Guest Blogger, Amy Duncan

We “talked” with Andrew via email from London for our very first interview on Tending the Fire!

Tell me about your background experience as a musician.

I trained as a landscape architect, so I know about plants and flowers and design, and I ran my own landscaping company for a while until music took over my life. I don’t really have any formal music training. I of course learnt the basics from a music teacher while I was growing up, but after a while my piano teacher became exasperated with me as I didn’t practice, and if I did play it was not what was written on the sheet music. I remember her once saying, “If Mozart had meant it to be syncopated he would have written it syncopated!” and then she told me she no longer wished to teach me.

I took every opportunity to try and see live as many musicians and performers as possible—usually after gigging myself—so I used to go to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club and Pizza on The Park in London quite a bit, where I was inspired by many great musicians including George Shearing, Anne Hampton Calloway, Steve Ross, Blossom Dearie, Ray Charles, Richard Rodney Bennett and so many more!

When did you first know you wanted to be a musician?

I don’t think I’ve ever known I wanted to be a musician…it kind of just happened. I was asked to play at a retirement home years ago, so I learnt some music they would have appreciated—songs by Cole Porter, Gershwin, Jerome Kern and the like—and fell in love with it. I was amazed at the end of the concert they paid me too! It really snowballed from there. I learnt more repertoire, found myself in demand on the London Hotel circuit, learnt to sing and play at the same time, and then set up a band, an agency, a theatrical production company, and The Newsong Group. So music kind of found me really rather than the other way round. I do love it though…music has the power to move people in unknown ways regardless of age, sex, nationality, etc. I know it’s clichéd, but it really is a universal language.

I tour the UK with several shows that I have written and produced—one called Red Hot Coles, about Cole Porter and Nat King Cole, and another about Noel Coward, Irving Berlin and others, and at the moment a great showbizzy show called Wonderful Day, which is all about the wonderful Doris Day!  My latest venture is as producer and narrator in a new show called “When Peggy Met Ella,” with some fabulous UK jazz musicians celebrating Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald. Also have just started producing a really great music show called Blues Mother, Soul Sister, which is touring the UK—with the music of Nina Simone and Etta James.

I’m resident at The Wentworth Club, London, a prestigious Club where I play and sing at least three times a week, and I’m also their chief music consultant. So I’m liaising with and booking first-rate musicians on a daily basis.

When did you first start composing?

Nothing could have been further from my thought. It came about as I was sharing an apartment with a friend who was a guitarist and songwriter. I watched her work and asked her how she wrote songs (not thinking I would ever do so), and she said, “For me it’s just a series of chord sequences.” So I put her basic process into action one day and ended up with a song. I found myself writing songs that reflected how I was feeling emotionally at the time, and it became a great outlet for stress and aching heart.

How does your performance work inform you as a composer?

Over the years I suppose it must have informed me quite a lot. When I’m in performance mode I try to take the audience on a journey through the emotions—sometimes funny, or sad, and then rhapsodic—the whole gamut. So when it comes to composing I guess quite a bit of it is subliminal, but it’s about touching the emotions. Sometimes when people hear my compositions they are really moved by them.

Tell us about your group, The Newsong Group. How did that start?

The Newsong Group came about through a great friend of mine, a Christian Science  practitioner and teacher who suggested I write some tunes for kids to enjoy singing in Sunday school. I wrote  a couple and took them to  a Christian Science Youth Meeting in the UK about ten years ago. The kids loved what I had written and were clamouring for more, so I wrote more and got together with two old school chums who had always been part of the music scene with me at school and had stayed in touch through church and social meetings, etc. The three of us seemed to work so well together. Tamsin is our wonderful flautist and Airlie has a very special quality to her voice and seems to be able to convey the deep spirituality of the lyrics she is singing. Anyway, from there we produced our first CD, Songburst—Hymns With a Beat, that has sold really well all over the world. We then produced Gracenotes, which is much more reflective and healing, that’s doing its healing work all over the world, too. As the Newsong Group, we travel all over the UK doing hymn sings and concerts, and we took part in the Annual Meeting Hymn Sing in Boston four years ago, too, which was really great. I have had two of my hymns included in the first Christian Science Hymnal Supplement, and again, that was such a privilege. Next we produced Upbeats—Songs With Spirit, and we’ve  recently completed recording a fourth CD, Soulscapes…which I just love! Two  years ago  The Newsong Group did a highly successful tour of the West Coast in the US, with 20 or so concerts from Seattle to San Diego, in Christian Science churches, outdoors in parks and also at a multi-faith concert in Salem Oregon.

Last year I embarked on a solo tour of southern California, which really grew out of an invitation to play one of my songs, Peace, Love and Grace, at a dear friend’s wedding service in San Diego. At these solo inspirational concerts I was performing my new songs and sharing the composing process and my love of God with my audiences. Once again I was deeply humbled by the whole experience, as healing occurred for both me and my listeners.

How do you approach composition? What is your process?

Although when I first started composing on a very basic level it was perhaps “just a series of chord sequences,“ I think now more often than not I start with the melody…yep, I’m a melody man….you really can’t keep a good tune down! As far as possible, I try to remove myself from the composing process, particularly so when I’m writing the more religious, inspirational music. I very often have no idea what I’m going to compose when I come to my piano…I will sit at my beloved piano and let the ideas and melody flow through me. It sounds kind of weird, I know, but that’s when it really works. Literally minutes later I will have a new song or a new melody, it knocks me sideways, and can be a very emotional process, literally moving me to tears.

I’ve just written a new setting of The Lord’s Prayer that I’m really excited about. That’s a prayer which is universal to all Christians across the world. I’ve performed it at two church services so far, where it was very well received, and at a Christian Science Association meeting, and I also squeezed it in to one of my more recent cabaret shows. I’m hoping to record it very soon, both in English and Spanish.

Do you have a personal definition of creativity that you could share?

I’ve always been a somewhat “laissez-faire“ sort of a chap…in fact “It’ll be fine” is something I’m told I say frequently. I believe creativity is within all of us, but its hard to define what it is. I guess it’s allowing, letting ideas…letting them form into something tangible. I guess there is a knack to being receptive to the ideas when they come…grabbing them and turning them into something listenable. For instance, there’s one particular hymn I have loved for a long time: In Atmosphere of Love Divine, and I’ve always had it in my head that the tune I wanted to write for it should be calm and lyrical. But over the years the melody hadn’t presented itself to me. Then a while ago I sat at the piano with the words in front of me and a whole new idea was formed, and it wasn’t calm and lyrical at all. It was quite up-tempo and rhythmical, but it really worked. Thinking about it—“living, moving and breathing“—it should be full of vitality and energy, and perhaps that’s the message I was meant to hear. Its so not about me outlining how a song should be….it just happens, or rather, it already is!

Tell us about the work you do as a teacher.

Well…I sometimes can’t quite believe that I’m a music teacher. I teach privately and on an individual basis, and the ages range from four year-olds right up to grand-parents. It’s great to see the receptivity of the little ones, and how excited they can get when music begins to make sense to them! It’s also wonderful to see how adults can benefit from re-learning their skills they once knew as a child, and building on them. Adults that I teach find re-learning the piano a real “stress-buster.”

How does interaction with your students help to shape your view of the creative process?

With my students I’ve always approached music making less about technical wizardry and much more about enjoyment of the music. With the younger ones, I try to get them to “visualise” the music they are learning/playing. What does the music sound like? A bird? The sea? How does the music make you feel? Happy, sad, etc.? it’s quite amazing how differently the kids play when they believe in the music.

What inspires you? 

Life inspires me. We all have so much to be grateful for! And since becoming a daddy for the first time, life has taken on a whole different meaning. I think I’ve fallen in love all over again. I’ve recently written a new setting of Lullaby For A Child, a poem by Doris Peel, and I sing it to my daughter every night before bed when I’m not out gigging. It’s wonderful to see how quickly the calming melody (evidence of he divine Comforter at work) calms her into a safe sleep.

How does spirituality fit in with the music that you compose and play?

Spirituality is somewhat pivotal to the music I write and play. Spirituality has always been very important to the way I live my life. Every day now I find it astounding that I’m writing new settings and songs, and that people from all over the world are listening to them and appreciating them, and especially, being healed by them. Above it all, I know that I am indeed just an instrument of God, It’s God who ultimately moves me to write and compose and play and sing. It’s inspiring, moving and deeply humbling.

What profession would you choose if you weren’t a musician?

Oh my word! That’s a difficult one. I’ve always wanted to be able to dance like Fred Astaire—I guess lots of people have wanted to do that—but that’s sort of connected to music. I think perhaps I’d have liked to have been an art historian…I love the Renaissance and Florence and everything Italian!

What profession would you never do?

Again that’s hard—there are lots of professions I wouldn’t choose, but I think the one I would be worst suited to is an accountant…I’m terrible with numbers! That’s weird, because great mathematicians are supposed to have a link with musical prowess, so  something must have gone wrong there!

Access Andrew’s Watchfire Music page here:

http://watchfiremusic.com/composer.php?coid=76

Watchfire Music home page:

www.watchfiremusic.com