MUSIC
Richard is a vocalist, songwriter and guitarist. You can listen to his songs on SoundCloud where you'll find music from his album, Splendid Love. Its title song was featured in a compilation album, The Diamond Collection, released in Los Angeles, California, in 2007. You'll also find songs he's written for other projects including stage plays, musicals and performance art pieces.
Richard conducts workshops that help people turn their creative energies into artworks. Although his focus is in music and writing, his workshops are useful for any form of creative practice.
His method is to ask participants to keep an artistic journal in which they track their creative process, and consolidate their prose, songs, as well as ideas and blueprints for plays, dance pieces, paintings, or other kinds of artistic work they may be involved in, and use their reflections on process as motivation to complete their works.
Music and creativity - a personal reflection
By Richard Philip
Music making is a remarkable use of the imagination and a sign of the generative powers of the mind. Everyone is born with the ability to make music.
Just go back to the time when you were a kid: weren’t tunes and songs among the first things you invented?
Perhaps you were singing a jingle or nursery rhyme, but even if the words and tunes weren’t yours, it was your rendition of them - the spirit you put into your performance, the energy you channeled into the movement of your vocal cords - that was original; as unique as your fingerprints.
The problem is, as time passes, some of us neglect this music-making muscle and it gets rusty. But your gift is only dormant, not extinct.
Music offered me a way to understand the structures, techniques, and essence of creative work.
It awakened me to the complexity within me, gave me a way to experience and understand it, to make sense of it, and to translate it into life-affirming insights.
This in turn developed a sense of confidence, a sort of inner courage to be able to handle different kinds of complex information. An example of this is music’s role in my quick mastery of medical journalism during my career as a science writer.
In my view, it is worth asking whether an understanding of music can help a person approach the creation of not just literary forms (songwriting, poetry, fiction, feature writing, etc), but also nonliterary forms such as painting, dance, sculpting, etc, or even new ways of thinking in the fields of psychology, medicine, engineering, architecture, law, and so on.
While it is clear that each of these fields rely on unique imaginative and intellectual thought processes, it is plausible that the capacity to appreciate, understand and create music is a common denominator within the root system that connects all fields of thought. This music-forming capacity could, therefore, help in reconstructing the way thinking is done in different arenas of human activity.
For sure, the true nature of music will remain a mystery and there are many reasons why it would be good for this beautiful aspect of the human experience to remain so: often, the best works have come from an unconsciousness of the methods that went into producing them.
In my Master of Arts research project I explored how one can compose songs through writing and reading stories. My investigation showed that cross-pollination between separate fields (for example writing songs from stories, or choreographing a dance from a piece of prose, or making a painting based on a song, etc) frees the imagination and leads to innovative works.
My experience in using music as a starting point for creating literary works
I’ve composed songs, written two books (one is a book of research on creativity, and the other is a novel), written scripts for the stage, worked as a copywriter and as a medical journalist. Music acted like a current that motivated my engaging with different fields.
Music and the English language were the first artistic forms that made an impression on me as a child. The English language captivated me partly because it was the language of my favourite songs and stories. Very early on, I learnt to appreciate how words had a musicality about them, and, inversely, how music had a way of evoking words and expressions that embody our highest thoughts and feelings.
On the right hand side of this page you'll see photos and brief write-ups on some of my projects whose creative processes have borrowed from music.
Below: How music plays a role in creating literary and dramatic works.
Night is about a few strangers who get together to spend their last night on earth. The idea came to Richard when he was listening to Chopin's Nocturne No. 20 in C-sharp minor. He was working as a medical journalist at that time, so he had to write the script in short bursts, on weekends. The five-day breaks between writing were disruptive. Nocturne provided the continuity he needed to maintain the flow of the narrative and dialogue. He would loop the track on the CD player and write as the piece went on in the background. Practically the whole script was written on Friday and Saturday nights as Nocturne played on. Music has the power to breathe life into the stories that lie dormant within us.
Together with co-director Law Soo Leng, Richard conducted feedback sessions with fellow artistes to get a sense of their thoughts and feelings as they went through weekly rehearsals spread over a period of 8-9 months. While the themes that arose from the discussions and research surrounding the work did not directly influence music composition, they nonetheless contributed to the emotional pool that musicians tap when they write songs. Richard experimented with chord progressions until he arrived at one that resonated with broad aspects of the human condition, such as pain, mystery, sorrow and injustice. The song, “Mr Mystery” was born. It served as a musical description of the paradoxical forces at the root of crimes against humanity.
Duet is a contemporary dance piece resulting from a collaboration between choreographer and composer. The work led to an interesting exploration of space, time and sound. Silence is alive with music and, modern dance, with its juxtaposition of movement sequences bearing different time signatures, for example, can create the kind of intellectual ambience conducive to the creation of copacetic melodic lines. The contemporary dance work was also a good case study on how music can leaven, empty or fill the collective mind of an audience primarily engaged in its visual field. For example, decisions on the level of activity in the visual space had to factor in the level of activity in the sonic space and vice versa. Broadly speaking, choreographer-composer collaborations work well when practitioners of either form discover similarities in the other and speak using terms that indicate confluences. Terms like "sonic dance" and "visual music" carried along the collaboration smoothly.