I had a chat with Helen about trends and anomalies during my composition process. Very often I start a composition with chords that come to me when I play the piano. Above that, mostly wild improvising and searching results in the melody that has been waiting for the given chords. At the very end I’ve determined what message should be behind the music and have squeezed the words on the already existing melody with a lot of effort.
With the latest songs I’ve written, I’ve turned it around. The words flowed from somewhere and I started composing with a clear idea of what my song wanted to say. The songs were finished faster and the compositions were more cohesive.
In the actual case, I have already found melodic motifs to my painting and I’m asking myself: how do lyrics arise from a picture? What does it stimulate in me? Where are the connections between what I see and what I think? Maybe the first step should be to collect associations and then start improvising?
Helen has given me an exercise: collecting associations over 3 minutes that come to my mind when I look at my picture. This is what came out of it:
Fluffy
Interrupted
Unclear
Many things happen in parallel
against each other – with each other
Heaven on earth
Veiled
Warm
Open/wide
Upside down
Soil
Continuous
Where am I going? Why do I put the focus on the background? I am overlooking the main element -> Framed