How I Walked Into a Story and Came Out With a Song: A Journey Into the Invention of Music From Words

How I walked into a story and came out with a song: A journey into the invention of music from words is a book that sheds light on the mystery and power of creativity. Through short stories, songs composed based on the stories, and interesting, highly revealing narrative essays on the creative process involved in deriving music from works of fiction, author and musician Richard Philip captures for us aspects of the multidirectional, recursive process involved in creative cognition. Artists tend to hide or oversimplify the thought processes that go into the making of their works mainly because of a desire to preserve the mystique around their gift and the fear that scrutinising their creative process may inhibit creativity.
But Philip, through careful observation and description, delicately depicts the process of engaging with textual narratives to compose melodies and song lyrics. You can access free of charge the audio recordings of the songs printed in this book on Philip's website - more details inside. A rich, coherent and illuminating collection of creative texts, this book contains nine short stories, six of which are accompanied by song lyrics and beautifully crafted essays that offer a behind-the-scenes view of the thinking process that went into the work of composing songs from stories. While each chapter can stand alone, the reader would do well to read this book like he or she would a novel, that is, from beginning to end, without skipping chapters, because every section reveals a little bit of the bigger story of the human imagination.
From the Acknowledgments page, Foreword, Preface and Epigraph, right up till the final chapter, one senses a poetic flow and sincerity of thought that connects and extends the different sections of this volume in the reader's mind in much the same way the movements of a symphony overflow into each other to form a holistic experience. Each story in this collection - including, Mutton Curry, which was shortlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize 2017/18, and placed on the Honorary Mentions list of the 2018 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition - is a search for meaning, truth and beauty; each song is an attempt to evoke states of consciousness that cannot be rendered merely by words; and each essay on process is an elegant and honest account of the currents of creative action. This book is the product of a one-year research project carried out as part of the Master of Arts in Music program at the Waikato Institute of Technology in Hamilton, New Zealand.
As part of his research, Philip documented the process of composing songs from stories via the research methodology known as Practice-Based Research, which involved keeping a written record of his creative practice in the form of a handwritten journal and the maintenance of audio records as evidence of the ongoing composition of melodies and lyrics. Having passed through a robust peer review process this book is a valuable repository of artistic works and insightful documentation of creative action. It lifts the veil on a heavily guarded secret, giving people a rare glimpse of the magic that happens when you seek out tunes from your imagination.
Readers will discover ways to derive music from texts. They will learn how a morphing combination of imagery, metaphor, and dialogue can crystallize themselves along a melodic thread. They will find out how to interact meaningfully with the things they read. Essentially, this book is about how to take something good from the world and leave something good behind.