Some thoughts on my piece "She Erases a Constellation" for Flute and Guitar (2021)

I've just posted a score video for my 2021 piece for flute and classical guitar, "She Erases a Constellation", which was the first full submission on my Master's course at the University of Surrey, and to be honest my first real attempt at anything one might call "formal", or at least notated composition. I've posted the commentary I had to write about the piece below. (The course was at least in part research-based, so all creative work submissions required an accompanying reflective commentary.) But before that, some thoughts two years on.

• I guess the first thing that strikes me is that it is a little jejune. To be sure, there's a lot of influence in there, which you would expect after >45 years of listening to music seriously. But if an informed listener were to come to it cold, I think they'd immediately see this was the work of a student finding his way. (I think this goes for the commentary too).
• That said, I can see that I was already starting to grapple with some of the themes that I'd continue to work with on the course (and since), in particular rhythmic and harmonic ambiguity.
• The piece was written, as I recall, about six weeks into the course, at which point most of the composition modules had been led by Milton Mermikides (now Gresham College's Professor of Music). On each week of the course we'd been set various compositional exercises and I really threw myself at them, turning out sketch after sketch (as anyone following my Soundcloud "Surrey Sketches" playlist at the time will testify). A lot of the material ended up recycled in this piece.
• As a result, as I noted in the commentary below, there's perhaps a little too much going on stylistically. Like I say, a bit jejune.
• The recording is currently midi-only. I'm hoping to record it properly in 2024 if I can find a flautist to work with. I think at that point I'll re-work the score, and try to incorporate more idiomatic writing for the flute. Are some of those passages even playable?!
• And on that point, I realise that the guitar part is a bit of a monster at times, particularly the faux-metal ostinato passages. One thought I'm paying with is to re-score the piece for flute and electric guitar, which I think could work well. We'll see.
• I think I'm mostly struck by the distance between this piece and my final submission, the small ensemble composition "The Poems by Li Bai". Although some of the approaches in that piece are foreshadowed in "She Erases", the difference in scale, ambition, materials, attention to detail and execution is pretty colossal. It was quite a year!

I'm hoping to re-work the DGMFS website over the Christmas, er, "break", including a page dedicated to all my scores so far, so expect more score videos like this one over the next few weeks. In the meantime, here's what I had to say about it two years ago.

 

Commentary (October 2020)

Process

Following Reginald Smith Brindle’s observations about the difficulty of starting with a blank page[1], I started with a simple sketch of the piece’s outline:

I then outlined the piece purely rhythmically, initially working with cells such as this:

The entirety of the agitato A section and much of the Tranquillo B section were written as rhythms only, according to the narrative structure outlined below. Different harmonic and melodic approaches were ascribed to “zones” of the piece. The melodic lines and chords were then written into this framework. I worked on paper with the first full draft, adding dynamics, expression and correcting errors in the scoring:

The scoring was finalised in Sibelius and the audio was rendered (in midi) in Logic X.

Structure/narrative

The overarching narrative took its cue from the first movement of Leo Brouwer’s “El Decameron Negro”[2], especially in its juxtaposition of agitated and reflective passages. Essentially ABA in structure, the piece’s sections respectively move from rhythmic and harmonic dissonance towards a more congruent endpoint.

Analysis: rhythm, harmony & melody[3]

 The piece employs rhythmic dissonance throughout. The opening (bb 1-11)[4] and duet in the Tranquillo (bb46-69) use radically different rhythmic groupings in the parts to render them apparently independent, somewhat influenced by Morton Feldman[5]. The guitar solo (bb70-92) uses guitaristic Euclidean rhythms in the style of John McLaughlin[6] and Roland Dyens[7]. The ostinato groupings in bb22-33 are obliquely inspired by the math-metal of Meshuggah[8] and Tool[9].

The harmony draws on a range of approaches The opening (bb1-10) is based on two whole-tone scales, and is polymodal from b9. The chords in bb11-17 are Lydian AITs based on the notes of the first AIT. The approach is modal in many places (eg. Lydian dominant and altered scale in bb18-30; Dorian #4 in bb54-67; Aeolian, Dorian and Lydian in bb68-90). Trichords are deployed extensively (eg. bb16-18 and bb54-67).

The melodies were mostly drawn instinctively from the harmony. The melody in bb 46-57 is based on a palindromic dissonance contour (IC: 16234543261); this is foreshadowed in the flute solo. The flute part in the recapitulation is in large part melodically inverted from its initial appearance.

Notation

I drew on Eliane Gould’s Behind Bars (2011)[10] for notation guidance. The guitar part is more closely annotated (see below); RH fingerings and string directions are given where necessary to avoid ambiguity but are indicative only[11].

Critical reflection

I’m broadly happy that the narrative objectives of the piece and the intended tension between dissonance and consonance (generically speaking) have been achieved. I would love to have worked with a flautist to explore the flute more idiomatically, and of course to have had the time to record the guitar parts properly. Overall, I may have employed too many of the approaches discussed in the course so far, and in retrospect might have given a little more breathing space to fewer.

[1] “Another important factor must be borne in mind when we begin a piece: too much detail at that stage can be a handicap.” Reginald Smith Brindle: Musical Composition (1986), p5

[2] See The Music Salon Blog (2012): http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2012/12/townsend-el-decameron-negro-i-el-arpa.html

[3] For a full breakdown of the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic approaches, see Appendix: Annotated Score

[4] Observations about the opening A section apply to the recapitulation.

[5] See Samuel Andreyev: “Morton Feldman's Bass Clarinet and Percussion: Analysis” (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emeDjNSxsCs

[6] eg. Mahavishnu Orchestra: “Faith” (1975) https://open.spotify.com/track/3jobR8lLBgq4VZiqRcZhae?si=50c396dc7bd2405c

[7] eg. “Lettre mi-longue” bb33-35 and “Lettre à soi-même” bb6-14 (2001)

[8] See Jonathan Pieslak, "Re-casting Metal: Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah"(2007) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/mts.2007.29.2.219?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

[9] See Rick Beato: "What Makes This Song Great? Ep.15 TOOL" (2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScRG40_7zb0

[10] For flute: pp253-260; for guitar: pp373-389

[11] “My fingerings are offered only as suggestions throughout, but students are urged to consider the rationale behind them before throwing them out!” Gerald Garcia, introduction to “25 Etudes Esquisses” (1995)

Download She Erases a Constellaton - Annotated Score

 

A recent round-up

 

My life in a nutshell, sadly...

Well, it looks like it's been over a month since my last post. Plus ça change, etc. Anyway, it's been a busy few weeks, so I thought I'd do a quick round-up.

In October I had three consecutive weeks of classical guitar fun, with the odd bit of terror in there for good measure.

BGQ in Rottingdean; L-R, your correspondent, James, Olivier, Ruairi

On Saturday 7th the Brighton Guitar Quartet played our first full concert since the summer, at St Margaret's Church in Rottingdean. The set was a slight adaptation of the one we've played a few times this year already with a couple of new/revived numbers thrown in: Leo Brouwer's "Toccata" and Luigi Boccherini's "Introduction & Fandango". We had a really good turnout and the set seemed to go down very well. From my point of view it was the most enjoyable concert we've played yet, with the material really bedded in.

We're now working on a largely new set to roll out next year (with candidate material including work by Phillip Houghton, Vincent Lindsey-Clark, Mussorgsky, Bach and more) and already have some 2024 shows in Falmer, Blatchington and Worthing lined up. Thanks as ever to our brilliant director Gregg Isaacson for organising the show and his consummate leadership.

Gerald putting us through our paces (photo credit: Anne Fotherby)

The following weekend I attended another of Gerald Garcia's excellent guitar ensemble weekends at Benslow Music in Hitchin, working on a whole bunch of music Gerald had sent ahead of the workshop: some of Gerald's own work, plus his arrangements of Piazzolla and Bach, and a mesmerising trio by the Croatian composer Filip Alilovic, "Spiritus Vitae". As ever, it amazed me how the pieces came together between the usual shonky opening session on the Friday night to the final concert on Sunday. What can I say? Gerald somehow makes it happen (some shouting may occur).

Along the way there was the traditional late evening, er, drunk sight-reading session and a student concert on Saturday in which I performed some Stravinsky duets with my Brighton guitar buddy Paul Dallaway (Theodore Norman's late 60s arrangement of the piano studies "Eight Pieces") and an arrangement of McCartney's "Blackbird" with the singer Alison Du Crane (I encouraged a bit of a singalong, of course.) All in all, exhausting fun. Thanks to Gerald for his energy and incredible musical insight, and to Greg Gomberg for pulling it all together. I'm already looking forward to next year.

Oh, almost forgot, one of the other players at the session, Bernhard Crede, who was making a return to Benslow after a gap of some years, shared this hand-drawn timetable from the weekend back in 1988 - a real work of art by Gerald!

And then (I said I'd been busy) it was time for last weekend's Guitars By The Sea down here in Brighton, organised once again by Jon Rattenbury and Steve Gordon. This was GBTS's second outing and if anything was even better than last year's. The weekend comprised rehearsals in small ensembles and as an orchestra with all the players in attendance. The small group I was in worked on Steve's typically brilliant arrangement of Telemann's G Major viola concerto, while the "orchestra" looked at Akis Filio's "Eight Little Corninthians in Tub" and Luc Lévesque's quite mad montage of tunes from Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker".

The weekend featured a lot of great direction from Jon and Steve, of course, but it was particularly thrilling to be steered through Steve's arrangement of the Telemann by Chris Stell. Chris is a fantastic guitarist in his own right, but has pretty much dedicated his life to ensemble playing, most notably with Mark Eden in the Eden Stell Guitar Duo. It showed; I have rarely been exposed to such insight about classical guitar ensemble playing.

The weekend culminated in a final get-together at Essex Hall in Brighton. The session opened with great presentations by the renowned guitarist Paul Gregory and luthier Stephen Eden, followed by some individual performances ahead of the final small ensemble and orchestra performances. I was honoured to play with the aforementioned Paul D and Shaun Bullard in a trio playing another of Akis Filios' pieces, "Dry River" - it's a blast to play with such lovely players. And I was relieved to somewhat redeem myself after my car crash in last year's final GBTS concert, making it through the solo part of the Telemann opening movement with at least 90% of the right notes in 90% of the right places. That said, it was the largo movement, so anything else would have been a disgrace, but still...

Anyway, another great weekend. Many thanks to the apparently indefatigable Jon for making it happen, and so seamlessly! Check out the GBTS Facebook page for updates.

Front row: Mark Eden, Steve Gordon, Paul Gregory, Jon Rattnenbury, Stephen Eden, Emmanuel Sowicz

In other news, I'm continuing my harmony and theory studies with the composer Peter Copley. As I reported recently, I've slightly stepped back from the Bach chorale work in order to work through Fux's "Gradus ad Parnassum" species counterpoint exercises (oh, the joy of it!) but I'm still doing the odd one. Here's my re-harmonisation of the chorale "O Ewigkeit, Du Donnerwort":

Simon Hopkins · Bach: "O Ewigkeit, Du Donnerwort"

And then, as a gig-goer, it's been quite a few weeks. First up, of course, I have to highlight my son Frank Hopkins' first headline show in London, at the Pickle Factory in Hackney. Frank's done a lot of support gigs over the last year or so but this was immense: a 70-minute set of music that ran from spatial, ambient electronica to genuinely jump-up-and-down dance numbers.

Frank in a slightly Jean-Michel Jarre moment

Anyway, I can't really describe it. To get an idea of what Frank does, check out his most recent album, Aeturnum:

In non-family-related gig news... I saw Brad Mehldau turn in a solo recital at the Wigmore Hall (in the company of my long-term musical collaborator Steve Morgan and his brother Paul), and it was, honestly, among the finest concerts I've ever attended. I think the sheer number of encores (four? five?) said it all. Sebastian Scotney captured it well on London Jazz News. When Mehdldau turned to Neil Young's "Don't Let It Bring You Down" I felt close to passing out. I'm certainly looking forward to reading Mehldau's autobiography over Christmas.

I also popped down to Bristol to see the Swedish post-metallers Cult of Luna with my bezzie Kate Norton. A night out in Bristol with Kate was always going to be great fun - and it was - and the gig was phenomenal. I'm not entirely sure why CoL haven't achieved stadium status, given how epic they are. But maybe I am. Here's their most recent album:

Finally, Sarah and I went to a fantastic Sunday afternoon concert given by the Brighton Philharmonic, the first in their 2023-24 season. Joanna MacGregor's role as musical director seems to be having quite an impact; conducted by Clark Rundell, this was a show exclusively of 20th Centrury American work (Gershwin, Bernstein, Ives and Adams) and a total blast from beginning to end. MacGregor's perfromance of the Gershwin piano concerto was utterly exhilarating. The rest of the season's programme is equally exciting - please get along and support their new direction.

On a lower note, I was genuinely saddened to hear of the death of the great jazz pianist and composer Carla Bley. With such a storied and brilliant career, it's invidious to point to any of her work in her particular, but what the hell. Here's her mercurial, genre-defying, and, truth be told, entirely bonkers 1971 masterpiece Escalator over the Hill, featuring contributions from, among others, Jack Bruce, John McLaughlin, Charlie Haden, Gato Barbieri and Linda Rondstadt (I did say "bonkers"):

From the archive Here's a reminder of my score video for the guitar quartet I wrote as part of the composition module on my Master's back in December 2021. The BGQ has been playing the middle movement, "The Age of the One Moon", as a standalone piece in recent concerts. Hopefully we'll get to roll the whole thing out at some point - although that last movement does look tricky!

Finally, a snapshot of my listening in 2023 to date. Happy shuffling!

Recent round-up and a look forward to the autumn

Right then, a little round-up of what I've been upto and a little look forward. Lots on (and hence not much written here of late, sigh).

In August I attended a guitar course West Dean for the first time since I began my Masters in the autumn of 2021. The was the 30th annual West Dean International Classical Guitar Festival, and was the fourth I've attended, if memory serves. As ever, the event comprised concerts by some of the world's finest classical guitarists (including Xufei Yang and Craig Ogden), small ensembles, an orchestra led by the brilliant Vincent Lindsay Clark, lots of workshops, private lessons, a final student concert and of course a lot of fun socialising. 

The ensemble I played in was led by the renowned young British virtuoso Laura Snowdon. This was apparently her first time leading a group like this and she did it quite fantastically, and with infectious enthusiasm. I especially enjoyed working on Jürg Kindle's 2009 piece "Techno" - a challenge for us to pull off, but a total blast. Here's the piece played by the Eos Guitar Quartet (somewhat more "in the pocket" than our rendition, it must be said, but still... ):

Playing in Vincent's orchestra was a blast as it always is, of course; we worked on a couple of his pieces and a great arrangement of Peter Warlock's "Capriol Suite". I put in a couple of solo performances, rolling out Jobim's "Estrada Branca" at a lunchtime concert and Roland Dyens' "Lettre Française" at the final (and always nerve-racking) student concert. And great to catch up with friends that I've made at the festival over the years, including Hilary May, Stephen Boreham and Clive Kemp. All in all, great fun, if exhausting - and I'm already signed up for the spring course! Thanks to the indefatigable festival organiser Andrew Gough for pulling it all off.

In other news... My music theory studies with Peter Copley continue apace. I'm still working on Bach chorale harmonisation and figured bass realisation, but have now also started work on Species Counterpoint, for my sins, working through Johan Joseph Fux's (infamous? notorious?) 1725 treatise "Gradus ad Parnassum". I'll let you know how it goes, and might even post some of the results here as I progress.

(I also note, somewhat wryly, this observation about species counterpoint from Reginal Smith Brindle's autobiography: "... I now know that to study Species Counterpoint was probably the worst musical study I could have chosen. It bears no relationship whatsoever to composition of an inspired nature, and is only a mechanism for cerebral exercises. There is absolutely no room for creativity. But who knows, this study may have started that taste for those elements of constructivism which were to characterise some of my later music. On the other hand, it should have given me forever such a strong distaste for any artificial structures, that I would shun them ever after.")

Earlier this month Sarah and I took our first holiday together this year, and spend the best part of a week in the delightful city Annecy, in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of Southeastern France. In and amongst the lake swimming, hill walking and excellent food (and possibly some wine), I started work on a new Abyssal Labs piece. Now, diligent DGMFS readers will know that Abyssal Labs was a project that ran from 2012 to 2014: five albums of soundscaping designed as an accompaniment to contemplative practice. To be honest, the music didn't really work against its stated aims, but listening back to some of the work while launching the DGMFS Bandcamp page recently, I have to say I was pretty pleased with some of it as music in its own right, and started thinking about reviving the project as an outlet for long-form, slowly evolving soundscapes.

Anyhow, just before going to France I'd made a recording (I hesitate to call it a field recording - Chris Watson it ain't) at the entrance to Sainsbury's in Lewes Road, Brighton, having been somewhat entraced on a previous visit by the sound the travelator seemed to be making (yes, I know, I know...) Then while on holiday I started playing around with the recording and, well, something started emerging. I'd decided beforehand to work mostly in Ableton Live, to try to break out of old Logic-based habits, and I have to say this turned out to be a good decision. The work so far is definitely in the Abyssal Labs "mode", but using a new DAW, with a wholy different arrangement paradigm and new set of sound effects and instruments to work with has definitely taken the work in a new direction. So here's an early draft - it still needs a lot of work, but should give you an idea of where it's heading. I'm hoping to complete it over the coming weeks.*

Simon Hopkins · Ghosts of the Kemptown Branch Line (first draft)

That being said, the coming weeks are busy, very busy! After a short summer break, the Brighton Guitar Quartet was back this weekend. We played a 20-minute set as part of the first concert in the 2023-24 Sussex Musician's Club season, at the Unitarian Church, alongside sets from mezzo Pamela Cross and the astounding young student soprano Jem Byrne. We rolled out Andrew York's "Spin" once again, as well as Boccherini's barnstorming "Introduction & Fandango" and Leo Brouwer's head-spinning "Toccata" (our first public shot at it - and one that I think we actually pulled off!) Thanks to Angela Goodall of the SMC for inviting us to play.

Brighton Guitar Quartet · Unitarian Church, Brighton, September 2023

The quartet will be back next month for a full lunchtime concert at St Margaret's Church in Rottingdean.

I've got a couple of guitar-based weekends coming up in October. 13th to 15th I'll be at Benslow Music in Hitchin on Gerald Garcia's annual guitar retreat, playing in the ensemble (Bach, Piazzolla and more) and turning in an appearance at the Saturday evening student concert. This year I'm hoping to accompany a couple of the singers also on the course; I'm currently working on arrangements of McCartney's "Blackbird" and Sondheim's "Could I Leave You". If they let me I might turn in a solo, naturally!

Then the following weekend I'll be at the second outing of Guitars by the Sea (here in my home town of Brighton), organised by the apparently indefatigable Jon Rattenbury. I'll be playing Telemann in a group led by Steve Gordon, and performing Akis Filios' "Dry River" in a trio with my guitar buddies Shaun Bullard and Paul Dallaway.

Finally on the guitar front, I mentioned a couple of posts back that I'd failed my Trinity perfromance diploma back in March. Well, in the spirit of "back in the saddle" I'm going to take another crack at it this November. Let's see... Oh, and on the the subject of failure, an update on my brass quintet, "Casualites of the Dharma", which I submitted for a New Music Brighton concert later this year. I'm afraid the piece didn't make the cut, which is disappointing, but ho hum. If any brass quintets out there fancy having a crack at a post-Messiaen processional dirge (with apparently very tricky timings) do get in touch!**

One of my tutors at Surrey, the polymath Milton Mermikides as recently been appointed Gresham College's 37th Professor of Music. Last week, he gave his inaugural lecture, the fascinating and wide-ranging "Why Music Moves Us", at St Luke's in Old Street, and I was lucky enough to attend. Here it is!

Finally, I'm looking forward to some great gigs this autumn, including Brad Mehldau at the Wigmore Hall, Cult of Luna in Bristol, and Bill Frisell at the Union Chapel. But I'm most psyched, of course, about seeing my son do his first headline gig at the Pickle Factory in Hackney on October 11th. You can get hold of tickets here. While I'm promoting Frank, check out his latest single, a rather beautiful Bach re-imagining:

That's it for now!

 

* I'll explain the name in some detail when I finally release the piece, but in the meantime, here's a taster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemp_Town_branch_line

** Because I'm sure dozens of brass players read this blog. Not.

 

Recent round-up: West Dean Guitar Festival prep , my new Bandcamp page, collaborating with Nick Reynolds... and more!

Right, it's been a fairly full-on week on multiple fronts, and I've definitely got that "just hanging in there" feeling, but anyhow...

There are worse place to spend a week playing classical guitar

Next Saturday I'm off to the West Dean International Classical Guitar Festival for the best part of a week. The festival combines evening concerts by some of the world's finest guitarists (including, this year, Craig Ogden and Xufei Yang), with private one-on-one lessons, masterclasses, ensemble and orchestra classes and lots of opportunities to perform (always a scary task, that, playing in front of a room full of other guitarists, including the luminaries above). This is my first time back there in a couple of years (I took last year off while finishing my Master's) and I have to say I'm not feeling as prepared as I'd like, but I'm sure I'll get there. I'm hoping to roll out some Dyens, Turina, Vincent Lindsay Clark (in a duo with the excellent Hilary May, whom I met many West Deans back!) and Jobim both in either performance or in lessons, and looking forward to playing some of Vincent's pieces with the orchestra. Anyway, stoked about going there, although, as I say, a tad daunted and under-prepared, and I hope to report along the way, should I get a moment to breathe!

The not-in-anyway-anticipated DGMFS Bandcamp page

I've finally got around to consolidating a lot of my Boom Logistics and Abyssal Labs work on to a DGMFS Bandcamp "label" page (I mean, it's not really a label is it? But anyhow...) The most recent work on there, Boom Logistics' Fifth, dates from 2016 and has been available for most of the time since on Spotify and other nefarious streaming platforms. So why move to Bandcamp, so late in the day? Well, for one thing, it's nice to have everything in one place, and anyway, it's not as though I'm making money from Spotify - so frankly I'd rather not make money from Bandcamp, which is in every way a better experience for musicians, with a straightforward interface, a genuine community and, well, a generally better "vibe". Whether it stays that way we'll have to see.

But what I mostly like is that I can actually include some information on each release, not least about the various fantastic musicians who've contributed along the way. A lot of people have commented on Spotify in particular's appalling album metadata (the brilliant Ted Gioia among them), and it is truly woeful. By way of contrast, funnily enough, only this morning I was listening to Dennis Russell Davies' 1978 recording of Ives and Copland (on the original vinyl release) and noted this on the back cover (the back cover - not exactly tucked away!)

Different times, people, different times! Anyway, there's more work to do, not least to consolidate the album artwork. The design for Fifth was done my old buddy Paul Finn of Fitzroy and Finn, and rather makes my own attempts at "design" on the other covers look like that of an 8-year-old let loose with a sawn-off version of Photoshop. So I hope to recruit Paul to put that right. 

I'll still be keeping my Soundcloud page going for all my classical shenanigans, composition sketches and so on, and using it to preview other work in progress. Talking of which... I've got two more Boom Logistics releases to get mastered and put up there, both of which I've collated (again, in pre-mastered form) as Soundcloud releases. Firstly, The Rainbow Faults, talked about endlessly (promised? threatened?) in these pages for several years now. Well, honestly, I swear it's nearly there, and here's the final assembly, at least:

And then, in true London bus style, there's going to be another BL release hot on its heels. A Stag Hill Miscellany is a collection of material mostly done either as part of my Master's at Surrey, or at least inspired by it. I was initially unsure about whether this should be a Boom Logistics release or not, but listening back, it strikes me as inhabiting the same world, which is pretty diverse, after all. The more formalistic side of my studies has definitely taken the music to new places, of course, but... well, see what you think. Here's the first draft of an (unmastered) assembly:

In other news, I mentioned earlier in the week that I'd just had my annual recording session with my long-standing collaborator Nick Reynolds, and indeed, my mangling of one of his excellent clarinet improvisations has made it on to the Stag Hill Miscellany playlist above. Nick has now started posting his own pieces from the session, including this, his own bossa-goes-wrong (and brilliantly titled) piece Floating World, Brutal Powerplay:

Then, sigh, more Bach! I've already mentioned my work arranging Bach's aria "Sheep May Safely Graze" for the Brighton Guitar Quartet, and pointed out how much help I've had from Steve Gordon along the way. Well, here's the finished result, albeit with midi guitars (although I have to say how impressed I am with Native Instruments' Plucked Nylon VST - it even features heavy breathing!)

Amid all this, I've only managed to knock out one Bach chorale harmonisation, I'm afraid. It's his "Aus Meines Herzens Grunde", which was quite a challenge because the melody implies a fairly static harmony, and given that it's a reasonably long, six-phrase-length chorale, it made it quite a challenge to sustain interest. I'll let the reader be the judge of whether I've achieved that.

Finally, I wrote a lengthy post on Wednesday celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of the 2-CD compilation, 152 Minutes, 33 Seconds - A Brief History of Ambient, which kicked off the somewhat cult-status "Virgin Ambient Series". I haven't had much feedback on the post yet, given that there are some contentious issues around the series, but what I've had so far has been complimentary, so maybe I wasn't entirely barking up the wrong tree...

My not-entirely-complete AMBT archive

 

Sheep May Safely Graze (guitar quartet arrangement)

I mentioned in a recent round-up that I've been working on an arrangement of Bach's famous aria "Sheep May Safely Graze", hopefully to play with the Brighton Guitar Quartet. The aria is from his 1733 secular "Hunting" cantata (BWV 208). It's been quite a process adapting it for 4 guitars!

I based my first draft on a piano transcription, transposing it from the original key of Bb up to C, and then ran it past the guitarist and arranger Steve Gordon, with whom I've been working over the last year. Steve suggested that I go back to the original scoring for two flutes, soprano and continuo and assign those to each guitar part. He also suggested transposing it - again! - to A, so that the continuo part in particular could make use of the open strings. 

Now this proved tricky, not least as the original vocal part (assigned to guitar 3 in my arrangement) was written in soprano clef. So at this point I was down to transposing the whole thing by a minor third (from my first draft) and dealing with what Sibelius helpfully calls an "archaic" clef. Arghh. Oh, and I had to work out the continuo part from a non-figured bass line, inferring the harmony from the rest of the original texture and from the piano transcription. All just a bit above my pay grade, but it seemed to work, broadly. 

Back to Steve for more feedback, and his final piece of (as ever sage) advice was to make the continuo part more guitaristic, making the chord voicings more idiomatic to the instrument, to which I dutifully attended. Anyway, here's a midi rendition of the final version. Still no attention to dynamics yet. Bach, being a clearly lazy bastard, hardly attended to such frippery. We'll be taking a look at this when rehearsing with the BGQ...

Simon Hopkins · Sheep May Safely Graze

This year's summer recording date with Nick Reynolds

Boom Studios, Brighton ;-)

This Tuesday, my great friend (and one-time Beeb colleague) Nick Reynolds made his annual trip down here to the hipster capital of Europe to spend a few hours recording with me. Nick informs me that this was our eighth year - if it hadn't been for the odd worlwide health emergency we'd be in double figures by now!

Over the years we've evolved a certain way of working that, well, works - for both of us, I hope! Nick brings down his clarinet and various charts he's been working on, we try out a few arrangements and pretty much hit record. Second takes are unusual! We also generally spend a bit of time capturing some of Nick's solo improvisations which over the years I've worked into a lot of my Boom Logistics and Abyssal Labs pieces. Here's a particular favourite (Nick comes in like a screaming and rather jittery banshee at around 1'06'):

This year Nick brought along three charts: one of his own tunes and his typically wayward arrangements of Dave Brubeck's "Fujiymana" and Nat D Ayer's "If You Were the Only Girl in the World" (yes, really). And yep, Nick did a single-take improvisation that I cut up and turned into a kind of semi-indeterminate generative piece, using Ableton Live's rather fun clip "follow" function and a shit ton of Live's FX plugins. Here it is:

I'm thinking I'll be using the piece in the next Boom Logistics release, hopefully coming this autumn (yes, I know we've been here before). And when Nick posts his pieces, I'll be sure to link to them. Anyway, great fun as always - thanks, Nick!

Simon Hopkins · Soap Bubbles And The Forces Which Mould Them

Recollections may vary: on Virgin Records' 1990s Ambient series

My sadly incomplete AMBT archive

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the release of a compilation album I put together while working as a product manager in Virgin Records' Commercial Marketing Department: 152 Minutes, 33 Seconds - A Brief History of Ambient (Volume 1). This was the mid-90s, remember, and "ambient" had become something of a catch-all for a range of electronic and generally spacey music being spun in, er, chill-out spaces at raves. Or so I gather; I guess you had to be there (I wasn't). As it happened, Virgin's storied 70s catalogue had a lot of rich ambient-related pickings: kraut rock, prog and early electronica. The label also owned Editions EG, the "art" imprint of the EG label, which was a rich seam, not least of course for the four albums released by Brian Eno that effectively launched the very term "ambient". And there was plenty of stuff going on at the label contemporaneously that provided compilation fodder. So the collection was a no-brainer. (I should also point out from the get-go that it was not my idea - I was charged with putting it together by my then bosses, of whom more in a mo.)

Anyhow, one way or another, the release ended up being the first of a series of both compilation albums and new releases that somehow ended up, 20 years later, with its own Wikipedia page, Virgin Ambient Series. The series ran to 24 releases and came to an end in 1997, the year I left the company. For a while at least, the series enjoyed something of a cult status and acquired a bit of an afterlife on the web, so I thought this might be a good moment to share a few random thoughts about it, although as the title of this post indicates, this was a long time (and several careers) ago, so some of my recollections might not be court-worthy. 

The key thing that needs to be said is that this was never conceived as a series - or at least not the one it turned into. Yes, the first release featured the teasing "Volume One", but I think that simply suggested that we might flog the dead horse at least a couple more times. Anyway, the first record sold well enough to follow it up with two more, which mined the same catalogue (with somewhat diminishing returns, truth be told), again riffed on John Cage titles, and featured graphics by Buggy G Riphead, who'd been working with the Future Sound of London, at that time one of Virgin's apparently coolest acts.

Things took a very different turn with the series' fourth volume, 1994's Isolationism, compiled by Kevin Martin, now perhaps best known for his work as The Bug, and whom I'd known since his days with God (I'd encouraged the Virgin imprint to release God's "Possession" a few years earlier). Kevin had written about the darker music around the edges of ambient for The Wire magazine, and (again, if memory serves) coined the term "Isolationism" to describe it; the compilation was Kevin's idea and broke with the series template not only stylistically, but in licensing new tracks.

Albums then came thick and fast, and broadly fell into four categories.

"Historical" compilations The legendary journalist and musician David Toop released several compilations for us, starting with 1996's Ocean of Sound (to accompany David's groundbreaking book of the same name), continuing to the series' last release, 1997's Guitars on Mars. In a similar vein, Kevin compiled the psych-jazz survey Jazz Satellites.

Artist releases This was perhaps the most unexpected area of activity for us, and the series ended up including several releases by Toop himself, Australian composer Paul Schütze, Kevin again under two soubriquets, Techno Animal (with Justin Broadrick of Godflesh and Jesu fame) and The Sidewinder, and Rudy Tambala's Sufi.

Compilations of new material Following Isolationism, Kevin went on to compile further collections of new material for the series, the two volumes of Macro Dub Infection.

Existing planned releases At least two artist compilations that would have gone ahead anyway ended up under the Ambient series banner, a collection of work by Tangerine Dream founder Edgar Froese, and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra's compilation Preludes, Airs and Yodels.

Although more releases were planned for 1998, I left Virgin at the end of the previous year and the series ended there. So... that's the history, again as I recall it, and what follows are a few brief observations (file under "wanting to get off my chest for three decades").

The real heroes of the series get nary a mention on any of the album credits: my then bosses Steve Pritchard and Pete Duckworth. It was they who had suggested the first compilation and from there on out they were nothing but supportive of my work on the series. Given how esoteric things got at times (remember, they headed up the Commercial Marketing team), they let me get on with it and supported me throughout. In retrospect, I think I was pretty bratty about the whole enterprise and not sufficiently grateful at the time. So let me put that right now: Pete, Steve - thank you for your patience with it all!

Not unrelated... In some of the contemporary coverage of the series, there was definitely something of a "major label ripping us off" kind of vibe. As a Quietus review of my own alt-rock compilation Monsters, Robots and Bug Men says: "One of the bands on here used to have a website whose discography advised people not to buy this album, because it was released by Virgin and everything on it was already available on smaller labels." Indeed, in the Wikipedia entry on "Isolationism", Jim Plotkin is quoted as saying that "Isolationism was a Virgin compilation and it needed a marketing angle". Really, a marketing angle?!

Honestly, I get it. But this is definitely not what was going on. After the initial spate of catalogue-mining compilations, the whole shebang consisted of me constantly hustling Steve and Pete to let me put out collections of old material and releases of new work that I wanted to get more attention. If there was anything nefarious going on, it was me trying to build a personal reputation; I don't think even that was the case (and in any case it didn't work), but I'm prepared to concede it. But I can say categorically that it was not a major label "cashing in". If only!

A clear shortfall of the series is that it clearly relies on too small a circle of musicians and journalists - although they were all great, of course. The truth is that I simply wasn't well enough networked, knowledgable nor proactive for it to have been otherwise. As painful as it is to admit it, I think that a smarter, better-connected and, well, more knowledgable "overseer" (as Kevin termed me on the liner notes for Jazz Satellites) would not only have produced (overseen?!) a stronger series, they would have been able to create the attention it deserved.

I'm particularly proud of the limited-period licensing approach we took to new work. Alongside all this activity, one of my roles at Virgin was to "look after" the deeper back catalogue. Part of this entailed making what in retrospect were often entirely specious arguments for keeping low-selling titles in print. (This is one of the reasons I fell so hard for Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" distribution argument, although I admit that it didn't pan out as some of us had hoped. More on that another day.) Seeing (albeit subjective) masterpieces constantly in danger of deletion made me determined that any new work we released should have its release rights returned to the artist at some point after release.

I don't claim that the series created a template for playlist culture. For one thing, mixtapes had of course been a thing for a decade or more before this sequence kicked off. But it is striking to me how popular thematically-arranged, fabulously niche playlists (complete with crossfades!) have become in the age of Spotify, bringing me neatly on to...

The series has definitely had a bit of a strange afterlife, not least on Spotify. I embedded a playlist based on David Toop's Ocean of Sound series earlier. But it gets weirder. Only a couple of years after leaving Virgin I started to see online speculation about the second iteration of Kevin's Jazz Satellites compilation. As I mentioned earlier, we'd already scoped this out before I left the label, and had even distributed sales notes (sadly I can't find a copy of these in my threadbare archive). Somehow these notes had made it into the hands of members of online mailing lists (rmember them?), leading one list member to suggest that there were "definite plans for the second volume when corporate changes sunk the project." Yeah, right: "sunk", and "corporate changes"!

After the initial three catalogue-scraping compilations, I personally put together only one more, the aforementioned Robots. For the longest time, I felt this to be the weakest of the entire series, not least as it got a complete kicking in the press at the time (and a completely reasonable letter of complaint from the brilliant Simon Reynolds pointing out that I'd entirely ripped off his concept of "post-rock" without attribution). But even this release has had its own afterlife and even re-appreciation, with a contributor to AllMusic describing it as "a real peach", and adding, "attempting to condense a genre that encompasses everything into 155 minutes is a thankless task". Honestly, after all these years, I'll take that!

Finally, a word on the composer and trumpeter Jon Hassell, who sadly died a little over two years ago. Jon's amazing work as a composer and band leader naturally featured heavily in the AMBT series' first three releases (again, a by-product of Virgin at that point owning the catalogue of Editions EG, who'd released several of Hassell's key albums and his collaborations with Brian Eno). He then went on to play on Techno Animal's Re-Entry (recently re-issued on Relapse) and Toop's Pink Noir. I regret that the series doesn't feature one of his own records, but again, a better series "overseer" would have made that happen. 

So that's it. In the spirit of this post's title and, I hope, its general tone, I would welcome any feedback, observations, and perhaps most of all, corrections. Again: recollections may vary; it now all feels like several lifetimes ago.

On Spectralist Guitar Music... or rather not

This was going to be a follow up piece on my AI-assisted little introduction to spectralist composition, but is rather more (if briefly) about generative AI itself. I asked my, er, "research assistant" to pull together a short list of spectralist and post-spectralist work featuring classical or electric guitar, with a brief commentary. Here's what it came up with (my comments on its comments in italics:

Fausto Romitelli - "Dead City Radio" for Electric Guitar and Ensemble: This mesmerising piece combines the electric guitar's unique timbre with spectral orchestration, creating an otherworldly sonic experience. OK, not a bad start.

Tristan Murail - "Vampyr!" for Electric Guitar and Ensemble: Murail's innovative use of spectral techniques shines through in this composition, where the electric guitar interacts with the ensemble in a haunting exploration of sound. Actually, this is a solo electric guitar piece, so I'm marking you down for that - although it's fantastic!

Brian Ferneyhough - "Kurze Schatten II" for Solo Electric Guitar": This technically demanding piece challenges the electric guitar's capabilities, combining post-spectral elements with extended playing techniques. Mmm... it's for solo classical guitar, and Ferneyhough is in NO WAY a spectralist. So nil points on that one (although it IS great and I will inlcude in a later post about New Complexity composition).

Michael Levinas - "Le Rouge et le Noir" for Solo Classical Guitar: Levinas' composition explores the expressive potential of the classical guitar, with spectral influences enriching its emotional depth. I've found nothing on this other than a bunch of scholarly articles, I'm afraid.

Philippe Leroux - "M" for Electric Guitar and Orchestra: Leroux's imaginative work features the electric guitar as a soloist in dialogue with the orchestral forces, showcasing spectral orchestration and the guitar's versatility. Ditto.

Magnus Lindberg - "Era" for Electric Guitar and Ensemble: Lindberg's post-spectral language beautifully intertwines the electric guitar with a diverse ensemble, creating a dynamic and engaging musical dialogue. Ditto.

Benjamin Thigpen - "Metal, Skin, Wood" for Prepared Electric Guitar and Electronics: Thigpen's electroacoustic exploration includes prepared electric guitar elements, combining spectral and electronic soundscapes. Ditto. Although I ended up enjoying an article about the future of aluminium supply.

Javier Torres Maldonado - "Cyber Guitar" for Guitar and Electronics: Torres Maldonado's piece features the guitar in a captivating conversation with electronic elements, exploring spectral timbres in an electroacoustic setting. Er, ditto - this is getting boring, frankly.

Kaija Saariaho - "NoaNoa" for Flute and Electronics (or Flute and Live Electronics): Though not specifically written for guitar, Saariaho's use of electronics and spectral techniques provides an inspiring example of how the guitar can be integrated into similar works. Well, thanks for that, but not exactly what I was after.

OK, back to me, in non-italics.

So this was, to put it mildly, a disappointing exercise. To date I'd been less than impressed with ChatGPT's ability to write posts for me, or at least in anything approaching what passes for my style, but I have been broadly pleased with the results of my experiments in terms of research. But it really fell over here. For one thing, it completely missed this piece for classical guitar by one of spectralism's greatest figures, Tristan Murail (although in fairness, it did find "Vampyre!", albeit mis-describing it):

My guess is that a lot of the failing here is that in emplying a large language model (LLM) approach, ChatGPT is better able to search, say, scholarly articles than it is on, well, just browsing YouTube. And in the case of this piece of research, the latter appraoch would be rather more beneficial. Although I stress that this is just a hunch, as this is very much not my area of specialism, and I feel like I'm reverse-engineering its methods. That being said, my own "manual" Googling on the topic hasn't turned up much more either, so it's more than possible that I've set it an impossible task in this instance. I'll keep trying, and perhaps set something a little less challenging next time.

As for the "tone" thing, it's just not getting "me". I've stripped out some of the more egregious examples of it mangling my tone in this post, but really, I don't think even the 25-year old Simon Hopkins would have used terms like "captivating conversation" or "the expressive potential of the classical guitar"*. My suspicion here (again in the spirit of reverse engineering) is that I'm not giving it a large enough of a sample of my writing to get to grips with, so I'll try harder on that front next time, too. More soon!

* I'll have more to say about my 25-year old self in a couple of days.

 

On spectralist composition

"Spectralism" emerged in the 1970s as a mesmerizing compositional technique. Inspired by the scientific analysis of sound spectra, this movement unlocked a captivating world of sonic colours and timbral intricacies. Pioneering composers like Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail paved the way for a remarkable evolution in musical expression.

The roots of spectralism can be traced back to the groundbreaking works of György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis. These composers  explored the boundaries of sound, and Grisey and Murail arguably took this approach to new heights. They delved into the hidden treasures within sound spectra and orchestrated their compositions based on these spectral analyses.

The effect had the breathtaking effect of instruments unleashing unheard textures and complex harmonic spectra. These composers introduced a new world of extended techniques, allowing musicians to breathe life into somewhat ethereal soundscapes. As time passed, spectralism evolved into post-spectralism, pushing the boundaries even further. Composers embraced spectral foundations while incorporating rhythmic complexities, microtonality, and harmonious fusions with other contemporary styles.

Key figures in post-spectralism, like Kaija Saariaho, brought their own innovations to the genre. Her opera "L'amour de loin" beautifully exemplifies the synthesis of spectral techniques with mesmerising storytelling. Magnus Lindberg's orchestral work "Kraft" is another striking example of post-spectralism's expanded sonic palette.

Influential texts, like Saariaho's "Notes on the Concept of Spectralism," further solidified the movement's impact, offering insightful glimpses into the minds of these visionary composers. Post-spectralism's cross-disciplinary nature fostered collaborations with visual artists, choreographers, and more, enriching the artistic experience and creating truly immersive performances.

List of Key Spectralist Works:

1. Gerard Grisey - "Partiels" (Orchestral Work)
2. Tristan Murail - "Gondwana" (Orchestral Work)
3. Hugues Dufourt - "Antiphysis" (Chamber Work)
4. Gérard Pape - "Imaginary Landscapes I" (Electronic and Tape Music)
5. Horatiu Radulescu - "Clepsydra" (Solo Instrumental Work)
6. Fausto Romitelli - "Professor Bad Trip" (Electric Guitar Ensemble)
7. Magnus Lindberg - "KRAFT" (Orchestral Work)
8. Kaija Saariaho - "L'amour de loin" (Opera)
9. Philippe Hurel - "Tombeau in memoriam Gérard Grisey" (Chamber Work)
10. Georg Friedrich Haas - "in vain" (Ensemble Work)

I recommend this rather more in-depth analysis on the excellent "Classical Nerd" YouTube channel:

And this Spotify playlist is a pretty good place to start listening:

Quick round-up of the week: (more) Bach, Mussorgsky, guitar quartets, ambient & a recent failure

I'm cracking on with the Bach chorale harmonisation work, more or less daily, so will share some recent examples, again side by side (cringingly) with Bach's own harmonisation where possible.

Here's the full choral version, sung rather beautifully by a Dutch choir - I couldn't find a version of Bach's 4-part harmonisation, but other people's own work out there in YouTube land generally has more going on in the ATB parts than mine, which is a little too, er, stately, listening back.

Simon Hopkins · Ich Steh' An Deiner Krippen Hier

Here's one where I had to realise Bach's figured bass (Albert Reimenschneider collated 69 of these, only a handful of which Bach himself harmonised - and this isn't one of those). 

I've also been working on an arrangement for the Brighton Guitar Quartet of Bach's famous aria "Sheep May Safely Graze" from his earliest known secular cantata "Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd" ("What pleases me is only the cheerful hunt" - BWV 208). Here's the first draft, which is based on a piano transcription and transposed form Bb to C.

Simon Hopkins · Puer Natus in Bethlehem (re-harmonisation)

Having spoken about this with my friend Steve Gordon, himself a brilliant arranger of baroque music for various guitar combinations, I'm going to be making some substantial changes. Steve suggested that I base the arrangement on the original composition, having pointed me at the extraordinary Petrucci Music Library's online database of out-of-copyright scores. The original aria is arranged for two recorders (or flutes), soprano and continuo, so Steve suggests that I assign those parts to guitars 1 & 2, 3 and 4 respectively. This should create more independence of line and give guitar 4 something more chordal (and certainly more interesting) to do. I'm  also going to re-transpose the piece to A, not least to give give guitar 4 some open strings to play with. I'll report back on that, but in the meantime, here's the original.

Simon Hopkins · Sheep May Safely Graze (Guitar Quartet Arrangement)

On the non-Bach front, I've also been working on another arrangement for the BGQ, this time of "The Old Castle", from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition suite. I say "arrangement", but it's actually a transposition to Am of an existing arrangement by Angelo Ferraro that had inexplicably left the piece in the original key of G#m - not an intuitive key for guitarists! I'm probably going to make some changes to the assigment of parts, as it gets a tad tedious for guitar 4! Anyway, here it is. (The sample set is Native Instruments' Plucked Nylon which is pretty good, but doesn't seem to accomodate tamboura effect that this arrangement strictly needs).

Simon Hopkins · Mussorgsky: The Old Castle

Switching gears, I mentioned in a recent tweet (or is that an "X"?!) that it's almost 30 years since the release of the CD compilation "152 Minutes, 33 Seconds - A Brief History of Ambient", which somewhat inavertandtly kicked of a series of 24 albums that took up much of my professional (and for that matter, personal) time over the ensuing four years and is listed in Wikipedia as the "Virgin Ambient Series". Well, I dug out my original marketing notes, and it turns out that the CD was released on August 9th, 1993, so I'm busy putting together some thoughts for the anniversary, which I'll post here on the day. It turned out that I didn't have many of the original releases, so I've been buying them through the excellent Discogs, which if nothing else has revealed which of the titles is the most sought after. It's also costing me a small fortune, which is annoying, but there you go.

Managed to get hold of 15 so far... another 10 to go!

Finally, that word on failure... In April I finally got around to sitting my classical guitar performance diploma and I have to report that somewhat disappointingly I failed. I'm only reporting it now as I requested a re-marking. That's not something I would ordinarily do, but I was encouraged to do so by a number of my guitar-playing mentors who were all surprised by the result, not least given that the recitals I turned in as part of my Master's were both given credits. In any case, the re-marking has confirmed the failure, which to be honest I was aniticipating.

Although I was initially a bit shaken, I'm actually pretty sanguine about it. The overall tenor of the feedback is: musically communicative, but technically less than assured. That's pretty much in accord with the feedback in all the exams and competitions in which I've participated, but where musicality seems to have made up for technical issues in the past, clearly this time not so much. Given that I took the instrument up so late in life, the holes in in technique aren't entirely a surprise. So it's back on the horse, and a few months of studies and technical work awaits. Sigh.