November 28, 2011
I’ve been working on a piece for this year’s Plug festival at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, which will be in May sometime. The theme this time round is ‘postludes’. Head of Composition Gordon McPherson has invited all the composers here, including staff like myself, to compose something which draws on, or reflects, or comments upon in some way, a piece from a previous Plug festival.
I’ve found myself drawn immediately to one of Gordon’s own pieces from 2007, ‘Spiricom’, part of a trilogy of pieces called ‘Ghosts’ which deal in various ways with death and a possible afterlife.
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August 29, 2011
I’ve just got a new toy (tx John!). It’s a Cheetah MQ8 midi sequencer. This is UK made, apparently released sometime in the late 80s as a competitor to the Alesis MMT-8. I’ve only just started to figure it out: pretty crazy trying to do everything with a combination of button presses and a tiny, dim LCD screen!
Here’s a two track improvisation, using sounds from my trusty Casio GZ-50M.
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May 20, 2010
So here I am at the Forum for Innovation in Music Production and Composition at Leeds College of Music. It’s been a while since I’ve attended a conference, but I’m getting back into the swing of it. It’s hardly coalmining; nevertheless, it’s quite tiring to sit still all day listening to a long series of what can be quite dense and complicated presentations.
The subject matter for this conference at least is consistently up my street.
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April 27, 2010
The programme note for my latest piece Étude-Poème pour Pianiste Récitant, being performed this evening at 1830 by Silviya Mihaylova.
‘So, here’s the idea; a piano étude where the pianist speaks to the audience, playing along with what she is saying. This idea has several things going for it, for one, hopefully nobody else will have hit on the selfsame thing. Also… here’s what it says in the Oxford Companion to Music, under ‘étude’;
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April 10, 2010
Having some free time over the Easter break, and in preparation for taking part in a performance of Cage’s Musicircus at Tramway on 30 May, I’ve been playing with the Lexicon MPX 100 effects unit which Allan Neave gave me, feeding it back into itself, which works particularly nicely on the pitch-shift-plus-delay patches. At the same time I’ve been working on a Max patch which drifts five-note chords gradually through a modulating set of hexatonic regions, so… without really meaning to, I ended up putting together a sort of ambient track combing the two;
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February 1, 2010
This is the sort of thing where there’s probably a video out there already explaining it, but as I ended up figuring it out myself anyway, I thought I might as well make my own video… This is how to send midi information from Max/MSP to Logic Pro, in particular how to use Max to control the automation parameters of a softsynth running in Logic. Probably best to watch these fullscreeen; http://youtu.
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October 22, 2009
ARTMUSFAIR is… well, I guess you could describe it as a trade fair for contemporary music (stop giggling) which this year is happening in Glasgow, Thur 29 Oct to Sun 1 Nov. I’ve got two things confirmed and a third in the pipeline.
First up is a new piece certain assumptions, which was accepted in a call for scores by the Red Note Ensemble. It’s for alto flute, horn, marimba, cello and ’tape’, with the latter part composed using a patch I made at the pd bootcamp in Wales earlier this year.
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September 23, 2009
Nothing earth-shaking here, just the very first Max/MSP patch I built with my Performance Technology students today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptgQIun-H70
September 11, 2009
A long-standing frustration of mine is the way the music notation package Sibelius handles the ’tilde’ sign ~ in text. As a sort of clever bodge or hack, it is used to hide midi messages, so that a control change for example can be put in the score as ‘~C64,127’, but won’t print out.
However, I’m of the frequent habit of using the ~ sign to mean ‘approximately’; I’d love to be able to mark a pause, for instance as ‘~45 seconds’, meaning roughly 45 seconds, but when you do that the text gets hidden.
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September 4, 2009
All week I’ve been on a PureData course at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, with Simon Kilshaw. PureData, or Pd, is a free and open source graphical programming language for music and video; in plain language, a system allows one to plug together a series of graphical objects on a screen in order to create an original work of digital art.
Pd is closely allied with another very similar language, Max/MSP, both having in fact been initiated by the same programmer, Miller Puckette.
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