Today I want to celebrate a couple of birthdays – composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, fiddle-player and road-builder Blind Jack Metcalf, and – whilst we don’t know her precise birthday – composer and musician Barbara Strozzi was baptised in August 1619. All these folks had obstacles in their way but carried on and found a way through. I’m thinking about music as a road – my singing teacher refers to the ‘line of song’, meaning the musical sense or journey that one expresses and leans into when singing.
So today’s prompt is to write your way through a journey and think of it like a song (it might actually be a song..). Where you meet resistance in your writing, or in your life, how can you lean into that and make it flow? Write yourself a road or a map, paying particular attention to lyrical and musical qualities in your language. Or use any of these musical/road-building heroes as inspiration or a starting point and write about them, their music or a journey they went on.
sl grange 