harmony! harmony!

Good news!

2012-01-08T00:37:00.000Z

The good news is that I may well have a performance of for three in the pipeline.
The ensemble handwerk and I are planning to put on a couple of performances of the piece, one in Cologne and one in Edinburgh. More to follow hopefully.
Other works in the pipline this year include:

a piece for solo organ (probably microtonal) written especially for the organ of St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh called '...and Eternity in an Hour'. It's the final installment of a four part set of pieces which starts with 'To see a World in a Grain of Sand...' for solo piano (first performed in 1997 by Paul Harper-Scott) and yes, it's going to be an hour long. The significant thing about the organ of St Giles is that it's one of the only organs I've come across that still has a mechanical tracker action and therefore all sorts of wonderful things can happen if the stop is not pulled out all of the way;
another piece for organ, this time for organ and amplified organist called (possibly) BREATHE. I'm writing it for Lauren Redhead. Currently I have no idea how it's going to sound (other than awesome of course) but the breathing of the organist is going to determine durations of notes and of rests but is also going to be amplified (along, possibly with the sounds of the bellows). Duration is going to be around 9 minutes I think;
piece for solo clarinet in A for Carl Rosman. No title yet, but I've had sketches for this piece sitting around for quite a while. It's based around a series of multiphonic dyads that are mostly going to be quiet;
a companion piece for for three called for one (it's the Trinitarian link you see) for any melodic instrument with variable pitch, and a drone. The idea will be that it takes all of the intervals of my justly-intoned chromatic scale and works its way up to an octave. This is a piece that I may perform myself first, or ship it out to one of my very talented friends;
I'm also still looking to produce a version of Kinderszenen for solo flute and tape. This version of the piece is being written with Richard Craig in mind (and it's going to be tailor made for him, with collaborative input). There may also be a version for bass clarinet and tape for Sarah Watts but we haven't really talked about that in any depth yet.

So that's a few things to be getting on with.
On the back burner are my chamber pieces SOLO, DUO₂, TRIO₁, TRIO₂ and TRIO₃. I think I need to establish a working relationship with an ensemble who might be willing to tackle all six pieces for a rather special concert (and possibly double-CD release?).

This year, there are a few other projects to get underway:

I want to finally get my colleague Nicholas Ashton to record his performance of my solo piano piece EMG alongside Fabrice Fitch's Wind Up;
I want to sort out a website and some good copies of the music that I'm still happy with;
Record a performance of CRAGG with some of my students.

As far as ambitions go, these three shouldn't be too taxing.
Let's see how it all goes!

'It is not linear'

2012-01-03T19:11:00.000Z

OK, so this is going to be a little geeky.

I have been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation from the start, and I've just started watching Star Trek: Deep Space 9. Very quickly wanted to say that the two-part episode Chain of Command is outstanding still. The dialogue between David Warner and Patrick Stewart is strong enough to stand on its own. In comparison, the rest of the plot is rather light unfortunately, but the end - where Picard confesses that he was on the verge of saying anything when he was finally released (and incidentally, the way that throughout TNG, that Picard is depicted as being vulnerable and (dare I say it?) old, is brave in a franchise that is generally dominated by action) was amazing when I first watched and when I watched it again recently. We are used to seeing Picard as being righteous, upright and uncorruptable and to see him fail shakes this fundamental belief. The refusal to resolve all of the issues in the episode with a comforting (often humourous) wrap-up contributes to the long-range plot arcs and character development, and undermines the characteristic 'reboot' of every episode (satirised in, for example, The Simpsons).

This sort of ending became characteristic of a lot of Deep Space 9, (and seems largely rejected by the writers of Voyager), and I quickly grew to love the show, almost obsessively. Having watched most of it all the way through, I had pretty well established ideas about how the plot worked right from the word go, but I watched the first episode 'Emissary' again yesterday and realised that it wasn't as simple as I thought, but it did give rise to some interesting thoughts about the extra-temporal nature of the Prophets.

When Sisko first encounters the Prophets, they do not understand his linear nature. Until this point, they seem totally incapable of understanding time. By looking through his memories, they learn what time means, and therefore how to assess linear beings. So far this is a basic summary of the episode. What interests me is looking at this in light of later developments in the show, particularly in the final series when Sisko discovers that his mother was a Prophet sent to Earth with the mission of giving birth to him. This presents a paradox. If Sisko is the child of a Prophet, then surely they were aware of temporality and linear beings before this point. There are a couple of possibilities (as far as I can see):

The Prophets had either deliberately forgotten or were dissembling;
Sisko's arrival in the wormhole is what caused the Prophets to intervene in linear time, and to send one of their number to become Sisko's mother.

Dealing with extra-temporal beings is always going to be a major headache for any ongoing narrative, especially as they interact with temporal linear beings. If the beings are outside of time, what happens in the wormhole is happening at all temporal points. When the pah wraiths are at war with the Prophets, they have always been at war with the Prophets. There is no distinction for them between what has happened and what will happen. This explains why the conflict between the two races needs to be resolved by an outside party - Sisko needs to return his mother to the wormhole in order to restore the 'balance' (i.e. the Prophets being in control of the wormhole and capable of casting the pah wraiths out - at which point, they have never been at war with the Prophets).

I think that this poses the possibility that the Sisko who first encounters the Prophets is actually not half-Prophet; he is totally human. At some point between Series 1 and Series 7, the Prophets change linear history and Sisko becomes half-Prophet. So much science fiction is resolutely linear, even when dealing with many-universes ideas, so I'm interested in examples that might mess this up a bit. I rather think that what actually happened was that the writers hadn't planned everything ahead and effectively rebooted Sisko's origin story, but that doesn't stop me thinking.

Which brings me on to the whole idea of canon. This has had a stranglehold on the whole Star Trek franchise and has effectively boxed writers into a corner with regards to the familiar Alpha quadrant races, and in order to write an episode, I'm guessing that writers had to learn the whole back-history of all the characters, all the races and the star maps/star ship specifications to avoid any continuity problems. Big pain in the bum and this is presumably why DS9 and VOY explored the Gamma and Delta quadrants respectively [can't remember any references to the Beta quadrant... is it boring there?] but large sections of Enterprise at times felt like a painful attempt to reconcile elements within the Original Series and the same elements in TNG and beyond (e.g. the cranial ridges on Klingons' foreheads). Canon is something that seems to really bug fans of major sci fi franchises and must make writers' lives a total nightmare. Fans seem totally concerned with the 'real'/'true' story - pinning things down totally and utterly beyond discussion or speculation. I guess this is even more frustrating for writers. The 2009 Star Trek film effectively short-circuits canon by changing history with the intervention of Nero and Spock. This basically means that writers can now choose to totally change aspects of characters' back-stories. Of course, this is now being described as an alternative time-stream (wrong leg of the trousers of time?) rather like the mirror universe that featured so much in DS9 (which, ironically, seems to have developed its own canon).

rhizomatic (had to say it) nature of such narratives. Although it messes with our suspension of disbelief, if we accept that these different writers are (ahem) different writers, telling stories about the same bunch of people, there are surely many productive and exciting approaches to story-telling within the franchise that doesn't involve drastic narrative steps (e.g. relocation to the Delta quadrant or the creation of an alternative time line). I'd also say that there are many races (e.g. the Tholians, and the Breen) who could be explored further by post-VOY Star Trek series without requiring too much research and knowledge, and without violating canon.

I hope that, further down the line, a powerful writing team might write a new Star Trek show within the franchise set in the post-VOY universe. I believe that the hiatus was inevitable following 18 years of continuous broadcast, and it was probably healthy for the franchise. What I would love to see is something as tightly (or even more so) through-composed as the recent Battlestar Galactica reboot but I guess that's the problem with being at the mercy of commissioning. And we're back to the problem of currency and money driving and directing everything. We're all capitalism's bitch.

An unnecessary post

2011-12-30T01:32:00.000Z

Feel like I should say that I realise that the human ear can only really discriminate pitch of around 5-6 cents (this must be true - I just looked it up on Wikipedia to make sure I remembered it right), and that most digital tuners are not as sensitive as my score suggests that I'm looking for.
So why include this much detail?
At the moment, I'm including it because these tunings are the exact proportional ratios that I'm looking for, and they're what I'd like the performers to aim for. When I have the first performers to work with, I'm planning to talk to them about whether they find this (aspirational?) notation ok or whether it's a problem (distracting maybe). So I'm not hopelessly naive, just hopeful.
In other news, I finally listened to Richard Barrett's CONSTRUCTION without having Oliver barking at it. I think it's amazing, and it gets better and better as it goes on. I may write more about it on another occasion, but for the time being I'm bowled over. I love Richard's music, and have done for a long time so to hear him deliver such an amazing sustained work over that duration is just wonderful.

for three (score excerpt)

2011-12-29T01:33:00.000Z

I have written the first three minutes or so of for three.
I'm not totally happy with it, but this gives a flavour (click on the image for a larger version):

Notation:
Multipliers above a rest indicate that the performer should multiply that rest by that number (e.g. if a semibreve rest has a 'x 4' indicator above it, this indicates that there should be four semibreve rests).
A '+' or '-' indicator above a note indicates that pitch should be sharper or flatter (respectively) by this many cents.
At the moment, all dynamics are balanced and as quiet as possible.

About the piece:
I may reduce the speed to something more like crotchet=52 (or slower) and I'm not quite sure how I feel about the nature of these awkward durations. This may be revisited. There may also (when I complete the piece) be alterations to durations etc. down to the progression of this section from these isolated utterances to the smooth overlapping texture.

The name Petrus Abaelardus and the title of his work which includes his allegedly heretical teachings on the doctrine of the trinity, Theologia Summi Boni, have been used to structure the durations of the work. I've always been interested in Abelard. Initially, his relationship with Héloïse was what grabbed me, but as I found out more, his relationship with his son and with Bernard de Clairvaux struck me as interesting. I've been thinking for a while that I'd like to do a series of music theatre clusters around a series of figures, and had thought that they would coincide with decades in my life (An Evening with Ezra Pound was supposed to mark my 30th birthday (3 years ago), and An Evening with Peter Abelard was going to mark my 40th birthday)*. I don't really know how I feel about all of that now but I do think that there may be a cluster of pieces around Abelard and I suppose this may as well be a start. The connection came simply because of the title and the indeterminate instrumentation as related to his theoretical writings on the Trinity, which got him into such hot water with Bernard de Clairvaux.

It's beginning to get to the point that, in order for this project to have a place in my research hours, I'm going to have to come up with a performance. If I don't, then I'll carry on in my spare time, but I'll have to prioritise other projects. Sad but true.

*The final Evening with was going to be Alan Turing. We shall see.

measuring rests (for three)

2011-12-27T22:17:00.000Z

I'm trying to work out how to structure the rhythmic shape of the piece (for three).
There are going to be a lot of rests, and I'm not sure how to measure them.
I have basically three ideas:

To use standard rhythmic notation;
To use minutes and seconds to mark the rests (but probably use standard rhythmic notation while they're playing);
To use breaths as a durational method for rests, and for the playing durations.

Idea 3. is very attractive to me, but I don't think it's for this piece. I'm thinking I want to use this in another piece. Maybe more on that later.

I think that each of these three methods of notating rests will create a marked difference for both performers and for audience. I would like to see some research on this (or I suppose I could actually research this myself I suppose). I've written pieces that use the first two methods of measuring rests and performed pieces that use all three, and I certainly feel that the experience is different.
Counting the rests creates (for me as a performer) a sense of very measured time.
Counting minutes and seconds normally involves watching a stopwatch - I would say that 'musical time' freezes and this correspondingly creates more of a sense of stasis for the audience as well.
Having the rests measured by somatic measurements creates a more intimate experience (at least as a performer - I haven't knowingly experienced this as an audience member) and I believe that this experience will be carried through to the audience.

But I don't want to do this for this piece.

Further refinement to the structure of the piece
There are three 'states' of operation:

Long measured silences frame statements of the three pitches (with various tunings)
Very few silences as the three instruments make up a 'tapestry' of sound from the three pitches
Long measured sustained single tones (staggered between the three instruments) frame statements of the three pitches

Rather than these being three different sections of the piece, I'm going to construct the whole piece in two parts. For the first part, I will structure rhythms it in two ways, using both methods 1. and 2. The finished version will progressively move from method 1. to method 2. The second half will use methods 2. and 3. in a corresponding way. This way, there are no clearly defined sections, but each moment of the piece should lead smoothly to the next.

In terms of pitch organisation, I'm hoping to have initial sketch material of the first section ready sometime tomorrow. I think that it's going to stay pretty restricted for the majority of the first section, and then start to move up and around in the second section before stabilising close to the end (although the whole range of the piece is going to be strictly within an octave - when you're exploring an expanded set of proportional tuning ratios, you don't have to gild the lily - which also serves the indeterminate instrumentation).

intervallic content (for three)

2011-12-26T23:44:00.000Z

Just done some quick analysis of the intervallic content of for three.
I've got seven different tunings for the chord (treating the two ratios given here as sort of interval vectors):

8:9 +15:16
8:9 + 24:25
9:10 + 15:16
9:10 + 128:135
225:256 + 24:25
9:10 + 25:27
225:256 + 128:135

This gives three major seconds:

9:10 (1.11111111)
8:9 (1.125)
225:256 (1.13777778)

four minor seconds:

24:25 (1.04166667)
128:135 (1.0546875)
15:16 (1.06666667)
25:27 (1.08)

and three minor thirds:

64:75 (1.171875)
27:32 (1.18518519)
5:6 (1.2)

Great so far. Now I need to work out how I'm going to use this in the piece's structure.
Am I going to go through them in 'keyboard' order (ABCDAAEFBACG), or come up with a new structure based on (what I think are) interesting movements from relative consonance to dissonance and back?
I'm in two minds.
I also have to decide which pitch stays constant between each section (this itself could answer the question of 'material' above). I don't want it to be the same pitch, but at the same time (at least) one pitch must stay constant.
There will also be the question of overall duration, and the proportion of silence and sound.
At the start, I want there to be silence separating instances of the three players each playing one sustained note. In the middle I want there to be very few breaks in the corporate sonority, with tunings overlapping. At the end, a return to the texture of the beginning. Possibly.
Overall duration could be as long as 40 minutes, but I don't know if that's crazy. I suppose it depends on the players and on how many sections and how long each section is.
Enjoying thinking about this. Quite like the idea that the timbre of each performance could be radically different.

for three

2011-12-26T00:29:00.000Z

An idea for a piece:
Three notes - tone + semitone between them - played by three instruments.
Use whole number ratios to generate precise tunings (see below) but render these in cents, so that performers, using digital tuners, can tune their individual notes (seated as far apart as necessary to get a 'clean' reading on the tuner).
The tunings are based on segments of a justly-tuned twelve-tone scale.
The basis of this scale is that (identified by La Monte Young in his Selected Writings (Heiner Friedrich, 1969. 37-8)) of a diatonic major scale:
24:27:30:32:36:40:45:48
In this scale, do:re:mi are in the expected 8:9:10 ratio; both do:so, and fa:do are in a 2:3 ratio; fa:so:la repeat the 8:9:10 ratios of do:re:mi; and te:do repeats the 15:16 ratio of mi:fa.
There are plenty of pleasant symmetries and repetitions here to satisfy (at least my) aesthetic desires.
In order to generate the other notes of the fabric, I took utonal relationships based on do, fa and so to create mi flat (5:6 above do), la flat (5:6 above fa) and te flat (5:6 above so). This creates possibilities for just chords based on la flat and on mi flat (both 4:5:6). By the same logic, I calculated re flat from a ratio of 4:5 with fa (just chord re flat:fa:la flat - 4:5:6). This only left me with a so flat/fa sharp to calculate, and I did this by replicating the ratio between la flat and te (64:75), which also gives a 15:16 ratio between fa sharp and so (as you would expect, given that te:do is also 15:16).
Final ratios of all twelve tones are (in integer ratios):
480 : 512 : 540 : 576 : 600 : 640 : 675 : 720 : 768 : 800 : 864 : 900 : 960

Whoopee. Good for me.
Why do I want to turn this into a piece?
I like the idea that these three notes can appear in different rhythmic configurations (like in late Feldman, a persistent and fruitful inspiration) and also in different tonal (here, I mean tonal as in proportional) configurations. When studying temperament, the characters of individual keys in temperaments such as well temperament are emphasised, and the idea of presenting a sample of a tuning like this in close-up, so that you're almost sitting in these two proportions for a period of time, is (for me at least) rather an attractive endeavour.

The instrumentation (and octave displacement) is variable (although all instruments must be at the same octave displacement). I haven't decided how dynamics are going to work, but I suspect they will either be equally balanced and as quiet as possible (whilst maintaining stability of tone), or there will be different dynamic configurations as well (within a pppp, ppp, pp, p band).

The title is currently for three.
If anyone is interested, do drop me a line. I am 100% more likely to finish it if someone wants to play it.

I've been meaning to...

2011-12-21T00:33:00.000Z

Over the last few months, there have been experiences that I've meant to blog about, but it's come to it and I just haven't. Haven't had the energy or given enough of a crap to actually put it in words.

What have I achieved lately?

I'm quite pleased with some of the teaching I've done this term. There are parts I need to tighten up, but I think I did an ok job.

I went on strike, which I think was important, and it was a good experience. It highlighted for me how out my depth I am when contemplating my role as a public sector employee apart from anything else.

I haven't written enough music. I hashed together a few things for my installation, but I don't think I've finished work on them really. I wrote a nice open form piece for the Museum of Modern Art (called CRAGG), which we performed out in the open air with voice, clarinet, flute, percussion and guitar. The notation needs fixing, but I'm planning to revisit the notation (the actually notes themselves are good) and record it with a few more players (I'm thinking at least two of each of those instruments). My duet for bass clarinet and piano (DUO₂) didn't quite work - too much happening too fast, but not enough variety to maintain the duration that I was looking for. I think that the version of the piece that was lovingly performed by Sarah Watts and Antony Clare was nice in itself, but it wasn't what I was aiming for. Think I'm going to salvage it (there are, again, a few notational quirks to iron out) as a separate piece and start the DUO piece again from scratch.

On my desk (apart from the obligatory marking) at the moment are a piece called kinderszenen, which is for any forces, but I'm looking to create a version for flute and pre-recorded flutes for Richard Craig at the moment. We haven't yet worked out exactly how we're going to approach the task yet, but it's going to be fun. I'm also looking at finally engaging properly with the piece for clarinet in A that I've been meaning to write for Carl Rosman. No title yet (and I think that lack of an identity for the piece is what's making it so slippery at the moment) but the sound of the piece is beginning to crystallise in my head.

I think I'm doing ok off anti-depressants. There are difficult times, but mostly I feel happier and stronger than I have done in a long time. I have further to go in some areas than others but it's all improvement so far.

I've given a couple of papers at conferences: one on Stockhausen's Aus den sieben Tagen and one on relating a chunk of Cardew's output (1969-76) to Deleuze & Guattari's rhizome principle (is that even the right word). Very very happy with the Cardew paper, but the Stockhausen wasn't bad by any means, just unfocused. I am planning to write them up (and my informal guest paper on Partch I gave at Edinburgh University) and try to get them published.

Big question is why am I writing this? I guess I'm mainly writing it for me. I'm taking stock at half-past midnight in the week before Christmas. I'd like to get back into the habit of writing this blog, but I still haven't quite worked out what I want to write and for whom. I have a few thoughts - that I should just write everything (personal, musical, food-related, dog-related) that occurs to me and use tags to order them; that I should just focus on composition (as I have in the past); that I should just focus on a personal blog as a way to vent. I'm not sure it actually matters in the long run. Perhaps a sort of order will work itself out.

Things Oliver Does Not Approve Of

2011-11-10T20:47:00.000Z

My dog, Oliver (a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel) occasionally takes offence at music.
Over the last few days, I have observed that he does not like: Steve Reich's Different Trains, Morton Feldman's Bass Clarinet and Percussion and K T Tunstall's Suddenly I See.
Noah (my other Cavalier) has not expressed any opinions regarding music aside from his contribution to a performance class last year when he joined in the last note of a Hindemith saxophone duet.
I'm not sure what to make of all of this.

Eating at Castle Terrace, Edinburgh

2011-10-22T23:43:00.000+01:00

Today we (parents are staying) had lunch at Castle Terrace, the latest restaurant in the Kitchin family headed up by Dominic Jack, the chef patron.
We've eaten at the Kitchin before and loved it, but they were all booked up today, and Castle Terrace has just received a Michelin Star (just this month in fact) so we thought we'd give it a whirl.
The booking that they offered us was at 12:15pm. The advantage of an early sitting is that you almost always go straight in, without having to wait for previous dinners to clear off.
And immediately we feel welcome. The mini breads arrive: two breadsticks, a little cheesy pastry thing, and two little cheese biscuits each, as well as a selection of fried pasta (one with herbs, and the other with squid ink). We decide to go for the set lunch menu (just £24 a head) with a bottle of prosecco (the details of which, stupidly, I failed to get).

Amuse bouche
We get an amuse bouche: a 'taste' of carrot and coriander topped with a roasted cumin crust. This was basically a really concentrated carrot and coriander sauce (with diced carrot) at the bottom of a teacup, topped with a foam (possibly flavoured with more coriander seed?) and finally on the very top, a layer of roasted ground cumin (mixed, I suspect with something else to make up the crust without making it too intense). When it arrives, you just see the crust, and it looks like ash in a cup. You dig down and find the foam and it begins to come alive. You finally dig all the way in and find the carrot, eat it all together and it is a joy. We were all scraping up as much as we could from the side of the cup before we finally relinquished them.

Bread
I like what the Kitchin and Castle Terrace do with bread. You get one slice before your starter arrives (from a choice of a few (strangely reminded of Subway at this point - they are cut from similarly looking batons) including (today): caramelized onion, sun-dried tomato, white, granary and spelt. I chose a slice of the spelt bread which was lovely and dense, with a really nice taste, and a fabulous thick chewy crust. The sun-dried tomato bread had a thinner, crunchier crust which was also very nice, but for me, the spelt had it nailed.
So you get this one slice at the beginning and you munch away. Your starter arrives. They come around again and offer you another slice. Now I didn't test this today, but when we were at the Kitchin last, they were quite happy to replenish our bread supplies whenever we wanted them. No ceremony or snobbery or stingy portions.

Starter
As soon as I saw the smoked eel pannacotta on the menu, I knew I had to have it. It came on an apple jelly (neither too sweet nor too tart, just the right amount of both), wobbling away and topped with a poached quail's egg (which burst delightfully almost just at the touch of the fork), and accompanied by tiny little dice of apple and finely chopped scurvy grass (nope, I've never eaten it before either) as well as a fillet of smoked eel. As with so many dishes like this, the real pleasure came from eating all of the elements together. Individually they were all very nice (with the smoked eel fillet clearly standing out - absolutely delicious) but together they married so well together. My Mum hadn't had eel before and she loved it too. Dad had the broccoli velouté with blue cheese ravioli and baby baby broccoli stems. He said that it was very nice, but paled in comparison with the later courses.

Main
My Mum and I had both chosen the same again: the partridge pithivier. I had totally forgotten what a pithivier was (wonderful memory) but when I saw the little pastry domes delivered to another table, my memory of seeing them on TV (probably some variant of Masterchef) came flooding back. These little pies were served on a small bed of braised cabbage, with a gravy at the bottom of the bowl. My first thought was that it looked a little small, but as soon as you cut into the pastry, you realised that it was crammed full of meat. This was not a pie with plenty of air keeping the lid dry, but the pastry was wonderfully thin and not at all damp. No idea how they did this but it was wonderful. The meat itself was rich and extremely flavoursome, bordering almost on a sort of beefy note, and went so well with the cabbage. Slight criticism: there wasn't enough cabbage. Lovely lovely sauce (and plenty of it). Almost asked for a slice of bread to mop up the sauce but in the end just settled for getting as much as possible on my fork. Dad had the hake, which was served on batons of celeriac and celery (this was a lovely touch - three batons of fondant(?) celeriac, separated by two of celery, forming a cradle), which themselves were atop a celeriac purée. I'd love to tell you what it was like, but I was so engrossed in my dinner, and he was so engrossed in his, that we totally failed to talk during this course.

Pudding
We all chose the sea-buckthorn dessert. This consisted of a set sea-buckthorn cream (at least that's the best way I can describe it off the top of my head) with a thin chocolate biscuit on top, and a blob of raspberry sorbet. Also on the plate were a couple of raspberries in a raspberry sauce, and some reduced sea-buckthorn sauce. I've had sea-buckthorn before at the Kitchinbushful at home; both grandparents also had large crops of them, so we were always eating raspberries - every day), I like to save them for a special treat. Having said this, whenever I have them from a supermarket or from a restaurant, they are often too sweet and taste as if they've been grown in a vacuum. These raspberries today tasted of raspberry bushes and allotments - they tasted grown, earthy. Amazing. Even the sorbet tasted like this.

Wine
As mentioned above, I went for a bottle of prosecco, which came to £32. There were cheaper wines (and plenty more expensive wines!) and this may not have been the most educated selection I could have made, but I knew that we didn't want a glass with each course (if you do want this, I'd recommend the glasses matched to the course (£19 per head) offered in the menu (assuming that the matches are as good as those delivered at the Kitchin as part of the same idea, they will be stupendous)), but we wanted more than one glass each, and probably the best way of doing this was to buy a bottle. Given that we were having different starters and different mains, I figured that a light prosecco would hopefully be a nice accompaniment without overwhelming delicate flavours, but also should have enough vim to hold off any loud flavours from the partridge. One question I do have about sommeliers is, when the customer decides that they want a specific wine, is it policy to not disagree? I'd like to think that if he didn't think that the wine would work with, for example, the partridge, that he would say so, rather than telling me how good the wine I had selected was... In the event, the wine had a very nice apple flavour. It was (as I had hoped) light, but very tasty, with some presence but not too much. I felt it went well with everything I ate (but especially with the apple jelly in the starter) and would order it again.

Coffee
The waiters were, at this stage, beginning to look a little harassed, and we realised that they probably needed our table, but in no way, and at no point did we feel rushed. Instead, we were invited to go and sit in the lounge at the front, before we were asked if we wanted to have coffee. This is another sign of the way in which here and the Kitchin look after their diners. I can't say too strongly that, for someone who comes to these Michelin star restaurants as a treat, rather than as a regular event, I feel that I'm a valued customer. It's worth ordering the coffee just for the petit-fours (same goes for the Kitchin). Very strong, dark coffee served with a jug of warm milk. Give me a bigger cup so I can put almost the whole jug of milk in, and I'll be a happy boy. The petit-fours today were a tiny little slice of carrot cake (my Mum's favourite), a chocolate drop filled with salted caramel (my Dad's favourite), and a sea-buckthorn macaroon (my favourite) which was chewy and sweet and sour.

Bill
Total bill came to £120, which we split in half, and then walked home. Last time we had the set lunch at the Kitchin, we all came out feeling very full, and didn't really feel like much to eat for the rest of the day. This wasn't the case today. I had been well fed and was extremely happy. It's tempting to say that the Kitchin experience was better because I had 'better value for money' (in that I felt quite stuffed), or that the Castle Terrace experience was better because I didn't feel that I had at all overindulged, but to be honest, it's like comparing apples and oranges. Really enjoyed the whole experience and will be back, hopefully soon!

red overwrought with orange (1)

2011-07-26T00:39:00.000+01:00

There is about 2'30" left to write of the alto flute part, but otherwise red overwrought with orange (1) is finished. I've abandoned the idea of having the flautist chose fragments in this version, partly because I think it's such a good idea that I don't want to rush it. This version is very much the testing ground for future realisations of this idea, whether in this instrumentation or piece, or in another.
Overall I'm very pleased with it and I'm looking forward to hearing it.

What is this blog for?

2011-07-10T00:53:00.000+01:00

This week I was really pleased to read a fascinating entry by Daniel Wolf on his blog Renewable Music to do with commonplace books. As I commented on his post, I've kept an ideas book for a long time (going on 13 years now - it's a long time for me anyway!). My record keeping has not been exhaustive or regular, so I don't have as many books filled as that length of time would suggest, but I've found it to be a really useful way of formulating ideas and for sorting out the wheat from the chaff (have you ever woken up from a dream in which you heard the most amazing music, written it down and then discovered it was indescribably trivial? - sometimes I find that an 'amazing idea' for a piece, when written down, becomes like this).
The discussion in Daniel's entry and in the comments turned my thoughts to my blog itself. I haven't really ever asked myself what the blog was for since I started. When I did start, it functioned almost as a way of motivating me to keep working regularly on my PhD, creating the illusion of an audience that one cannot disappoint. It worked to an extent and I became aware of the ways in which the blog could function as an aspect of the ideas book but I don't think I really ever explored this, and my entries dwindled until they practically stopped. Although I've started again recently to post a few things, I don't really think that I know what I'm doing and this whole issue of commonplace books has brought things into focus.
This week I have also discovered Matthew Fort's blog, Fort on Food. I have always enjoyed his restaurant reviews and other writings across which I have stumbled, and his performance as judge on Great British Menu have amused me consistently, so it was a pleasure to find this blog (if you don't know this already, food - cooking and eating - is one of my major hobbies, up there with reading) but what immediately struck me was the dynamic way that it employs tags. It uses a very restricted number of tags to put posts into clear categories. Now this isn't exactly rocket science and there are plenty of blogs that do this already but it took this one to really slam it into my thick head.
Still don't really have any idea what I'm going to do about this in the short term but I'm hoping that it will result in something a little more focussed and a little less splattery.
We shall see.

Philip Glass/Robert Wilson, Einstein on the Beach

2011-06-23T13:08:00.000+01:00

Finally got around to watching Chrisann Verges and Mark Obenhaus' 1985 film Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera (available from ubuweb here) yesterday.
For the first time since coming across the LPs in Durham University's listening library (now, alas, no longer) in 1996, I got to see some excerpts of the stage action in motion.
It confirmed to me what I had suspected for a long time: that my ideas about my own opera were on the right track. I feel that what Wilson was doing on stage (more so than what Glass was doing in the pit) had so much relevance to me, and correlated so tightly with my preferences for modern dance, that I have to go forward.
Haven't yet got the right libretto, which does require some thought, more than I thought originally. My original libretto was made up of chunks of existing work:

the text for Mozart's Abendempfindung;
the marriage and funeral services from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer;
Amy Lowell's Patterns;
the section on the suicides from Dante's Inferno;
the vowels from the name 'Malespina';
the madmen's speeches from Webster's Duchess of Malfi

Recently I've realised that the libretto for an opera (particularly contemporary opera) can be fundamental to its success (by my standards, not necessarily a critical/popular success) and I've come to this conclusion by looking at the Glass/Wilson Einstein, and my two favourite Birtwistle operas: The Mask of Orpheus and Punch and Judy (libretti by Peter Zinovieff and Stephen Pruslin respectively). In each case, the libretti have shaped the drama and intensified what the composers do with the drama more (in my opinion) than in any other operatic work that they produced (or are producing).
So I'm looking to work with a librettist now because my writing of prose is just not up to the job.

The goal is to complete my three act opera, lasting three hours entitled MALESPINA over the next two years. It's scored for solo soprano and tenor (Bride and Devil), and SSAATTBB chorus, with an orchestra of two clarinets, two horns, two pianos, two percussionists, two violins, viola, two cellos. I feel like I'm in the right 'zone' to actually get on and do it now, but it's a matter of carving out the time, setting myself deadlines and really motivating myself to actually do it.

It's not an opera in the sense that most opera companies will recognise or that most critics will accept, and that's not really the point. I want to write the work that I want to write; the work that I want to see on stage.

Red overwrought with orange

2011-06-06T23:45:00.000+01:00

Working on a piece for my Memories of You show to be played by a trio led by Chris Cowie, one of my former students and the flautist with my ensemble. The trio are alto flute, clarinet and cello and I'm calling it Red overwrought with orange after Ezra Pound's Envoi. The alto flute is really the soloist and the two other instruments provide a frame (amber?).
The clarinet and cello glissando through a whole octave (in opposite directions) over the course of seven minutes (see below - instruments are at notated pitch). Need to double-check that this is actually realistic on the clarinet but hopefully it should be quite effective. There should be as few breaths and bow-changes as possible, and the dynamic should be as quiet as possible throughout.

The alto flute part is built up of fragments and the flautist has choices about the order in which they are played. The part is constrained by the limits of the framing pitches as much as possible (though the three parts are not coordinated).
I'm also going to write six solos (rhythmic or timbre specified but not pitches) for each of the clarinet and the cello. These can be applied at any time. There will also be three duos for the clarinet and cello that can also be applied at any point (but these must be coordinated between the two players). There is also one trio moment (this moment has only one possibility for the alto flute).

I'd like to prepare different frames for different versions of the piece: two electronics and one orchestral. The first electronics part is made up of sine waves, and the second from recorded chromatic drones on bass flute.

Birthday

2011-05-28T00:33:00.000+01:00

Today I turn 33, which seems weird.
I do feel that the music I'm writing now (well not right now) is good, worth writing, worth playing and worth hearing. I can now look back at my frighteningly (to me at least) prolific years of study as an apprenticeship. There's not all that much that I am bothered to preserve if I am honest, and I've finally (hallelujah!) learnt that there is much to be said for moving on with new projects rather than revisiting old ones.
Moving away from what you might call complexity towards the (just as complex in other ways) pragmatic notation I've been working on for the last three years, has also had the added advantage that I can play my own music again (theoretically). I'll be doing this at Whitespace in Edinburgh from 5th-19th August this year as part of my exhibition Memories of You, and this has to be good. I'm involved in a very basic way with the things that make up a life in music.
So I want to carry on writing as much as possible, working with musicians, performing my own music as much as possible, and staying positive. If the music I am writing isn't right, I want to find the music that is right.

Alfie Hay's Tom

2011-05-28T00:25:00.000+01:00

I've been working for the last week or so orchestrating some songs from a musical written by Alfie Hay.
It's called Tom, and is based on Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies.
This is a musical that Alfie wrote in the 70s (before I was born), and it was the first of many that he wrote for the children in the schools in which he has taught since that time.

When I was at primary school, Alfie was my headmaster, and it was under his tutelage that I learned a great deal. He conducted the school orchestra in which I played clarinet, and we learnt how to transpose together, often transpose on sight - a skill that has stood me in very good stead since that time! Alfie taught me how to perform, and the importance of performing for others rather than for myself. He made performing fun, social and part of every day life. I performed in a different musical that he had written every year of my study, and finally took the lead in Francis (based on the life of St Francis of Assisi) in my final year in 1989. I played my first publicly performed composition (called originally Shapechanger, but in the context was renamed Into Danger) during School Party, which we performed in 1988. Experiences of collaboration with Alfie, writing scripts even though we were school children, gave a real sense of ownership, and he always treated us as equals. This sometimes meant that he expected a lot from us, but he always gave so much energy to every project in which he was involved. Since I left the school, I continued to be involved with Alfie and with his family. My sister and I, and his two daughters put on various performances, musical and dramatic, and I continued to be encouraged (egged on) and challenged by him through secondary school, and into my A-Levels and beyond.

Last year, Alfie contacted me and asked me if I'd be willing to help him out with his latest revision of his cantata/musical Jewel of the River. I took this on willingly, and Alfie came up to Edinburgh to work on some of the songs with me. I arranged them for voice and piano, and roped in a student to sing the vocals for a recording to be distributed to schools in the area around Henley-on-Thames. These schools then rehearsed the material to perform it with soloists and choreography at The Hexagon, Reading. Meanwhile, I orchestrated my arrangements for a small chamber line-up (two flutes, oboe, saxophone, two horns, two trumpets, tuba, piano, percussion, strings - in the end the saxophone line was taken by a clarinet, and the tuba part by a bassoon) and ended up conducting the orchestra on the night while Alfie directed the massed choirs. It was a lot of fun, and well worth the stress and trials that went into the production. See the local paper's review here.

Later last year, Alfie rang me up and asked me if I'd be willing to do the same again with a new musical, this time a revision of his first composition. I recorded the songs with a former student at the beginning of this year, and am currently working on the orchestrations. The orchestrations are slightly different this year. Rather than a semi-pro chamber orchestra, I'm writing this time for secondary school children from Langtree School (flute, clarinets, saxophones, and a bass instrument). The challenges are different obviously and have stretched me in different ways. I was thinking, initially, that something along the lines of Britten's Noyes Fludde might be called for, but I have since moved away from the ideas of massed percussionists playing kitchen sinks towards a simpler wind-based ensemble inspired by the groups I played in at school (and, following the closure of my local Saturday morning music school, at Langtree School on Wednesday afternoons).

Alfie is self-taught as a composer, but writes songs that are so catchy that I find myself singing them without even realising. Both of my vocalists have since complained that they can't stop singing them, and I have been told that I can't leave scores lying around the flat because they lodge in the brain so firmly and persistently. It's been a privilege to work with the material, to analyse Alfie's harmony and bring it out in both piano arrangement and in orchestration. Working with someone else's material, whether this orchestration work or the type-setting that I have done in the past (and will do again) for Fabrice Fitch, is always really nice, and I discover new things about material and the basic craft in which I am engaged every time.

Begin again

2011-05-27T23:50:00.000+01:00

I've been reading Kenneth Silverman's biography of John Cage, Begin Again over the last few weeks.
Having never really engaged with Cage as a human being before, it's been really interesting and I'm left with a couple of instant reactions:
1. I wanted to listen to more and more of his music as I read about the conditions of its composition
2. I was surprised at the extent to which he seemed to value loyalty above professional integrity and found it difficult to separate friendships from professional associations. This, to me, seems to run at variance to the philosophies and aesthetics of life that texts such as his Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) seems to espouse.

This second observation set me to thinking if I would be able to carry on being close friends with someone who criticised my music (and deeper than that, my whole aesthetic) in print. Would I be able to separate personal from professional? I just don't know. I find it personal enough when I read feedback from students on my classes, and my music is so much more personal to me.

Cage comes across, in this biography, as being quite lonely towards the end of his life, and I have to say that I was moved by the account of his death. I certainly don't think I could live like him, and I'm not sure I would have been friends with him if I had met him, but I would like to work on being as positive as him in terms of his work ethic. He may have despaired of the world at times, and of his own personal life, but he retained a belief that his work could actually help things along.

Things to come

2011-05-24T23:59:00.000+01:00

Finally finished all of the marking that needed doing...
Finishing off some orchestration (for secondary school orchestra - more details to follow)
Once that's done, it's on with the fun.
As well as everything that I've mentioned above, the summer will see a week or so devoted to getting a good recording by Nicholas Ashton of EMG (stands for 'Even More Geese'), and a session experimenting with the department's 5-octave marimba (and possibly playing with other percussion instruments - timpani and detuned vibraphones (based on some exciting ideas tweeted by Jacob Sudol (@jdsudol on Twitter)).

While I was taking my MA at Huddersfield, I wrote a piece called More Geese for the Firebird ensemble conducted by Barrie Webb with Alison Wells singing mezzo-soprano. The piece was based on Orlando Gibbon's madrigal The Silver Swan but extrapolated from the original material and really problematised the rhythmic structure. Even though I loved the piece, and the players and Alison did a great job, the notation made the whole piece a lot harder than it should have been. Although, at the time, what I was aiming for was a sense of rhythmic floating, almost like a tightrope walk, my obsession with ideas of control were getting in the way of what I actually wanted to hear (at least that's my perspective now). I had written the piece in reaction to an editorial by Steve Martland for spnm's in-house magazine new notes (spnm has now merged with other UK concerns to become Sound and Music) in which he said that 'notation is merely a means to an end'. I still feel that as a sound-bite, that really misses the point about notation and its relationship to its realisation, and that notation has its own implied (unwritten) tradition, simply based on a reception and interpretative tradition so by writing in a certain way (as I was then), I was aligning myself with composers like Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finnissy rather than with composers like Steve Reich or Peter Maxwell Davies (to pick two names out of the air). In many ways though, my piece missed the point. So much attention rested on the notation and its realisation (and the relationship of the parts to the conductor's pulse) that the 'history' of the notation became more important than the way it sounded (so far so good) but only to the performers. The sound was rather beautiful and floating, but it didn't rely on the notation to make it like this. So I want to revisit the notation and make it less rhythmically problematic, and dispose of the conductor and the score. I'm convinced that the piece will be stronger for it.

Even More Geese is a piece for solo piano that I haven't finished. It exists in potential but not in reality. the idea is that I will take the uncoordinated parts of More Geese and transcribe them for solo piano. The notational aspect of this is going to take a lot of thinking about, but I think it could be a good piece... We shall see if I ever get around to writing it of course!

EMG takes a series of vertical slices from the potential score of Even More Geese and sustains them as chords for a specified length of time based on a durational series. This durational series, and the (related) series that determined from where (or rather when) these slices were to be taken were derived from the name of the dedicatee (Nicholas Ashton) . I'm still in the process of inputting this into Sibelius and making the notation all 'nice' from my hand-scrawled (my carefully hand-written scores of the past are now, alas, in the past) A3 manuscript (it's a bit more than making it neat though - I want to clean up the score and remove some of the stave lines to give more of a sense of the sound of the piece from the notation), but at present it looks a little like this (click for a bigger copy):
I say 'a little like this' because there are some revisions still to be implemented but hopefully you get the idea. Chains of (metreless) durations are what concern me at the moment, and I would say that they dominate much of what I am writing at the moment.

The experiments in percussion are for a couple of reasons really. The first is to pick the brains of the percussionist from my ensemble, Edinburgh Experimental Musicians, Ian Munro, before he leaves for his MA place in London next year, but the second is for a specific piece. I originally wrote the instrumental parts of JAMESTENNEY for [rout] and scored it for soprano saxophone, electric violin, electric guitar, bass guitar, piano, hammond organ, and sine waves. Never quite got around to finishing the instrumental parts, but the notation was beginning to move away from the complex rhythmic notation that dominated my PhD writing, and towards the more simplified (indeed inspired, in part, by the composers of the so-called Cologne School) notation that I'm trying to get to right now. I would say that the reason I didn't finish it was because the notation (and the compositional approach) was still in embryonic form. I didn't know what I was doing. The sine wave part was finished (and can be heard by visiting my myspace page) and I'm hoping to finish a solo piano version in time to play it at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer, but I'm revisiting the original instrumental parts. My plan is to replace the piano part with an amplified marimba. Why do I want to do this? In part, it's a practical thing: in order to perform a part with a piano, you have to have a venue with a piano, and a marimba (even a 5-octave marimba) is just easier to transport; but I also want to explore what you can do with an amplified marimba. I've always written the marimba off so I want to see if I can make something of it... Only time will tell I guess. Quite enjoy this sense of moving away from the traditional 'nailed down' concept of what does and doesn't constitute a 'work' and I think that the instrumental parts may well be a compendium from which performers can select an ensemble (rather like Cage's Concert - a work that is informing ideas about Kinderszenen as well).

In many ways this is all very 'me me me' (and some would say that's how I've always been). Will perhaps say some things about composers that I think are worth listening to over the next few weeks. Then again, I may just witter on about me and the pieces I'm just about to write any day now as soon as other things cease being quite so important...

LAMONTEYOUNG

2011-04-24T00:39:00.000+01:00

The whole idea of the sine waves in the piece LAMONTEYOUNG is based on the same premise as that of JAMESTENNEY. The name of the dedicatee is turned into numbers by following caballistic principles (A=1, B=2, etc.) so I end up with the numbers 12 1 13 15 14 20 5 25 15 21 14 7. This then gives me harmonics within a harmonic series (so if the base frequency is 20 Hertz, then the 'L' of Young's name is the 12th partial i.e. 240 Hertz). This gives a basic grounding to the work, a tenor of sorts. Each of these frequencies is then part of another set of partials, again based on the same number sequence. Given that the 'tenor' note can be any one of the frequencies of the complex, there are 10 possible chords (and therefore tunings) available for each 'tenor' note, giving a total of 120 complexes throughout the work. I haven't quite decided how this is going to be structured yet but I know it will be rather more systematic than the systems behind JAMESTENNEY (which can be heard on my Myspace page). I will hopefully put some sound examples of how this is developing over the next few days (not the 6.5 hour version of course!). Duration is inversely proportioned to frequency (as you would expect) so the lower the note, the longer it is.

Although I'm going to start off with the same frequencies coming from all eight speakers, I would like to develop a more 'polyphonic' approach as the piece goes on until there is a point that all eight speakers have different complexes overlaying. Ideally, I would like to make the space 'vibrate' with difference tones. I have a feeling that the tunings of Young's The Well Tuned Piano (as demonstrated by Kyle Gann) will be important for this.

The piano part will be largely improvised, but I'm going to provide myself with some notation to shape it. I also want this notation to be interpreted by others further down the line. I'm becoming more and more interested in forming a piece that can have multiple versions (sometimes multiple interpretations, sometimes multiple forms) for example, JAMESTENNEY can be performed as just the sine tones (as on Myspace), with ensemble, or with solo piano; Kinderszenen will have versions for solo piano, piano and ensemble, orchestra, solo instrument with electronics, possibly more. What I find interesting about my current approach to notation is that, whereas for a lot of my 'composing life', I was interested in finding ways that notation would provide problems for performers, and that particularly problematic relationship between performer and notation begat itself interesting and potentially exciting performance dynamics, but I would say that I'm more interested in providing the performer with notation that creates possibilities. The future for LAMONTEYOUNG is still open to potentially other versions, some of which may even be strictly notated, but I would like, especially, to produce a version for pipe organ.

Having played Javanese gamelan, and read a fair amount about other musical traditions, the idea that there can exist a notation that gives a guideline for interpretation, without fixing that interpretation has been of great interest to me. Recently listening to recordings of Young's music, I'm starting to wonder how you would notate it. It strikes me that most performances of his music will be developed in conjunction with him. I would be very interested in finding a way to notate that working method as usefully and fluidly as possible, so that ensembles can perform his work in a way with which he would be happy, without losing the freedom that he wants the performer and the sound to experience. I was very against allowing this freedom into my own music until relatively recently, but following the completion of my PhD, I'm becoming more and more interested in producing music that I can play myself and that gives me challenges and opportunities beyond a 'simple' realisation of a complex score. This has also grown out of my teaching over the last three years. I have been lucky enough to have developed a module focussed on problematic notations from the twentieth century, and the performance practice issues created. We have discussed Kagel's Ludwig van, Cage's Variations series, Stockhausen's Plus-Minus and SOLO (I'll be performing two versions of SOLO during the exhibition as well, one of which is my realisation, the other is one of my student's) and these have really drawn me to address these issues in my own work as well as in my teaching and research.

More soon I hope!

Memories of You

2011-04-23T09:20:00.000+01:00

Big two-week installation coming up at the Edinburgh Fringe 5th - 19th August.
It will be dotted with performances as well, but the basic idea is that it will start off with very pure sinusoidal drones, and develop (almost palimpsestically) over the course of the two weeks to incorporate 'memories' of the performances that have occurred within the space. There will also be (hopefully) a grand piano in the centre of the space which I will prepare and detune during the performance, and use to 'feed' the installation with new sounds. I want there to be a couple of microphones set up to allow visitors to leave their mark on the installation as well.

Currently mulling over how the MaxMSP patch for the overall installation will work. I want to be able to add certain things to the mix myself every day, but I also want some sense of random development there - an uncontrolled element. I want it to take on new stuff but only gradually change. It's got to make sense as a patch as well, and run without being too memory hungry.

Really hoping I can get hold of enough equipment to record everything, stream it live with video and audio, have enough microphones to do everything I want to do, and have one computer running the basic patch for the show the whole time, with another one to run the piece-specific patches as I'm going along. Time to really think about this, jot down my ideal requirements, and take to our marvellous technical guys and find out what they can spare for the fortnight.

The exhibition will open from 11:00-17:30 every day at Whitespace, 11 Gayfield Square, Edinburgh, and it will open with a six and a half hour performance by me of a new piece called LAMONTEYOUNG for piano and sine waves. This will be connected to what I did (and am doing later in the show) with JAMESTENNEY but slower. I want to spread out La Monte Young's name over the whole span so that it's just very pure and sustained, but I want to create some beats between speakers as well. Haven't quite worked out how this is going to work but I've been listening to some Alvin Lucier recently that's suggested some possibilities. Once I've got the whole tape part fixed (I'm hopefully working with 8 speakers), I'll have to start really thinking hard about the structure for the piano part. It's going to be largely improvised and a homage to the soundworld of Young's Well Tuned Piano except that the piano is not going to be well tuned (quite the opposite) but I want to strike the right balance between what I notate for myself, and what I create on the fly. It's all fun stuff and I'm really looking forward to getting started. Just need to finish this marking and then I can go for it!

Dynamics

2007-08-24T00:13:00.000+01:00

I've always had a problem with dynamics.
How can I possibly have a problem with dynamics?
What am I talking about?
All of my scores have dynamics until about 2001 and then... some sort of crisis?
Sorry, that sounds ridiculous. You can't have a crisis about dynamics.
OK, so it wasn't a crisis, merely a realisation that I didn't know what I was doing.
I was plastering these markings around but they weren't actually contributing anything to the piece other than making the score 'look right'. There was nothing as such wrong with them. They just weren't really part of the score in the same way that pitch, rhythm, instrumentation, etc. were.
I was quite content to just start putting one dynamic marking at the beginning of an entry (and sometimes at the beginning of a piece) and just leaving it at that. If there was phrasing, the performer can work the dynamics out for themselves.
So that worked to a limited extent. I started my PhD and was producing a large piece for the London Sinfonietta (Lovesongs) and I couldn't even commit to dynamics at the beginning of each entry. Did I really want a monochrome colour throughout? No, but there was phrasing which the performers interpreted.
I felt paralysed. I could go through the score and 'improvise' dynamics but how could I convince anyone that I really wanted that crescendo if I felt that, on another day if I had eaten a banana for breakfast instead of toast, it could have been a diminuendo? So the Sinfonietta received a score without dynamic markings (well, there were a few).
Everything else in the score was meticulously notated. (Carl Raven put his finger on the problem about another piece written at the same time when he said that there was a mismatch between the almost aleatoricism of my dynamic markings, and the precision of every single other aspect of my notation.)
F grilled me consistently over the course of the first three years of my PhD about my relationship with dynamic markings but I couldn't get out of this hole.
So I went back to an earlier piece (disiecta membra) and came up with a series of structurally determined processes to generate dynamics and articulation markings. The whole piece was generally shapeless in the form I'd left it in 2003, so I set about creating a process with dynamics and articulation that meant that page thirty was different to page four (which wasn't really the case before I enacted these processes on it! There is a high degree of self-similarity in all of the pitch/rhythmic material that didn't quite work).
Working on this piece in this way unlocked something. I suddenly felt able to attack Lovesongs and create meaningful dynamic markings that really brought each individual line and gesture alive. Now, looking at the score, it is finished. Without them, it was flapping in the wind, a perfectly serviceable piece of music yet somehow unsatisfactory. F called it a torso.
Last night, talking to him, I think I figured out what changed. In creating almost completely automated processes to generate dynamics, I discovered a means by which dynamic markings could transform material into something more significant. At almost every level of my compositional practice, I have to be transforming things, transcending their existence as notational cyphers into music. And suddenly dynamics could also fulfill this function.
F sounded a note of caution.
He said that some of my ideas about flexible dynamics were potentially interesting in the right piece. So that's something to return to. I even have the basic idea for the piece...

So what happened?

2007-08-21T18:24:00.000+01:00

It's now almost nine months since I last published an entry and it's all change in hh's world.
From the date of my last post, I put my head down and tried to complete as soon as possible. Combined with teaching and trips to see C, this meant that I couldn't really entertain the 'distraction' of documenting 'worked some more on trying to put this piece on Sibelius' every week.

I completed the PhD in June and submitted, I have a viva date in September, and I'm applying for jobs.
On the bad side, C split up with me last month (it's a 6 month trial separation - we'll reevaluate in January) and it's been a tricky few weeks coming to some sort of terms with that. I'm feeling a lot better about the whole thing now but I still feel out of touch with composition.
On the job front, because I haven't got lots of performances lined up (I was more concerned with finishing my PhD), this means that all I have on my CV is potential. Anywhere that's going to appoint me is going to have to believe in me first. And that's quite a lot to ask. Beginning to get myself in gear to send off scores to ensembles now but it's a bit late if I want a job to start soon!

This all sounds a bit pessimistic, but I think that it's realistic. I have more positive energy on the go right now than I have for a while. I have off-days when I'm miserable, but those are becoming fewer and fewer (and after all, who doesn't have an off-day every now and then?).
The house is on the market, and I'm preparing for life after Durham (and even looking forward to it) and I'm starting to sort out some of the piles of papers/magazines/scores that have accumulated. The future starts soon and it's incredibly exciting/scaring me to death.

My Name Is

2006-11-04T00:13:00.001Z

The more observant among you may have noticed that I have removed my name from this blog and also started moderating the comments that are made. (But I have managed to change it so that you can leave comments anonymously - I'm getting there!)
I haven't decided yet whether these changes are permanent or not. Just brought them in as a sort of buffer between 'online me' and 'offline me'.
If I ever have any of my pieces performed ever again, I could well reveal my secret identity again, but in the meantime...
Proper blog coming up shortly and I'll explain what thrilling things that I've been doing over the last few weeks! Bet you can't wait!

This week, I have been mostly...

2006-09-26T23:21:00.000+01:00

I've been working on the electronics part of my oboe piece US4 this week. I had an original patch which I cobbled together for the workshop that spawned this monster, but it was a bit Heath-Robinson in its construction. I'm really starting from scratch and attempting to 'build' it as logically as possible: i.e. with different 'instruments' and a central triggering mechanism. It's looking pretty good and I think that it's going to work, but it's a long way away from the 'rehearsal-proof' patch that I think that I'm going to have to put together at some stage. At the moment, it's just going to be a matter of starting the piece at the beginning and then letting the electronics run the show.

Some of the rehearsal proofing that will need to be done, sooner or later, will also involve recording sections of the piece so that any section can be rehearsed without having to first go back and perform the earlier sections. I'm convinced though, that when it's performed, I want it to be done live, not prerecorded. There's just something about a live performance, something messy that I want to be reflected in the recordings. If someone coughs, I want that replicated!

Staring at the screen all day isn't doing my eyes any good, but at least I got out of the house and talked to real people today!

2006-09-12T22:04:00.000+01:00

Always the problem with composition. You finish one piece and then what do you do?
Sometimes you start a new piece and get faced with the whole business of starting from scratch.
Sometimes (and this is the best in my opinion) there's already a piece started with a whole load of ideas floating around, so you can just jump in.
Sometimes, and this is today's situation, you have a piece that's almost finished. I've got a lot of these, as I come closer to the end of the PhD.

The idea of starting work on the second version of Frisch weht der Wind is quite depressing, since I've already produced the first and third. Particularly since my final task before putting it on the computer is to add dynamics to the pre-existing pitches/rhythms. It's not difficult, just requires an imagination slightly ticking over to categorise the gestural forms and assign them a suitable 'envelope'. I've just got to bite the bullet and slog my way through it. At least version D is more interesting and will require some kind of intelligence to complete.

I have now no idea if I'll be able to submit my application for postdoctoral funding at B, because I haven't heard from their Head of Research for a little while. The deadline is the end of the month and I'm beginning to become a little concerned (i.e. stressed). If I don't get this funding, the next round doesn't start till next September, and while I think I can keep my head above water financially until then, I'm not sure how sane I'm going to be living this far from C still!

Anyway, I've got to keep going at this piece because once I've finished it (and the others), then I'm one step closer to being with C full time. So far, I've got disiecta membra, US4, La Pastora, De contemplationis digitis, 83 Chords for Ezra Pound, and two versions of Frisch weht der Wind ready for submission, which adds up to about 46 minutes of music. The total duration of the portfolio is supposed to be between 60 and 90 minutes, so I'm getting there. With Lovesongs, Dead Island Songs, and the other two versions of Frisch, we're talking more like 80 minutes... so that's all I'm down to do right now. I've got a timetable of work from here to the end of December, which is when I'm handing it in. Which is when I'm handing it in. Which is when I'm handing it in!

2006-09-08T13:16:00.000+01:00

Just a quick post to say hurrah! I have finished both disiecta membra and La Pastora. Both are now set up on Sibelius and printed out. Next week's task is to produce the 2nd version of Frisch weht der Wind. If all goes to plan, it should be completely finished and on Sibelius by this time next week.

2006-08-17T12:32:00.000+01:00

Hmmm. Haven't posted for a long time. I've been on holiday to Santorini and Chester. While I was away I did some work on Lovesongs and since getting back I have finally finished (nearly) disiecta membra. I have only to go through it and change some of the sforzando markings to other accents (the use of sfz throughout the score has made it look a little hysterical - I'm replacing them with accents, tenutos, etc. but also (for the strings) sometimes replacing them with just bowing indications). Nice to finish it though. Looking forward to it being on the computer and printed out.

I'm planning to send it to Ensemble ExposÃ©, who have expressed an interest in working with me over the next few years (I'd like them to be the main 'band' for the ensemble pieces within my cycles). I started the piece in September 2002, for the ensemble Symposia, based in Glasgow, who had asked me to be Composer in Association for 6 months. It wasn't a fantastic partnership. disiecta membra, in the form I gave to them in October 2002, wasn't very finished. I had written it in a hurry after spending a year working in an office without composing and had gone back to some very basic automatic processes to generate material. I had ended up with a quite complex piece for septet with very hard rhythms (at times unnecessarily so) and no dynamics or articulations. The time signatures were also slightly unwieldy (14/16 to be understood as 3+4+5/16 etc.) and unhelpful. The other pieces that I wrote for them were Cantus 6 (for flute, clarinet, tuba and 'cello) and Music for Pete Greig (for flute, clarinet, and detuned 'cello). They were also planning to perform Fantastica Stutta Diaboli (from my Blake cycle) (for flute, oboe and clarinet) but in the end, only Cantus 6 was performed. There were rehearsal issues to contend with (the saxophonist (that I later changed to a clarinet) in disiecta membra was sporadic in his attendance, and the whole septet found it difficult to come together for number of rehearsals that the piece required; the oboist for FSD didn't appear tomaterializee; and we worked quite intensely on Music for Pete Greig, especially on the detuned 'cello harmonics, but by the time it came to the performance, the 'cellist had forgotten how it all worked) but also I was trying to juggle the two commissions that I had that year (Lovesongs for the London Sinfonietta, and De contemplationis digitis for the Cheltenham Festival) and didn't really have the time to spend a lot of time solving problems and generating new pieces. I regret that more didn't come out of this collaboration, and I'll attempt to send the new versions of all three pieces on to them so at least they knew it wasn't all in vain!

It took me about 2 years to come to terms with disiecta membra and realise what needed changing. At the time I had a real problem with dynamics and articulations. I think that I've got over it now (at least for the time being) but the history of this piece has really been the history of my approach to music over the course of my PhD. My approach to gesture, dynamics, and articulation has, I believe, passed through the crisis and emerged stronger and more nuanced. None of this would have been possible without the patient and insightful criticism of F, and I've decided that this would be a good piece to dedicate to him.

2006-06-14T00:01:00.000+01:00

I just want to post something short today to mark the passing of György Ligeti.
Ligeti is one of the most significant and influential composers of the last century.
We can be sad that the third string quartet and his opera on Alice were never written, but we are left with a rich musical legacy.
Ligeti's music has been a tremendous influence on me and I can only assume that it will continue to be.

2006-05-14T11:35:00.000+01:00

I've spent the last day proofreading a short viol piece by F. It's been an interesting experience, pursuing another composer's processes - constructing a piece according to another's blueprints.

Apart from developing some theories about accidentals that might bear repeating to some composition students some day, it struck me that there is a great difference between F's processes and my own.

When I 'process' some material (whatever that is - Satie, a pitch row, random numbers), any error will not produce anything very divergent from the overall effect. It has to be a big deal if I want to be exact because usually the level of process that minces the original material translates it to such an extent that it is largely unrecognisable (think of the solo piano opening of the second movement of Lovesongs, where left-over Wagner from the 1st movement becomes something resembling Berg - accidental but beautiful and fortuitous conjunction). F actually wants you to hear the lines, and follow them even though they've been scrunched into semitones and (in 2 voices) have been shuffled like cards.

Why do I use pre-existent material or even processes if I'm that indifferent to accuracy? I'd like to point out that in terms of accuracy, I don't mean that I'm indifferent to errors in the score: 20 notes in a 21:17 tuplet for example, or a botched metric modulation. I'm referring to mistakes that have been made in a transformation process or a number sequence mistakenly reconstituted. There is a margin of error that I'm willing to accept. It's almost an economy of effort. I check over what I've done to some degree, but I feel no compulsion to go over it to the degree that I am with F's piece. I remember finding a big mistake in the 'perfect' durational sequence in my 'opus 1', Supplication for mixed choir. It was in one part (the tenor part) and I only found it while we were preparing it for performance. I went home and tried to fix it but realised that if I did that, the entire framework was weighted in a completely different way (from that point on, the tenor line would be completely different) and would make my coda seem 'wrong'. In the end I concluded that I preferred it with the error in place. The 'sound' of the piece wouldn't be very different if the correct numbers had been used, but the change would alter the detail of the piece to such an extent that it would have to be recomposed. And I didn't want to do that. What would be the point of completely recomposing a piece so that it was 'correct' even though the soundworld remained the same, and would have a different weight (and therefore potentially a different 'feel') to the already composed version? I kept the error. Given that a major inspiration for the piece had been the Liturgie de cristal from Messiaen's Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps, the error is fortuitous. I was always slightly dubious about Messiaen's claims to the 'perfection' of the number 7 in this work, and the 'super-perfection' of the number 8. The error becomes the grit in the oyster, the human failing that makes the piece mine.

I'm not sure quite how I'll justify all of this in my viva but I'm working on it, which is the main thing!

2006-05-08T00:41:00.000+01:00

To the sounds of Steve Reich's Drumming, I've completed Version A of Frisch weht der Wind. There are a few formatting issues (just spotted three time signatures slightly out of place) but by and large it is complete. Making a start on Version C tomorrow... on a roll still...

2006-05-06T00:22:00.000+01:00

Well, the maneuvering of the time signatures took me less time than I thought and I've actually got through just over half of the score of Version A of Frisch weht der Wind. Passed those pages to F to vet, will also try to get P's opinion on the notation.
So far so good...

Realised that once I type up everything that's almost ready to go: (US4, disiecta membra, Lovesongs, Frisch weht der Wind, La Pastora, and De contemplationis digitis) I've got an hour's worth of music - and that's counting Frish as a 3 minute piano piece (all four versions rack up a total of 12 minutes). Anything on top of this is a bonus!

Been listening obsessively to Mama Cass singing 'Make Your Own Kind of Music' today, and all because it featured in the opening few episodes of Lost. It just got into my head and refused to leave, so I'm flushing it. Aggressively. It's just fantastic!

2006-05-01T23:21:00.000+01:00

I've put all of the basic notes of Frisch weht der Wind onto Sibelius now. I'm probably going to redo all of the time signatures (yawn) to ensure that they align correctly (like the anally retentive time-waster that I am) but otherwise it's done. The wonkiness that the constant change of meter produces is really quite attractive. I hope that it's actually possible for a performer to get it really into their head to reproduce it.
I'm making enquiries concerning the possibility of having Version A of Frisch performed on a Discklavier or similar, for the purposes of recording (but also, it would be nice to have an ultra-correct version of the score!).

Once I have my basic 'skeletal' version of the score complete, it's really just a matter of saving it as three different files, and then editing it as appropriate to produce the three different scores. And then that's it.

2006-04-27T23:26:00.000+01:00

Long time, no post.
Not because I don't love my avid internet fan scene.
Not because I plan to become one of the majority (can't remember the statistic) of bloggers who stop posting after 3 months.
But because I got sick of posting 'haven't finished yet' over and over again.
So this is my first post-US4 post!

Finished as much of it as I'm going to mess around with (for the moment at least) yesterday. It went in a bundle of stuff (copies of the manuscript final drafts of La Pastora, Frisch weht der Wind (Version A) and copies of the current revisions of Lovesongs along with a recording of same) as part of my application to go to the Darmstädter Ferienkurse this year.
Next move is (tomorrow) to make copies to send to Paul Archbold at Kingston, and to Chris Redgate to have a look at it. Paul reckons we should be able to get a recording of it over the summer for my portfolio (and who knows, if Chris likes it... but let's not get ahead of myself here).

Rather surprised myself today by mowing the lawn, digging compost into the vegetable bed, washing and ironing a load of laundry, and beginning work on the Sibelius version of Frisch weht der Wind (Version A). I thought that I was going to have a mini-slump before working again. I'm making a 'skeleton' version of the score with everything that all four versions will have in common (pitch, rhythm, and (most importantly) bar structure). This is a little bit of a pig because it involves entering every single time signature in by hand (Sibelius can't cope with bars of 1/10 etc. grrrrr) but it will look pretty when it's done.
I got two sides of A4 inputed today (77 very short bars) which shows promise. If I stick at it, a 'skeleton' draft should be finished soon. Famous last words.

In the bid to send my package off, F and I were racing around the department sharing the photocopier, swearing (him in French, me in English). He's in Trossingen giving a paper on Agricola right now (well not right now...) and there had been compatibility issues with his notes. For some reason, our university PCs (the staff PCs in their offices, not the networked PCs) seem to translate Mac-originated Word documents as notes - crotchets, minims etc. Also, he'd realised that he wasn't happy with the quality of his scanned examples. It was one of those great stress-filled evenings that you absolutely dread, try to avoid, and pretend to yourself that you don't enjoy. It was lots of fun but I hate doing it frequently!

My plan for the next year is to have lots of copies of my music prepared to send out for competitions, applications for summer schools etc., inquiries from interested musicians (what, can't a composer dream?...)

I leave you tonight with a recommendation to have a look at Daniel Wolf's blog Renewable Music, at http://renewablemusic.blogspot.com. Particularly his entry for March 26th. Enjoy.

2006-03-22T00:15:00.000Z

Haven't posted since I got back, not because I haven't been working, but just because I felt like it wasn't worth talking about the slog of making US4 'look nice'. Basically I've been poring over the score in order to make sure that the notation explains exactly what is happening, so that if someone wants to make a new patch for the piece (or use analogue equipment for that matter), then they can.

Despite the fact that I haven't had anything noteworthy (pun intended but not really excusable) to report regarding composition, I have been reading, listening, and posting on the Radio 3 Message Boards. The result is that I have far too much to talk about in one entry. I'll be gentle.

The first thing I wanted to say was, that I went back and listened to the whole of Kurt Schwertsik's Twilight Music - A Celtic Serenade for Octet, (from Hear & Now broadcast 26/11/05, see my post dated 28/02/06) and decided that I didn't find it interesting any more. The overworked clichés that drew attention to the basic nature of the material and to the sound production itself came across as being unintentional. I have problems with a lot of the MOB/ART crowd's music. I love H K Grüber's stuff, but the MOB pieces leave me a little cold. It's probably because I don't get the political engagement. I should find out more.

I'll talk about my Birmingham reading matter in a later post. I'm going to Cork on Thursday so I'll try to read the rest of the Lachenmann CMR issue while I'm there.

I've started to post on the Radio 3 Message Boards. In the past, I have posted on other MBs, but I've been a little surprised by the attitudes of some of the posters. There seems to be a fundamental rift between those who post because they are Serious Music Lovers, and more conversational, tangental posters. In the context of a thread attempting to rate composers as first-rate, second-rate, etc., I'm a bit non-plussed by this. Also, there are people who are fanatical in their devotion to certain performers/composers, and will hear no bad word said. To the extent that, despite the fact that they state their opinion in message 2, every time someone says something less-than favourable regarding their idol, they have to restate their position in a way that is slightly bullying. Some people on the MB have said nice things about the blog, and someone compared it to the Diary of a Nobody. Good point! I don't think that this is as good as that though.

Just a quick word about Hear & Now broadcast on 11/03/06. I enjoyed it. I didn't think that I would but I did. I listened to it after attempting to listen to Saariaho's Du cristal and ...à la fumée, which gave me a headache (Spectralism doesn't usually give me a headache, just on this occasion!). I do have a question about piano quintets however. Does anyone know of a modern piano quintet where they feel that the instrumentation works? It often feels like a piano piece accompanied by a string quartet piece. I'll try to give a more detailed critique at a later date. When I have more brain.

Basically I've worked out the fine details of US4 now. Tomorrow will involve putting it all on computer...

2006-03-16T00:42:00.000Z

Back from Birmingham, feeling rather more like a composer than when I left. I'll give my impressions concerning what I read while away in another post. I'm a bit wiped out so I just wanted to write down a few thoughts about the piece that I started imagining on the train.
It's for a trio of flute, oboe and bassoon. I'm basically working on this for the Aeolian Trio (Carin Levine, Peter Veale, and Pascal Gallois) for their workshops at Darmstadt this year (http://www.imd.darmstadt.de/ferien2006/hauptseite.htm).
I think that it's going to include some really basic material: single iterated notes, scales (mainly chromatic), and triads (arpeggiated). All of these materials are hocketed between the three instruments. It's all going very fast as well. There are accent patterns splashed across the ensemble that aren't in synch with either the hocketing patterns or pitch patterns. There are also going to be big pauses.
And then...
In the middle there's a ridiculously difficult section with plenty of complex rhythms and separate staves for articulation.

Although a lot of the details haven't been worked out, there are plenty of ideas. I'm only worried it's a little unproblematic at the moment. Only time will tell!

2006-03-11T00:55:00.000Z

It's been a weird week. Doesn't feel like I've got much done. Frustrating.
Going to see C tomorrow and I'm taking some reading with me: Volumes 23 and 24 of Contemporary Music Review (Lachenmann issues), Volume 34 no 2 of Perspectives of New Music, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen part 2. Hopefully just taking the pressure off and reading about someone else's music will mean I return to Durham full of energy and focus.
We'll see.

2006-03-07T23:33:00.000Z

After all that, I realised that I had got completely confused about whether the numbers I had in front of me referred to the tape loops (represented by numbers 1-8) or the speaker layout (represented by numbers 1-8). I had used them interchangeably. Doh! So I started again.
This time, I went for the sensible option. I drew some diagrams of the speaker layout and applied the tape loop distribution over them. This made a lot more sense than any kind of mathematical modelling (it's rather obvious now I come to actually think about it) and produced an answer that I'm fairly sure is what I want. This just leaves final proofreading and making pretty. The plan is to have this done by Saturday, when I'm going to Birmingham to visit C.

Speaking of C, following her comments concerning my blog, she's started her own: http://spaces.msn.com/claireg-nearly-clergy. I suppose that this may begin to function as a complement to my own blog. She may well tell you the stuff about my life that I don't include here.

Today I listened to last Saturday's (04/03/06) Hear & Now. It featured a concert from LSO St Luke's in London, and excerpts from a concert given at Huddersfield.
The first concert, from LSO St Luke's, was given by the Arditti quartet with Nicholas Hodges. This was my first chance to hear the new lineup of the Ardittis. I didn't realise that Rohan de Saram had left... The theme seemed to be British and German composers.
The first piece was Wolfgang Rihm's Interscriptum for piano and quartet. I found this quite nice, but I didn't really feel that I grappled with it. It's an over-writing of his 12th quartet and I would be interested to compare the two pieces. Does the piano add anything to the piece?
Philipp Maintz's Inner Circle (or its first movement at least) was more satisfying for me. I can't say that I really listened to it intently, in order to hear the circular references, but it did something for me, and I'm going to listen again.
Hanspeter Kyburz's String Quartet was also very appealing. I wasn't completely convinced by the Bergian harmonies that were going on at times, but it was certainly very expressive and very interesting.
Paul Newland's Mie was less convincing for me, but having said this, it grows on me each time I hear it. I don't think that the soundworld is entirely confident but the balance that emerges, between sound and silence, motion and petrification, mechanism and organism is very attractive. I just felt it was a shame that this balance emerged during the piece, rather than being stamped on it from the start.
Finally James Dillon's The Soadie Waste was disappointing (this goes for a lot of recent Dillon as far as I'm concerned). In his earlier work, the folk-like melodies were problematised sufficiently to make them interesting sub-strata, but now, as they are pushed more and more to the fore, they strike me as a little tired and (dare I say it?) obvious.
Next, the Cikada quartet with Frode Haltli on accordion, recorded at the Huddersfield festival in Hans Abrahamsen's Three Little Nocturnes. This fell between two stools. It was neither short enough to form an appealing set of miniatures, nor was it substantial enough to do interesting things with either the oompah of the accordion, or the rhyming of the sound of the accordion with high harmonics in the strings. Both were there in embryo but neither really became anything.
The last piece in the concert was Fabio Nieder's Sogno 10 lunedi/in una casa/molte gente/musiche son tornato a casa. This was kind of Sciarrino meets Accanto (Lachenmann) and was dedicated to Lachenmann. There was a percussionist/DJ whose role it was to include some 'cheesy Italian pop', of which HL is apparently a big fan. So far so good. But it was too short. The inserts from the DJ weren't really long enough for us to work out what it was, until the end where it kind of erupts (Sciarrino does this sort of thing in pieces like Introduzione al'oscuro, where I think it works- the material that erupts is archetypal and characteristic enough for it to stamp its authority before evaporating). The whistling was also a nice touch, but over a longer duration this piece would have worked incredibly well.

Tomorrow, two friends are coming to dinner and I'm going to pop round to see F and have a coffee. No idea if I'll get to write anything during the day... Watch this space.

2006-03-05T00:17:00.000Z

I have a solution. It's not elegant or pretty, and it doesn't work like magic, but it's tolerable. I'm quite happy to admit that there isn't an elegant or pretty solution, and there's no magic equation to put all my numbers in that will come up with the correct answer.
It's actually all come down to pragmatism and the extent to which I'll tolerate inaccuracies. For each section of the piece, I've worked out an 'ideal' distribution of voices to speakers, and several possible distributions. I total the difference between the two, and the distribution with least differences is the one that I take forward. This probably doesn't make any sense without the context but I hope that it gives an impression of the compromise that I've reached.
Of course, it's time consuming to work out but that's life. I'd rather hack away at a system that I know will produce results that I'm happy with, than come up with a quick fix which almost-but-not-quite does what I want it to.

Having taken nearly 24 hours to find this solution, I am now taking to my bed.

C had a look at the blog today and remarked: 'I'm not reading all that. It's boring.'
My language is also 'poncey'.
Sighs. Rolls eyes. Presses 'Publish Post'.

2006-03-03T22:35:00.000Z

I've been working on the speaker layout for US4, a piece for oboe and live electronics. I say I've been working on the speaker layout, but actually it's just a tiny little aspect of the distribution of one of the delay lines. It's caused me a lot of grief trying to sort it out though. F suggested a great solution. Except I don't like it. It's too easy. Knowing when to back down from the technical challenge posed by a very small detail is not something I'm terribly good at. I've nearly got a great solution. But I've just found a flaw.

On the up side, I've decided that US4 is part of a trilogy of works that overlaps with two other of my cycles: The Star Spangled Banner for detuned violin will form the final part of my 10-part Americana cycle, and an as-yet-unnamed percussion solo will feature in An Evening with Ezra Pound. I'm thinking of calling the trilogy: American Icons or American Heroes. The heroes of US4 are Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld (at the head of the score is a quote: 'almost all our language has been taxed by war' from Ginsberg's Howl). The Star Spangled Banner (I think) will touch on Jimi Hendrix's iconic meditation whilst taking a backward glance at the rest of the cycle. The percussion solo will have something to do with Pound's American cantos (posited title: God Save Liberty, The Congress, And Adams). I call this the up side because it gives US4 a home. Also, seeing as I'm going to be applying for funding for a post doctoral project focussing on the idea of cycles, it adds an additional twist to an already polyvalent concept. Also, it allows me to begin the percussion piece as a stepping stone into An Evening with Ezra Pound... I was intending to produce it during my 30th birthday year, but thinking sensibly, I'm not going to have the time. One year late is acceptable!

I was going to explain more about this problem with the speakers in US4 but I don't want to. It's such a ridiculously small problem. It's probably not worth spending this much time on because the effect of all this fussing won't be audible. But, for whatever reason, it annoys me that I haven't come up with a satisfying (to me) solution. Once it's sorted, there's only the cosmetic side of the score to remedy. Then it's done and I can send it to Chris Redgate. And Cheney will grunt and Bush will address the faithful. And Rumsfeld will sing and Wolfowitz will squeak. Everywhere.

Received in the post a CD of music by Aldo Clementi called Punctum contra Punctum. It's amazing. If you've never heard any of his stuff you really should. The CD has four tracks and verges from the bizarre (GiAn(ca)rlo CArDini for prepared piano) to the thoroughly weird (Fantasia su roBErto FABriCiAni for solo flute with twenty four recorded flutes). I finally ordered the CD of Madrigale by the Ives Ensemble, which is the only CD of Clementi's music you'll find on Amazon.co.uk.

Also received the Decca LP of Brian Ferneyhough's Transit. I've been looking for this recording for about five years so I'm very happy that I actually own it now. It's a very clean recording and you can hear a lot of what's going on. I'm looking forward to getting the score out of the library again and following it with the recording. It's such a shame that the plans to reissue it on CD fell through. Transit is a great piece and it's really unfortunate that there is no CD recording of it.

Managed to do one of my favourite things last night: took a bath while listening to the latest podcast from the Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland. This month it featured an interview with Judith Ring, a (largely) electroacoustic composer currently working at York university. I can't say that I was blown away either by her ideas or by her music, but she seemed to be an interesting sort of composer. She seemed to be very much against any idea of conformity. Which is great. Should be encouraged. And she has a website (www.judithring.com). If nothing else, these podcasts are fantastic for finding out about a large number of composers that we never hear about in Britain. You can find out about the podcasts at www.cmc.ie.

I feel I should attack the US4 problem again before retiring for the night. The last thing I want is to be facing it again tomorrow. I will prevail.

2006-02-28T00:27:00.000Z

I've finished the final (paper) draft of Version A! The aim is to start getting it down on computer tomorrow. Not much has changed since I posted the extract a couple of days ago, except that I've decided to add some extra staves whenever those octaves in the bass part get in the way. It makes the whole thing a lot less cluttered. I was going to reserve the extra staves for Version C but I've decided that I'm only going to stick to the traditional 2-stave layout for Version B. The reasons for including extra staves in Versions A and C are different, which is good enough for me. Haven't quite figured out how this will integrate into the finished Version D yet, but I'll just have to wade in and work it out when it becomes a problem!

Will photocopy the 10 A4 pages finished today and hand copies to P and to F and watch their reactions.

Listened to Saturday's (25/02/06) Hear and Now today. It was mainly a recording of Scandinavian New Music played by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, finished off with two pieces from recent CD releases, and a recording of Terje Isungset's Iceman Is, played on ice percussion, ice trumpet and voice. I think that although the quality of the work was generally high, there were some pieces better than others. Pulkkis's Encanto made me think of Messiaen (but only towards the end) but it had a nice stillness (both harmonic and rhythmic). Nordin's Arv was very nice, but I felt that the end was a little too predictable and a little too overdone. Hillborg's Mirages was just too fluent for my liking. There were too many undigested harmonic functions (don't get me wrong - I'm fine with tonality. You want to write tonality? I'm in favour. But do it in an interesting way please!) and it made me think of Vaughan-Williams and Sibelius quite a lot. Also I thought that the quotations were nauseating. Almost literally. They were just nasty and gratuitous. And too loud. Wallin's Chi had nice bits but I can't say that I was blown away by it. The overall form just didn't convince me.
The two CD excerpts, by two female composers came next. Ragnhild Berstad's Verto made me think of Lachenmann's musique concrete instrumentale and therefore I'd disagree with Alwynne Pritchard's statement about this being obviously written by a woman. Natasha Barrett's Ras was quite nice, rather like an acousmatic electroacoustic piece. The percussion certainly didn't detract from the overall effect but I was left wondering what they added. I don't want to say much about Iceman Is not because I didn't like it, but because it was a short extract full of beguiling sounds, that didn't make much sense without the rest of it.

Also I went back to listen to Hear and Now from November 26th 2005, which focused on the bmic Cutting Edge concert called Soundings. The music was by British and Austrian composers. Joe Cutler's Without Fear of Vertigo was nice and clunky, with a well-contained promise that it could go off the rails at any point and go beserk. It was fairly obvious that Ivan Hewitt had never read Italo Calvino's If Upon A Winter's Night A Traveller since he described Calvino as an aloof, learned and quietly mysterious author... (also I think that he's misunderstood the part that Without Fear of Vertigo plays within the novel). Johannes Maria Staub's Black Moon was great. Hysterical, controlled delerium? It contrasted severely with the boring, disjointed and predictable Orchestral Airs by Johanna Doderer. The only time these songs worked for me was when they were grinding to a halt and reminded me of Lars Hallnäs (shades of Mahler's Urlicht too methought). Next, Infra la neve by Marcel Reuter didn't really grab me. It was nice enough but there was nothing really there as far as I could tell. Also, the sound of the pianist's chair creaking was incredibly distracting. David Horne's Spike was sub-David-Sawyer. He even uses the term 'aural camouflage'. Just a little too British for me. The second Staub piece, Arie am Rande Alter Bücher was fairly nice, but I didn't like it as much as Black Moon. wo Lippen die Blätter zu Zeichen bewegen by Reinhard Fuchs was quite convincing, but after a while all contemporary flute music begins to sound the same to me. I'm currently in the middle of listening to the Schwerstik Twilight Music - A Celtic Serenade for Octet and went from hating it to quite liking it. I think it might be too long though... I'll let you know!

Hearing the lovely Alwynne presenting Hear and Now reminded me of the interview she conducted with me on the occasion of my one and only broadcast. I think I made a total hash of it to be perfectly honest. She asked me whether Lovesongs was an emotive piece, written from personal experience. I got flustered, stuttered a little and waffled on saying that it was expressive, but that I wasn't sure what it was expressing. I've been thinking about that again, and I think that I'm trying to almost paint a self-portrait in music every single time I write anything. This connects, for me, with the idea of expression and communication through composition, and with Ferneyhough's ideas about recreating himself with each composition. I'm not sure I'd go that far. I'd like to think that I'm exploring aspects of myself through the act of composition (and therefore changing as a result) but only in the same way that I do when I read a well-written book or poem. Maybe I should try to email her to give her my updated answer!

Crossword was by Rufus today. I got all but 4 clues. In case you were wondering.

2006-02-27T00:08:00.000Z

Completed Saturday's Guardian crossword in bed this morning. Felt quite smug until I realised that I probably had just spent more time on the crossword than I was planning to spend working.

Listened to the last two editions (11/02 and 18/02) of Hear and Now from Radio 3.
The first was Park Lane Group at 50. It featured George Benjamin, Nancarrow, Kenneth Hesketh, Martin Butler, and too much Michael Zev Gordon. Actually, on the strength of that broadcast, any Zev Gordon is too much Zev Gordon. The Butler was a bit pants too. It was all so depressingly British post-'Manchester school' non-aspirational greyness. Talk about not scaring the audience away - you're going to bore them to death instead.

Read in the Guardian that Tom Adès is a 'colossus of the international music world' hence a retrospective in the Barbican. It really does make you wonder about the critical faculties of the critics in this country. I think that Adès has written some good stuff but I have a horrible feeling he's gone all George Benjamin.

Second broadcast was Mark Anthony Turnage's Blood on the Floor and I have to confess I really didn't enjoy most of it. Admittedly I wasn't particularly open-minded when I started (there's something about the whole improvising jazz musicians with fully notated symphony orchestra that's just a bit... I don't know.... fake?) and I just didn't know what to think about the auto-biographical elements. When you know the story (or at least bits of it), it's a little too emotionally coded for me. Emotive gestures. Clichés. I did find the final section quite touching (Dispelling the Fears). I heard this live at the Proms and it was good then but the commercially recorded version really doesn't do it justice - it robs it of its teeth. This live recording was great and coming at the end of the whole suite, it had more oomph.

All of which avoids the topic of my own music. Had an interesting moment this evening when I was texting D to share with him the information re:Adès (as above) and realised that a lot of this whole polyvalent form for Frisch could be seen to be coming from him. He sent me a couple of scores where the constituent parts can move around (especially in the Cello Sonata). F was the one that thought that three versions would be nice (and he hadn't seen the scores, though we'd discussed them in theory) and maybe my reaction against this suggestion was due to having seen D's own approach. Felt like a Boulez remark coming on: 'There is already enough unknown'.

Tweaked the notation around a bit. Not sure that these long 'pedal' octaves overlapping really communicates much. Will show them to F and to P and see what they think. I just wanted Version A to be the 'purest' version. We'll see...
Found a few mistakes in Version C and thus in Version B. I'll have to go back and change them. If I've gone on record saying that all four versions are the same and then they aren't...

Just got to keep plugging away. Finish this piece, do the odds and ends that need doing to US4, and then I can actually compose some new material again. Can't wait to grapple with the Dead Island Songs for strings. Caught sight of an old score and grew nostalgic about writing for more than one instrument.

2006-02-26T00:33:00.000Z

As promised in the last post, I've uploaded a graphic of the first page of Version A of Frisch weht der Wind (score is copyright John Hails 2006). This is the version of the piece that I was planning to write when I first started work on it. The dynamics, phrasing and articulation are all derived systematically from the original Satie. There are some illogical (possibly impossible) situations (see bb. 21-7 for example) that I resolve in the Versions B-D but not here. The phrasing is also slightly strange at times, but I wanted performers to solve some of the problems for themselves. The score is an 'ideal' image for the performer to aim at.

I think that it's going to be this version that I'm giving to P. I'll have to show him this page and find out if he screams.

Just to show that I have at least a semblance of a life, I went to a concert last week in Durham. Kate Ryder and David Appleton played Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mantra with electronics provided by Michael Young. It was nice to hear the piece live (last time (actually the first time) I heard it was at the Huddersfield Festival in 1996 with crazy Karlheinz in the audience) but I had niggles.
It was too slow in places (especially in the penultimate section) and it didn't sound like I remembered it. There seemed to be some pitches missing. Talked to M about this and she thought that maybe it was the bass frequencies... Perhaps a low-pass filter? Anyway, the electronics (sine tone generators) should be controlled by the pianists, not by a guy with a laptop! Anything else is a monkeying-around with the performer interface designed by the composer. The morse code section made me wonder if Michael Young had ever actually heard morse code before. A lot of the electronics was periodic and seemed to be based on quite short loops, which seems to go against the intuitive movements that Stockhausen requests in the score...
The experience made me want to maybe look into producing a Max/MSP patch for the piece, or at least to write about the issues involved (in the same way that I haven't quite got round to with Ferneyhough's Time and Motion Study no 2). Who knows? Maybe I'll have some time on my hands at some point.
All in all it was nice to hear it (and quite fun to see David Appleton in his leather trousers) but this wasn't what I'd call a representative performance, now if I could only get hold of my recording that I lent to Max...

2006-02-21T00:16:00.000Z

C visited over the weekend along with a couple of other friends so I haven't managed to get much done since the last post.
What I have been doing is slogging through Frisch and going through the same process for each page: first it looks like crap, then I start seeing how interesting the contrapuntal phrasing is looking and then the dynamics become fun and interesting.

Frisch weht der Wind is a piano piece lasting about 7 minutes and it will exist in four different versions (although more can be 'created' by the performer). The notes and rhythms are the same for each version. All that change are the dynamics and articulation. Each of the first three versions pursues a different strategy (with differing degrees of automation) but the fourth version moves between the first three according to a pre-composed 'route'.

In performance there are a few options:

Perform version 4 (this is the only option if the piece is being performed as part of the Etudes Tristesses (Frisch weht der Wind is no. 3 in this cycle))
Perform any or all of versions 1-3
There are two pauses in the piece. If option 3 is being observed, the pianist must change version after each pause (only versions 1-3 and all versions must be used).

As I mentioned in my last post, P wants to play it on the 9th March. I'm a bit worried about this because I'm a little way away from producing a definitive score for any of the versions. He has the basic skeleton score (without very much by way of dynamics or articulation) but is keen to see what I'm doing right now. Each of the first 3 versions need re-drafting before they go into Sibelius: Version 1 is rather uncooked at present (phrasing needs working out), Version 2 needs its dynamics micro-managed, and Version 3 will need some extra staves to clearly elucidate the contrapuntal structure (I'm tending towards Hopkins' Piano Etudes, though not to such an extreme). Version 4 can't be written until the others are done.
Currently coming to the end of Version 3's first draft so I guess I'll just have to make a decision and redraft one of them in a format that's neat enough to copy and give to P.

I'll try to include some scanned images in the next post just in case anyone gives a damn. It'll keep me out of trouble I suppose!

2006-02-17T00:42:00.000Z

Have decided to blog. Momentously egocentric but then it seems that a scary number of people are doing it so why the hell not?
The idea is that this blog becomes a diary of my progress as I write up my PhD in composition. I'll try and write it every day I do something compositionally.
Last night I dreamt that I was sitting in the audience for the performance of the piano piece that I'm writing (Frisch weht der Wind) and only realised afterwards that I hadn't noticed that the irrational bars had not been observed... Note to self - produce mock-up Sibelius score with tempo changes. Work still going quite fluently. Amazed how much there is to do. Have to get a wriggle on if I want to produce a performance score for P before too long.
Talked to Mum about my opera. I think that it's still possible one day. When I have time to produce 3 hours that, quite possibly, no-one will want to perform or listen to. It's still an important and alive concept so perhaps some day...
Maybe C's right. I have more music in my head than I'll ever be able to write.