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.
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. Readers 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. This book is about how to take something good from the world and leave something good behind.
Watch videos of Richard Philip performing the songs featured in the book!
In Richard’s debut novel: The Bending of Strong Forms, the narrator Selah embarks on a journey to find out why he gave up his existence as a timeless, eternal being to live in a world bound by time. Through a sumptuous feast for the imagination that includes outrageous dreams, numinous memories, and extraordinary but plausible connections between quantum physics and the soul, Selah tells the reader a magnificent story that reads like a fiction but feels like truth.