to please others with what I have written and by others I mean the performers and the audience.

Those two constituencies see music from very different viewpoints. The performer gets into the guts of the music. They usually know considerably more about their instrument than I do, but I am the one who is imagining and creating what they might do with that instrument within the scope of the piece.

The audience experiences the music as a journey, hopefully with lots to interest, engage and stir them along the way. For the composer, these two viewpoints ask on the one hand for technical assuredness and on the other for creative originality – the inspired and inspirational re-organisation of sound.

Where do you start?

Now to the first question – where do you start? I start to think (dream) about a piece from the moment that I know it needs to be written. For the BBC Concert Orchestra Proms commission this was early in March, so I was mulling over the shape, content and purpose of the piece for about two months before putting anything on paper.

Within that contemplative period, I am considering, my performers, my audience, the occasion, the concert hall, and the companion pieces in the programme as well as listening inwardly to all the sounds that contemplation evokes. Once those sounds begin to coalesce and in effect become so numerous that they clog up my cranial hard drive, the next part of the process kicks in.

This is the doodle phase and it began on 15 May. Now, using one of my pencils specifically selected for the composition, I start to fill the manuscript with numerous notational doodles and text reminders of how I intend to use the musical snippets.

The first manuscript doodle page is captured in the image where you can see there are lots of pencil jottings, some simple single instrument lines, others more worked through across a notional group of instruments. Accompanying these are arrows, occasional words and even some rather disembodied figures. I enjoy the freedom and randomness of this process as it gives ideas the space to grow, develop and change.

A second block of manuscript exists alongside for me to set down some of the ideas in more detail and more extensively. Other phases follow of which more in the next blog.

One more thing to say this month which is, the piece has a title. I am calling it Seascapes to bring to life the coastal setting of Great Yarmouth where the BBC Concert Orchestra is in residence in a partnership project with Orchestras Live.

The local people are loving the experience of hearing a live orchestra in concert and I want to give them a piece which reflects the colour and character of their setting. As John Masefield wonderfully illustrates in his poem, Sea Fever: