In these austere times, what could be more thrifty than to turn a single work into three separate ones?

I’ve been lucky enough to have various pieces of music written for me over the last few years and it makes a lot of sense to try to get as much out of them as possible. I say ‘lucky’ but of course it’s a lot of work to drive your own projects, as all creative people know. The first performance is relatively straightforward to find (novelty factor); the second more difficult but essential if you want to apply for funding for a commission and need to show that the piece isn’t just getting one semi-public performance in a church hall; many new works get no further than than that, even those by Composers Of Note. So, I am determined that where I do have some control over my material, I want to extend it as far and in as many different directions as I can.

At the moment I’m working with Joe Austin, director and dramaturg, to convert A Voice of One Delight – a piece originally written as a concert work – into a fully-staged monodrama. This is with the express intention that it should become a very small touring production able to pack away into a suitcase (perhaps not quite literally) and be affordable for small venues and festivals.

Transferring it to the stage, we’ll reduce the instrumentation from a three-piece chamber ensemble to a lone pianist and revise the spoken text. I still get to do all the singing and speaking in this new version but it may feature some new characters. After all, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and various other writers and diarists were in Italy with Shelley at the time of his death and there’s a lot of discussion of it in their private correspondence and published work.

The need to investigate these options has given me a great reason finally to join the British Library and I have been a regular in the Rare Books Room for the last couple of weeks, ploughing through the amazing range of primary sources that I now have access to. Joe is racing back and forth between London and Leeds (Opera North) in order to work on our project and we drink pints of coffee and scoff biscuits while brainstorming how to work within the structure imposed by the existing musical score. This is an interesting puzzle, and a great opportunity for me to learn from Joe’s expertise with text and storytelling.

We have two confirmed performance dates in August to show our work as part of Tête-à-Tête: The Opera Festival (click here for details), so we now have to get our skates on. We’ll find out how the piece works in its new form, prior to actually starting to market it and we’ll have the benefit of Tête-à-Tête’s Audience Survey which explores in detail the public’s response to new work after each show.

Funding the project is a whole other story. We have an application in to the Arts Council for a contribution but our presentation of the piece will be profoundly affected by how much money we have to work with. The basics required for rehearsal – a decent-sized room, a piano that’s in tune, a pianist and a score – are fixed costs before we even think about what we might need as props or costume etc.  And that’s with the venue and technical costs covered by our participation in Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival.

If we do get some funding, Joe and I might even be able to pay ourselves a little for the many hours we have already given to the project – if not, we will regard it as an investment. It’s ok to do this occasionally, but it isn’t a realistic solution. So many projects only make it because they are trading on goodwill and the hope that they will lead to something else. This is not a sustainable model for creativity if we want to eat and pay our rent and is one of the key things I will need to address if I want to continue to develop my own work with colleagues whom I respect and admire.

So that’s one of the strands of activity for A Voice of One Delight – what are the others?

An expanded version of the same piece looks set to fly in 2014 as one half of a double-bill tour with Nova Music, conducted by George Vass and directed by Richard Williams. We’ve changed the name to Prometheus Drowned, just to keep the identity of the two projects clearly separate. More information on this project here.

Oh, and the original concert version will appear on a CD of Stephen McNeff’s music that I am recording with Champs Hill Records in October 2012. More information on this project here.

Now that’s what I call getting your moneys’ worth.