In my day job in charge of the masters programmes in music at the RCS, I can’t help but be interested in innovative new models of postgraduate study. So I was very happy to be able to visit Hamburg this week to observe the CoPeCo programme in action. This is a joint European masters in contemporary performance and composition, where the students study in four different institutions in Estonia, Sweden, France and Germany. ...
Last night I stumbled into my first public outing of some livecoding I’ve been working on in SuperCollider. The context was an improvisation night called In Tandem run by Bruce Wallace at the Academy of Music and Sound in Glasgow. I hadn’t intended to play, as I really don’t feel I’m ready yet, but I had my laptop and cables with me, they had a projector, so…! I was jamming along with three other people, on bass, guitar and analog synth. ...
I’ve been working for a while with an improvising setup that uses what is sometimes jokingly called ‘recursive synthesis’ – that is, plugging an effect unit back in to itself and experimenting with the no-input feedback sounds. Today I’ve had some success with the next step in developing this system. I’ve written a SuperCollider patch that allows me to gate and pitchshift the feedback sounds, so that I can begin to find a way to play them musically using a keyboard. ...
I’ve been at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Den Haag for the last couple of days, working with a group of academics from all over Europe on the METRIC project – ‘Modernizing European Higher Music Education through Improvisation’. (If anyone can tell me in which language that acronym works, I’d love to know!) While I’m here, I’ve been amusing myself with some work on a simple SuperCollider patch to pitchshift live audio, that I intend to use as part of my own improvisational practice. ...
Yesterday I was in London with the Gamelan Composer’s Forum, an occasional collective brought together by Aris Daryono and Rob Campion to share approaches to writing for the gamelan. This particular event the series is entitled ‘The Intimate Gamelan’, and features three pieces written for a gadhon-size ensemble, performing in a private house in South London. There were three new pieces. ‘Sang Empu’ (‘The Maestro’) was Aris’ piece scored for cello and ciblon, the cello part being taken by Alice Jones. ...
Over the winter break, I’ve been working on some new music for gamelan. Following on from Naga Mas’ rather spectacular success with our gamelan-in-outer-space piece Gamelan Untethered, we have plans to do something along the same lines, but this time on an underwater theme. Below is a midi demo of something I’m working on for the group: a sort of sampak/kebyar fusion piece, pulling together some of the livelier ideas from the Javanese traditions with a Balinese-inspired melody. ...
I’ve just spent a very stimulating weekend, combining an algorave in Brighton with the Live Coding and the Body symposium at Sussex University. A packed weekend: I didn’t keep notes of exactly who and what and when, so this is a rather chaotic reflection! The algorave was in a clubby sort of room above a pub. Code from each performer’s laptop was projected on a black behind them, while some livecoded visuals in IBNIZ were projected on an adjacent wall. ...
I’ve been calling myself a ‘composer’ for about twenty years now, starting from when I went back to music college as a trumpet player but got sidetracked into writing music instead of playing it. On my website you’ll find early pieces like ‘Rate-limiting Step’ for cello & harp, or ‘Studies of Nucleate Boiling in Thin Liquid Layers (Part 1)’ for chamber ensemble. This is what people usually think of when I say I’m a ‘composer’: someone who writes contemporary score-based music for classically trained instrumentalists to play. ...
Very happy today. Been working on some electronics for the show. For me as a creator, this is a big part of what Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride is about: exploring my nostalgia for teenage evenings spent with a soldering iron, a cup of coffee, and a Hawkwind album. Some pics below: trying to get my SN76477 prototyping station back up and running.
Some of the publicity put out for the show has perhaps been unintentionally slightly misleading! I did have a dream of having a French horn section in the show, but that dream has been realised through… technical means :) Instead of live players, I’ve invented the ‘Horn-a-Tron’. This is a Pd patch which plays back midi horn sounds alongside video clips of sixteen horn players – with thanks to Steve Park for the horn vids. ...