March 19, 2012
After the success of the ‘The Seventh Voyage’, I have high hopes for my next two laptop-and-acoustic-instruments pieces, both to be performed at Plug 12 in a month’s time. Today I’m working on ‘The Black Rain’, which is for five players from the Scottish Ensemble - two violins, viola, cello and double bass - and live processing in SuperCollider. Here’s the (rather long and convoluted) programme note:
‘When the last trace of the rocket’s presence, a whitish haze, had been absorbed by the atmosphere, when the wandering sandy waves gradually began to cover up the naked rock of the ground, at the same time filling in the deserted digging spaces – only then, much later, did a dark cloud gather in the west.
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March 8, 2012
I’m happy to say that my collaboration with pianist Silviya Mihaylova The Seventh Voyage, for two pianos and laptop, has been given pride of place as the closing work in the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland’s piano festival.
The concert is at 1300 this Monday 12 March, in the Guinness Room. Tickets are available from the RCS box office, although, confusingly, they still have the wrong concert listed on the website https://boxoffice.
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February 10, 2012
I’m working on about three new pieces at the moment. The second of these is a collaboration with pianist Silviya Mihaylova on a shortish work for piano and laptop. The piano part is kind of done: Silviya took my sketches and added some ideas of her own. Apart from that, I have a program note, and some programming:
The title of this piece is taken from Stanisław Lem’s 1971 science fiction comedy classic ‘The Star Diaries’.
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February 6, 2012
January 30, 2012
Here’s how composing looks to me at the moment:
( a=[46!5,39!4,41!4,36!3,44!3,43!2,37!2,38,42].flat; Pbind(\midinote, Pstutter( Pwhite(5,17,inf), //min max number repeated notes Pxrand(a,10) //get 10 pitches (actually 8???) ), \dur, 0.25, \legato, 0.5 ).play; )
December 27, 2011
My friend and colleage Kath has persuaded me to sign up for a ten-hour sponsored improvisation which she is organising. The event is in support of Common Wheel, a Glasgow-based charity who provided ‘meaningful activity for people with mental illness’. They have two strands to their work, a bicyle project and the music project ‘Polyphony’. The latter runs at Gartnaval Hospital, where they are asking interested musicians to join them on 28 January for ten hours of sponsored musical improvisation.
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December 11, 2011
[soundcloud url=“http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/30240394"]
Not be much to listen to, maybe, but feels an important moment for me: a new direction after finishing the PhD, satisfyingly far away from score-based contemporary ‘classical’ nonpop, or whatever you call all that stuff. Next up: more of this kind of thing, plus more gamelan. Happy days.
December 8, 2011
I’m doing, um, I guess my first ever solo electro-junk improv gig on Friday 5 December. Ulp. Here’s the poster… I’m almost embarrased to say:
Let’s see, the plan includes… a Pd patch running on the netbook, probably SuperCollider running on the (new secondhand) MacBook Pro. The Novation BassStation and the Hammond AutoVari 64, a mixing desk, and a pocket trumpet with a piezo mic inside a harmon mute. That’s what I’ve been experimenting with so far, anyway…
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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September 19, 2011
Just found out that the Bremen gamelan group Gamelan Kancil are playing Running in the Dark on Nov 27, working from the score they found here. Hope they make a recording, be curious to see what they make of it…