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To accompany WNO’s Liberty or Death! season, director Tim Hopkins is planning an online music video project called ‘Occupation’. Interested in the current phenomenon of revolutions and other important events being played out on the streets and online, he has invited various musicians (I am one) to immerse themselves in current international news reporting, to follow a particular situation as it develops, and to write a song about it – which will be filmed as a music video.
The pesky thing about this project is that we are trying to be up-to-the-minute, as far as the usually glacial timescales of musical composition and film creation will allow. We composers have a window of ten days within which to identify a subject, write the song and send it to the singer. After that, our film director will have a similarly frenetic week to publish the video online.
My window begins on September 14th; it occurred to me that it would be appropriate to liveblog this experience (albeit rather slowly by news media standards). So here’s instalment one: today Tim visited me and we had a cup of tea. We talked about how interesting it is to hear the perspective of people trying to lead ordinary lives while great events are unfolding around them - like Mass Observation in WW2. Where do you find those stories today? Presumably on Twitter, via reporters like Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin. Soon I’m going to have to start immersing myself, ready to pounce on my subject when the day comes. More later.
STOP PRESS! Liveblogging will continue at an even slower pace than anticipated; my WNO slot now begins on November 10th. See you soon.
