This collaborative project involved me and a team of composers working with the Birmingham School of Acting and the director Chris Monks. I worked with two other first year composers from my course; Adam Pennington and Lily Loraine Smith.

This project started around October when we had a meeting with Chris Monks. This was to discuss the style of music that he wanted for the production and also the different songs and fills that we were required to write. This gave us a rough idea of the amount of work that this project would take. This first meeting helped us to establish which areas we were each going to focus on within the group.

The next stage of our composition process was to to do research on the genre of music that the director told us he wanted the music to fit with. We used websites such as You Tube and Spotify to widen our knowledge on the musical era that the play would be set in. The director had told us that it is set in the late 1960’s.

We then had regular meetings with each other to start composing the music. In these meeting we worked with our individual ideas to develop pieces that would be relevant for the play. Once we had established the main ideas we started to develop scores of each of the pieces involved.

Despite many re-writes and discussions within the team and with the director, all of the required music was composed and ready for rehearsals. As part of the rehearsals we had to teach the cast the vocals for the songs. This was an amazing experience as it gave each of us the opportunity to work with the actors in a more hands on way.

Taking part in this project was a very stressful experience because of the short deadlines and frequent changes that were required by the director. To work with such a motivational production team meant that this project was a very rewarding process and is something that I am proud to have been part of. I think that it has benefited me greatly by providing me with an experience of being a composer in the collaborative industry. As this was one of my first collaborative projects I think it has been a great experience and I would highly recommend taking part in something of a similar nature.