I recently had the opportunity to explore an area of music that I was familiar with as a listener but completely inexperienced with as a composer and what an experience it turned out to be.

My father, Jim, was turning 75 and I was thinking about possible gifts for his birthday. We have always been extremely close and I wanted to get him something special and memorable but also very personal.
He shares my love of music and has been an avid Opera fan his entire life. In fact from his teenage years onwards he has pretty much listened excusively to Opera his so a musical gift, particularly  Opera theme would seem to be a suitable way to go.

However over the years I'd pretty much exhausted this line of present buying. The family had bought nearly every possible Opera CD and DVD as well as books, tickets to live performances and all manner of other paraphernalia. With two months to go to his birthday I was no closer to coming up with a solution until one day I had an idea. Sitting as a passenger on a flight to New York, glass of wine in hand, Opera playing on my ipod,  it came to me. I'm a composer, why not simply write him an Opera....

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OK so not quite so simple. A couple of slight problems not the least of which being that I had less than 8 weeks in which to do it, I had no idea how or even if I could do it and on top of that I had a ton of other film and music business that I was going to have to move around to make this happen.

Nonetheless the more I thought about it the more I thought it might be the perfect gift.  So I sat about working out how I might achieve it. A few things were obvious straight away, firstly that there was not going to be enough time to write an entire Opera even if I knew how so I was going to have to settle for the main Aria which seemed like an achievable goal.  I have been a proponent of David Allen's Getting Things Done or GTD approach to time management and goal setting for several years and I decided to use this to start setting some goals to ensure I could complete the project on time. One of the techniques that GTD proposes is to mentally envisage a project as completed as completely as possible, called "starting with the end in sight". I imagined exactly what the finished result would look and feel as if I was there, in the future, handing the gift to my father. This helped me get clarity on exactly what was going to be required and what steps would be needed to get me there. I then set deadlines and benchmarks for the next 8 weeks to make sure it was all completed on time. It was important to be able to hand it to him on his birthday.

The finished product I imaged would be an original aria, custom written and composed for my father, with lyrics specifically written to express my gratitude for his faultless fathering over the years. He is a huge fan of the great Italian tenors like Pavarotti, Carreras and Domingo so that made the decision easier. It had to be a piece for a Tenor voice, ideally sung in Italian and I decided to go for a style that would pay homage to great arias like Nessun Dorma.  I imagined it would be perfect to be able to sit him down on his birthday and present him with the track, recorded onto CD, along with a printed and bound copy of the manuscript and lyrics with some words explaining what the project meant to me.  I also decided to video document the process to make a short behind the scenes DVD that could be included in the package.

So began what would become one of the most incredibly satisfying and important musical projects I've ever undertaken. Read more in Part Two