A look back at the second semester of my Master's course

A little light reading

On Thursday last week (9/6), I finished the second semester of my Master's course at Surrey with a classical guitar recital in Studio 1 in the PATS building on campus. (More of that somewhat fraught affair below). So I thought this might be a good opportunity to look back on the term, which kicked off what seems like a long time ago in February.

For me, the semester comprised three modules: Performance, Music, and Research Training for Practitioners. I was the only student who elected to do both composition and performance; the marking I get for my final recital will be the deciding factor in whether I continue with both in my final portfolio work - I would dearly love to, but at the moment it's 50-50, I think. I'll step through each in turn.

The first part of "Composition B" comprised three sets of very different, but equally fascinating topics. Milton Mermikides looked at some nuts and bolts music theory stuff, which of course I love. We covered, among other things, Neo-Riemannian theory, Bartók and harmony, and Joseph Shillinger's approach to rhythm. Tom Armstrong's lectures took on the theme of "medleys and chains" and drew in composers as diverse as Lutosławski, Milhaud, and Mike Oldfield! (And, er, "Hooked on Classics".) I was especially taken with the Lutoslawski stuff and have gone down a bit of a rabbit hole there. Cameron Graham's classes were, if you will, slightly more conceptual, concerning areas such as "parafiction" and "music & metaphor". As ever with Cameron's lectures, there was a huge amount to digest and some real gems I'd never come across, not least Peter Falconer's "What Happened to Seaton Snook" project.

Along the way, I got a super-generous amount of tutorial time (as I had in the first semester), with detailed feedback on my ideas from Milton, great conversations with Tom about his own work and scoring for electric guitar in particular, and working through some thinking with Cameron about where I might go next with all this stuff.

I was aware from the feedback on my first semester's composition portfolio that I have a tendency to take on a few too many ideas and should, rather, explore a smaller number in more detail. Milton had also pointed out to me that I shouldn't let the theoretical stuff get out of my own musical intuitions. As a result, to be frank, I didn't really explore Cameron's areas at all in the portfolio - but I hope to be doing so in my Master's Portfolio over the summer.

I've covered the work I ended up submitting elsewhere, but I'll recap in any case. (I've posted my detailed commentary of the works' creation here.)

Following Milton's lecture on Shillinger, I immediately set about creating some sketches for a post-metal piece based on Shillinger's "resultants"-based approach to rhythm. I had Meshuggah in mind from the start, but ended up going in a more 70s rock direction that's more like Crimson or Rush, not least as, well, I just cannot do what the in-human Meshuggah do (not saying that I'm exactly Alex Lifeson or Robert Fripp either!) It was interesting to approach a piece like this by scoring it entirely first before recording it; the whole process was painstaking but in the end I was pretty chuffed with the outcome, "Doom Scrolling":

Download Simon Hopkins - Doom Scrolling (score).

Perhaps the least successful piece was "On the Empty Pianos, Puppeteer Spiders", which took Tom's lecture on Lutoslawski's "chain"-based compositions (as well as some of Milton's coverage of pitch set theory), although perhaps ironically the piece bears the most resemblance to my previous work. Not that the piece didn't work entirely, it's more that the, if you will, Lutoslawskian chain approach didn't really work for the ensemble I settled on: string quartet + atmospheres. The process also revealed that I have a huge amount to work on in terms of idiomatic writing for strings, and that realising a piece like this without real players (despite Spitfire's string quartet samples being pretty bloody impressive) is, well, not without challenges. Also, I'd originally intended to include electric guitar (hence the conversations with Tom and a huge amount of relevant score reading), but in the end, I just couldn't make the sound world gel. Nonetheless, I think it's not without its moments, and I do very much like its constantly unsettling nature:

Download Simon Hopkins - On the Empty Pianos Puppeteer Spiders (score)

The most rewarding piece I worked on (and possibly the most rewarding - if challenging - music I've ever created) was a setting of three sonnets by the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, my first foray into writing art song, or any sort of song for that matter. I've written about the process at length previously, so won't belabour it here, but a couple of things to add.

The piece was originally conceived for the Joyce Dixey Composition Competition, and I wrote it to be sung by my fellow Master's student Yi Zhang. We performed the piece on Monday June 6th, and while it didn't win, it got very positive feedback from the adjudicator, composer and guitarist Gary Ryan. It was a great night, with a huge range of music: dream pop, jazz, alt-chamber... you name it. Yi and I performed last (sigh). I was unhappy with my own performance, which was badly affected by nerves (more on that below), but Yi completely nailed it. Honestly, she is already, at 21, a far finer musician than I'll ever be, and it was a huge pleasure to work with her. I'm not sure I'm the right person to judge these things, but it seems to me that she could have a great career ahead of her.

I also had to give an academic presentation about the creation of the piece, which went well, but was not without its own challenges. My tendency to chuck in the kitchen sink (see above!) somewhat hampered the clarity of the underlying argument, and as I've noted before, if I'm going to take the academic malarkey any further, I need to be more disciplined. Anyway, for one last time, here's the piece:

Download Simon Hopkins - Three Sonnets (score)

And so to the "Research Training for Practitioners" module. I've written at some considerable length about the "Butterfly Lovers" collaboration project that came out of this previously - about 12,000 words to be precise. Sigh. So I won't add to any of that. But I want to say a word or two about the overall practice as research approach. Before I do, I should say that none of this is a reflection on Tom's teaching of the course, which has been thorough, detailed and hugely insightful - and, indeed, very enjoyable. But, but... I am still somewhat sceptical, and studying the two modules has clarified, or rather contextualised, some of the trends in art generally, and music specifically, that I've noticed over the last couple of decades. (I should also add that my ramblings here are indebted to conversations with my good buddy and incredibly clear thinker Anno Mitchell, who's currently studying for a Master's in Fine Art.)

Practice research of course has a long history, and I think one can reasonably argue that all creative practice is to some extent an act of enquiry, if not of formal research (I remember Pat Metheny once referring to his work in this way, although I've never managed to find the exact quote online). But as far as I can see, the whole area really ramped up as art schools and music colleges were absorbed into the university sector from the noughts onwards. On several occasions, the composer and online music educator Samuel Andreyev has made reference to the problem of composition in North America increasingly being taught in universities rather than in conservatoires (as it still is in, say, France), but I didn't really get why this is a problem until starting this course. Now I think I'm starting to get it.

Putting it crudely, it seems to me that certain creative practices have been turned into academic, rather than strictly technical, disciplines, in order to shoehorn them into, well, the academy. And while this has undoubtedly made practitioners sharpen up their thinking about their craft (no bad thing in itself), it's also led to a tendency for even music, arguably the most abstract of art (the condition to which all art aspires, as Walter Pater famously commented), to have to be "about" something.

In terms of the visual arts, I'm old enough to remember when the notes placed next to pieces of visual art displayed in galleries pretty much carried the title of the piece and the artist's name (with dates, if the curators for feeling especially didactic). These days, artworks are pretty much accompanied by essays, and jargon-filled ones at that. Now I'm no enemy of conceptual art, but have we reached a point where, if there's no essay to be written about a piece, then it hasn't got a home? And despite the fact that I avoid the culture wars like the plague here (as someone as politically confused as I am, how could I not?) I have to say, what the visual arts are often "about" is often distinctively modish.

And this has undoubtedly crept into "art" music. It's notable that most of the work played on BBC Radio 3's (otherwise excellent) New Music Show is prefaced with a brief essay around the music's "theme". And I do mean "most". I really would love, at least on occasion, for the presenter to just say "honestly, I have no idea what this is about, if anything, but it fucking rocks". But then clearly I'm the wrong audience member.

At this juncture, I do want to take my studies further, but I am genuinely concerned that my, let's be honest, somewhat chippy credential-hunger is tempered with some trepidation about chasing the practice research dragon any further. To be clear, I think I have stuff to say, but it's ultimately somewhat technical and revolves around the interstices between composition and improvisation, narrative and texture, beauty and violence, and (more prosaically, but arguably most importantly) acoustic and electronic performance. I've got lots of other things to say, but I really don't feel the need - or the ability - to say them through music.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself but wanted to put it out there...

So, finally, to the most difficult thing to write about here: the performance module. In the recital at the end of the first semester, I played two pieces I've been working on in preparation for taking a performance diploma with Trinity. This semester I rolled out three more from the same set. the prelude from Bach's Prelude, Fugue and Allegro (BWV 998), Joaquín Turina's "Hommage a à Tárrega" and the guitarist Paulo Bellinati's arrangement of Jobim's "Estrada Bianca".

Home recital for friends: utterly nerve racking

I did huge amount of prep on these pieces, and I don't mean just a shit ton of practice (although there was that), and worked especially hard on the Bach after my car crash with it in competition at Springboard in Brighton earlier this year. In the run up to the recital I did one of my now-traditional "home" recitals (which are utterly nerve racking) and even a run through with two very fine undergraduate guitar students also studying under Paul Thomas, my guitar tutor at Guidlford. Also, it's worth noting that right before my own recital on the day I accompanied one of my fellow students, Jeongyi, on a couple of pop songs (which she performed beautifully), so I thought that might shake the nerves out

Turns out, not so much. Honestly, I was very disappointed with what I went on to play. I opened with the Turina, which I thought I pretty much nailed at a recent perfromance at one of Jon Rattenbury's Platform events in Brighton, but this time, it was, well, sloppy. I followed up with the Bach, and perhaps ironically it was the best perfromance of it I've ever turned in with an audience. Sure, there where some slips, but I think it came across musically as well as technically, and Paul's last minute advice to hold back the tempo paid off. As for the Jobim, well, it was the most recent piece I'd learned and I think I used too much lounge-jazz impressionistic rubato to hide the fact that in truth, it wasn't really under my hands.

Ultimately, as during the Monday competition perfromance, the nerves kicked in badly and the resulting adrenaline just killed my hands - and to some extent my memory. I've been here over and over, but after the January recital I thought I was getting there. Apparently not. Now, I will say that the acoustic at the PATS studio is particularly unforgiving (it's really a recording studio - and clearly a very good one). But that's basically an excuse. One the day, I wasn't really up to the gig.

So the big question for me now is: will I ever be? Is it possible to take up a classical instrument as late as I have and really ever be "up to the gig"? It's not as though I have ridiculous ambitions here; I'm not looking for a career as a classical guitarist. But I'd love to play reasonaby adavanced repertoire, comfortably, and competently, in front of small audiences. I've fallen in love with the instrument, and with the repertoire, but am I deluding myself that I'll ever be able to carry it off at least respectably?

I did, of course, come straight out of the recital and make a whole bunch of notes about the performance while it was still in my memory, and on paper it didn't look so bad. So maybe it's just negativity bias at work. We'll have to see what the examiners thought, but a week on, I have to say that it feels pretty disheartening, and made more so by hearing my fellow students (two pianists, three singers) rehearrse on the morning of the recitals: they were all really very, very good. Real musicians: not a middle aged faker. Oy veh.

Next time, some notes on what I hope to do for my final Master's portfolio, and some thoughts on future areas of study.

Post-performance notes

 

My Second Semester Composition Portfolio Commentary

Here's the commentary I submitted in May along with the portfolio of recordings and scores completed for the second semester's composition module.

 

Composition B Commentary

Simon Hopkins, May 2020

1. General introduction

The aim of the work[1] here was to explore some of the themes of this semester’s teaching and revisit some of the concepts from Composition A, as well as follow up with my own independent research. The areas I set out to investigate include:

• Joseph Shillinger’s approach to rhythm
• Rhythmic dissonance more generally
• Bartók’s pitch axis and ocatonicism
• Lutosławski’s “chain”-based compositional approach
• NRT-based voice leading
• Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition

A key aim was to explore not simply different ways of composing, but also of scoring.

 

2. “Three Sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning”

2.1 Stimulus & Process

When the Joyce Dixey competition was announced, I immediately thought about writing a piece for Yi Zhang to sing with classical guitar accompaniment[2]. I decided to set poetry and Barrett Browning’s early sonnets struck me as rich in musical allusion and structurally full of potential musical cues.

I began with a period of wide-ranging listening and score reading[3]. I looked at Western art song from the early 19^th Century onwards and paid particular attention to the post-war period. Britten’s sonnet poetry settings were useful for understanding scansion[4]. Brouwer’s “Canciones Amatorias” was key to exploring voice and guitar in terms of texture. Alongside this musicological research, I did extensive reading around the sonnet’s history, and around the setting of sonnets to music in the 20^th Century[5].

The process with each setting was similar. The first stage was to create a rhythmic framework based on the poem. The sonnet’s iambic pentameter[6] immediately suggests a dotted rhythm, but I was keen to avoid anything too obvious here[7]. I simply read through the poems, out loud, to come up with rhythm that was syntactically coherent.

I then looked at the poems for any structural or “tonal” clues. The breakdown of sonnets into quatrains suggests clear points for an instrumental interlude, for instance. A line such as “where is any certain tune or measured music in such notes as these?” clearly suggests non-diatonic harmony[8]. Finally, the crucial “volta” in the sonnet – a clear change in mood/argument – hints at a change in the music. With a rhythmic and structural shape in place, I transcribed the sketches into Sibelius and built a basic harmonic framework.

The melody was built intuitively on the harmony and other poetic cues[9]. Lastly, the guitar arrangement was built from the basic harmonic structure, with the aim of supporting the vocal line while remaining engaging in itself. A final set of largely pragmatic changes were made following our initial rehearsal and recording session[10].

2.2 Analysis

Harmonically, all three songs draw on the two semesters’ lectures on modality and NRT-based voice-leading, as well as my own research[11]. As outlined above, the songs’ rhythm flows primarily from the poems’ scansion. The accompaniment is designed to be as supportive as possible, but often employs rhythmic displacement in the solo passages to provide textural and dramatic contrast.

“Perplexed Music”: Until the poem’s “volta” at b38, the tonal centre is around D minor, although is modally ambiguous (eg. the opening, which moves between dorian and phrygian). Through to b34, the harmony variously moves through A aeolian, G dorian, and Eb major, using NRT voice-leading to make harmonically unexpected transitions smooth (eg. bb16-18, with a transition from A major to minor, or b13 where the closely voiced trichords move quickly from D minor to D mixolydian). The passage at bb34-37 is a whole-tone passage. The final section of the piece broadly alternates between G major and G mixolydian.

“The Soul’s Expression”: The piece’s home mode is E Aeolian. After the guitar opening, which employs a “line cliché”[12] – a descending chromatic bassline against a static Em9 chord - the first passage up to the restatement of the opening theme is almost entirely in E aeolian, with the exception of a passing chord at b12. The passage from b17 – b27 is more harmonically ambiguous and again uses NRT voice-leading to create unexpected harmonic movement (eg. bb 25-27, with a move from FMAJ7#4 to Fm7). The concluding passage from b28 is entirely diatonic to E aeolian. The guitar part features an ostinato E pedal in both the bass and in the middle voice of the ascending trichords, and the melody comes to rest on the mild dissonance of a M9.

“The Seraph and the Poet”: The solo opening and first passage are largely based on NRT moves, with the AM-Bbm contrast at its core. Again, the middle passage (from b17) introduces more harmonic ambiguity; the ostinato 4ths in the upper voice of the guitar echo bb38-40 in the first song, and the chromatically descending bassline in bb32-33 reprise the line cliché in the second. After the volta at b41 the piece is entirely in E lydian[13]. The guitar part in bb 47-51 features quartal harmony[14], slightly offset by the #4.

2.3 Reflection

Given that this was my first attempt at writing any form of song, I’m broadly happy with the results. This is obviously entirely subjective, but I think the songs capture the mysterious and at times rapturous mood of the poems. I’m especially happy with the use of NRT voice leading, which led me into new harmonic territory. The scansion was the most difficult aspect of the composition, and at times it does follow the poem a little too faithfully. In future similar work I would like to be a little more audacious with this, and in particular investigate more use of melisma[15].

3. “Doom Scrolling”

 3.1 Stimulus & Process

Following this semester’s lecture on Joseph Shillinger’s approach to rhythm, I wanted to take the principles and apply them to a contemporary “math metal”[16] piece. In terms of influence, the starting point was the Swedish extreme metal group Meshuggah, whose disorientating polyrhythms are legendary[17]. However, I wanted to explore a slightly older sound world. I set about writing a piece that recalls mid-late 70s hard rock and prog, most notably Red­-era King Crimson and Rush[18]. I also set out to explore some of the harmonic areas covered over the last two semesters, including Bartók’s’ pitch axis and octatonicsm, and modality more generally.

I started by sketching out different resultants and spent days “living with them” trying to hear the contrasting underlying rhythms. I finally settled on a resultant of 3 and 5 which seemed to offer riches in terms of complexity and ambiguity, but still really grooved.

To avoid guitaristic clichés, the entire piece was written in Sibelius[19]. As the piece built, I occasionally exported the midi into a metal template I’d built in Ableton Live, to confirm that things were sonically appropriate[20].

A midi file of the final score was imported into Logic 9.[21]. The midi guitar parts were mostly replaced with real guitar, although in some places the midi parts are retained low in the mix. The scored drum parts were supplemented with improvised cymbal and tom-tom fills[22]. A final version of the score was produced in response to some performance issues that arose in recording.

3.2 Analysis

The A section sets out to be disorientating and ominous from the start. The rhythmic “stabs” are based on the underlying 15/8 rhythm, but this only becomes clear from B, when the complete rhythm is established. The ascending minor 2nds in the lead guitar part outline a W/H octatonic scale on G. The main riff enters at B; the parallel bass and rhythm guitars spell out the resultant in full; the kick drum is grouped in 5s, the ride in 3s. The tonal centre is G minor. The entry of the lead guitar part introduces more ambiguity, with an octatonic melody in groups of 2s but on every four quavers[23]. At b16 the riff modulates to the subdominant, but the melody outlines C lydian dominant. At b23 the riff moves to the mediant, and the melody outlines Bb lydian. The main riff and melody return from b26, but in b30 the lead guitar reprises the minor seconds from the opening.

Although the underlying tempo remains at b31, the meter slows 4/2. The kick drum is a classic death metal “blast beat”[24]. The rhythm guitar plays sus9 power chords outlining G mixolydian; the bass plays a contrary motion part. The lead guitar from b35 moves the harmony to an implied G major, although there is no third in the melody; the rhythmic displacement and hammer-on technique owe a clear debt to Rush’s Alex Lifeson[25].

The main 15/8 rhythm returns at D, but with a dramatically different texture. The entire section builds from a bare kick and hi-hat pattern, with each few bars adding to both the complexity and the dynamics. The bass reintroduces G minor as the tonal centre from b41, with rhythmically offset trichords in the rhythm guitar from b44. The guitar melody at b50 introduces G phrygian, and again uses cycling in its construction. The riff moves briefly to a whole-tone scale on Ab from b15, before the whole texture moves to A dorian from b58 (the melodic pattern remains the same to retain some stability). The final statement of the melody is A dorian, but with a #4. The breakdown at b70 returns to G aeolian, at which point the piece returns da capo. The fading coda ends in G aeolian, and once again uses rhythmic displacement.

3.3 Reflection

On balance I think the piece broadly achieves its aims of exploring both rhythmic and harmonic ambiguity, while still grooving and being, well, heavy. My main concern is with the audio realisation rather than the composition per se. Of course, it is all but impossible to recreate the sound of a real metal band using midi instruments and modelled guitar amps[26], but my engineering skills certainly need work in this area. The middle section of the piece is a little less organic than I would like, and might benefit from some room for improvisation.

 

4. “In the Empty Pianos, Puppeteer Spiders”[27]

 4.1 Stimulus & Process

The motivation for the piece was the lecture on Lutosławski’s “chain” approach to composition and how I might use it to reverse-engineering my own “assemblage” approach to creating electro-acoustic work[28]. I initially settled on the instrumental line-up of string quartet, electric guitar and atmospheres. I spent several weeks studying string quartet scores, especially early 20^th Century work and more recent pieces that incorporate electronics or tape. I wasn’t so much studying the string quartet as a form, but rather trying to absorb the ensemble’s texture, as well as idiomatic issues such as range and technique. I also studied several scores for contemporary electric guitar. However, my early experiments in creating a palette suggested that the guitar parts were neither necessary nor particularly successful. After several experiments with different work-flows I settled up the following process.

The first stage was to map out the entire shape of the piece on paper, to have a structure to work through.

Each instrumental “cell” was created by choosing a given pitch class set and then improvising around this using the Spitfire strings plugin in Ableton. Once I was happy with a given “cell”, I recorded a take, hoping to retain some of the improvisatory feel. Each link was then exported into Logic according to the structural outline.

The cells were notated in Sibelius. The three atmospheres were adaptations of sketches I’ve worked on at various points on the course. The final score was assembled in PowerPoint[29].

4.2 Analysis

With this piece, I was guided more by musical intuition than theoretical concerns and in general to create a “mood” which reflects the title – dream-like and unsettling. Hence the theoretical analysis here is somewhat lighter than elsewhere. Structurally, the piece is relatively straightforward: instrumental gestures or cells are introduced gradually, constantly expanding and then contracting the texture, until the final passage from 7’40” has all the voices build to a fff climax and a subito stop.

The pitch class sets chosen for each individual cell frequently feature ic 1. However, it is in the PCSs of combined voices where the real complexity is introduced. For instance, at 3’25” the combined texture has an ic vector of 443352 (Forte # 7-14) and is particularly rich in dissonance. At this stage I haven’t mapped out the entire piece in terms of PCSs but will be doing this subsequently to inform further work.

4.3 Reflection

This is paradoxically the piece I’m the most satisfied with of this set, and yet is in some ways the most disappointing. Musically, it is a clear extension of my usual practice; indeed, the structural approach has enhanced the way in which I would normally approach such a soundscape, and the results created are the closest to the sound image in my head before starting. The disappointment is that while this piece arguably took the most time to conceive, and was the most painstaking to assemble, the results “on the page” are possibly underwhelming. The string writing some was somewhat constrained by my own experience and what is reasonably achievable with even such a good sample set as Spitfire; certainly, the string writing would benefit from a greater variety of technical approaches. Ultimately, while the piece stands on its own, it may be the basis for a larger scale piece – both in terms of instrumentation and length.

 

5. Overall reflection

The key take out for me here is that I wouldn’t have written anything like these pieces before starting this programme. To be clear, the music here is in some ways akin to what I’ve worked on for years, not least in the kind of ambiguity to which I’m naturally drawn. But the lessons I’ve learned thus for around harmony, rhythm, and structure have benefitted my practice hugely, and taken me into entirely new areas.

One obvious question that comes up in listening back to these pieces is: do I have a “voice”? I’ve deliberately set out to explore different approaches to composition, scoring and realisation. I wonder whether this has sacrificed something in terms of identity?

A clear issue is around not having real musicians to work with on the pieces[30]. The most sonically successful piece in this submission is the Barrett Browning settings, sung by a real singer and played by an actual guitarist[31]. “Spiders” and “Doom” lack the equivalent benefit of using a real string quartet and a real band respectively. It’s not so much that this has impacted the audio renderings, but that working with other musicians can realise other musical avenues.

In all cases I’ve tried to balance what I’ve learned theoretically with personal musical intuition. I think broadly the balance is right, although as observed above, “Spiders” is perhaps (harmonically speaking, at least) the least theoretically grounded of all the pieces here.

Areas of further development include:

• More detailed writing for strings.
• Further investigation of singing – perhaps in a more clearly modernist setting.
• More detailed solo guitar writing.

 

5. Resources

Academic papers & online articles

Lawrence Kramer: “Song Reconsidered: Words and Music, Music and Poetry” (Fordham University, 2017)

Jeremy Noble: “Britten's 'Songs from the Chinese'” (Cambridge University Press, 1959)

Mike Ingham: "'The true concord of well-tuned sounds': musical adaptations of Shakespeare's sonnets" (Routledge, 2013)

Jonathan Pieslak: "Re-casting Metal: Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah" (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Philip Brophy: “Post-human Synchronisation – Meshuggah Live” (Real Time Sydney, 2017)

Michael Klein: "Texture, Register, and Their Formal Roles in the Music of Witold Lutosławski" (Indiana Theory Review, 1999)

 

Books

Robert Sherlaw Johnson: “Messiaen” (Omnibus, 1975)

Vincent Persichetti: “Twentieth Century Harmony” (Norton, 1961)

Stefan Kostka: “Materials and Techniques of Twentieth Century Music” (Prentice-Hall, 1990)

Eliane Gould: “Behind Bars” (Faber, 2011)

Reginald Smith Brindle: “Musical Composition” (Oxford University Press, 1986)

Ernő Lendvai: “Béla Bartók – An Analysis of his Music” (Stanmore Press, 1971)

Steven Stucky: “Lutosławski and his Music” (Cambridge University Press, 1981)

Mark Mynett: "Metal Music Manual - Producing, Engineering, Mixing, and Mastering Contemporary Heavy Music" (Routledge, 2017)

Katherine Rapaport: “Violin for Dummies” (John Wiley & Sons, 2020)

Joe Mulholland & Tom Hojnacki: “The Berklee Book of Jazz Harmony” (Berklee Press, 2013)

Malcolm Hebron: “How to Read a Poem” (Connell Guides 2017)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Collected Poems” (Wordsworth Editions, 2015)

Camille Paglia: “Break Blow Burn” (Vintage, 2005)

Rhian Williams: “The Poetry Toolkit” (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Stephanie Burt & David Mikics: “The Art of the Sonnet” (Harvard University Press, 2010)

Federico García Lorca: “Selected Poems” (Penguin, 1995)

 

Scores

Benjamin Britten: “Songs from the Chinese” (Boosey & Co, 1959)

Benjamin Britten: Seven Sonnets of Michaelangelo” (Boosey & Co, 1943)

Benjamin Britten: “The Holy Sonnets of John Donne” (Boosey & Co, 1946)

Leo Brouwer: “Canciones Amatorias” (Ediciones Espiral Eternal, 2011)

Leo Brouwer: “Guitar Works” (Eschig, 2006)

Witold Lutosławski: “Symphony No 3” (Chester Music, 1984)

Witold Lutosławski: “Mi-Parti” (Chester Music, 1976)

Witold Lutosławski: “Chain 3” (Chester Music, 1988)

Dmitri Shostakovich: “String Quartet No 1” (Edition Eulenberg, 1938)

Sergey Prokoviev: “String Quartet No 1” (Boosey & Hawkes, 1931)

Steve Reich” “Different Trains” (Boosey & Hawkes, 1988)

Anton Webern: “Five Pieces for String Quartet” (Universal Edition, 1922)

Olivier Messiaen: “Quartet for the End of Time” (Durand, 1941)

Christian Wolff: “Another Possibility” (Edition Peters, 2004)

Tom Armstrong: “Diversions 3” (2015)

Betsy Jolas: “Episode septième” (Alphonse Leduc, 1989)

Morton Feldman: “The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar” (Reconstruction by Seth Josel) (Edition Peters, 2013)

Tōru Takemitsu: “Landscape 1” (Editions Salabert, 1962)

Various: “Violin Grade 8” (Trinity College London, 2015)

György Ligeti: “String Quartet No 2” (Schott, 1968)

Kevin Volans: “String Quartet No 2; Hunting: Gathering” (Chester Music, 1997)

Ludwig van Beethoven: “String Quartet 15, Op. 132” (1825)

Ludwig van Beethoven: “String Quartet 13, Op.130” (1825)

Ludwig van Beethoven:  “Grosse Fugue, Op. 127” (1825)

Claude Debussy: “String Quartet” (1893)

Béla Bartók – “String Quartet 1” (1909)

Luciano Berio – “String Quartet” (Universal Edition, 1956)

Kaija Saariaho: “Nymphea” (Editions Wilhelm Hansen, 1987)

Listening

 

Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Umr9WOOgWIJ0kkqvNJh7Z?si=3eba36bf58024bf8

 

[1] Some of the work here recycles material from sketches produced in response to various challenges and assignments set across the two semesters; most of it, however, is entirely newly composed. It was reassuring to hear this recent Radio 3 “Listening Service” edition all about musical recycling: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0017678

[2] I’d heard my fellow student Yi sing at her first semester recital and was hugely impressed, particularly by her performance of early 20^th Century material.

[3] A full list of scores consulted and a related Spotify playlist are included in the “resources” section at the end of this paper.

[4] See Noble, 1959

[5] See Ingham, 2013

[6] https://nosweatshakespeare.com/sonnets/iambic-pentameter/

[7] Although the weak-strong stress of the iambic “foot” does heavily lend itself to melodic phrases beginning on an anacrusis, which I’ve largely run with.

[8] In this particular case I opted for a whole-tone melody, which as it turns out isn’t an easy “sing”.

[9] Of course, I established Yi’s range before starting writing the melodies.

[10] A note on the recording: Given the little time available for rehearsal, the recordings are all composites. The guitar parts were recorded first and Yi overdubbed her vocal parts in sections of several bars at a time. The outer songs were recorded in my home studio, but Yi’s part for the middle song, “The Soul’s Expression”, was recorded on campus and is of a slightly lower quality, with a small amount of clipping. The mix for the entire suite was done in Logic X.

[11] Esp. Persichetti, 1951, and Kostka, 1990

[12] See Mulholland & Hojnacki, 2013

[13] The tone of the poem from this point is one of celestial joy, which suggested lydian, the “brightest” mode; whether seraphs actually favour the lydian mode I cannot confirm.

[14] https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/QuintalHarmony.html

[15] It’s worth noting that Hubert Parry’s celebrated Shakespearean sonnet settings eschew melisma almost entirely.

[16] https://www.last.fm/tag/math+metal/artists

[17] See Pieslak, 2007

[18] I also, I took considerable influence from the current generation of “post-metal” bands such as Vessels, Battles and Mono.

[19] Of course, some idiomatic guitar writing was entirely appropriate (eg. the 5 chords, or “power chords” used throughout the main B section of the piece).

[20] Which is of course all but impossible in Sibelius.

[21] I have a large library of pre-sets and plug-ins I previously used on the avant-metal project Nape, and haven’t been able to replace satisfactorily in the more recent version of Logic.

[22] The final mix was mastered using SoundCloud’s Dolby-based, machine learning-driven mastering service.

[23] This is also drawn from Shillinger – this time his concept of rhythmic cycling.

[24] https://www.drumlessons.com/drum-lessons/heavy-metal-drumming/blast-beats/

[25] With pleasing circularity, this technique is heavily employed by Meshuggah’s virtuosic lead guitarist Frederik Thordendal.

[26] See Mynett, 2017

[27] The title is taken from the Lorca poem “In the Street of the Mutes”.

[28] Principally Boom Logistics (https://www.dgmfsmedia.com/my_weblog/boom-logistics.html) and Abyssal Labs (https://www.dgmfsmedia.com/my_weblog/abyssal-labs.html).

[29] The linearity of this process is somewhat misleading; in truth, the whole procedure was iterative and editorial decisions were made throughout.

[30] With the exception of Yi, of course!

[31] Or at any rate, in this case, me.

"Butterfly Lovers" reflection Pt 2: The collaboration process

Final checklist, including stage layout thoughts

A final word, then, about the collaboration process itself. I‘ve said this previously: despite this project being one I approached with some considerable reservation, it's turned into the most enjoyable, most rewarding thing I've done on the entire course. Given how relatively little time we've all had together in person to work on the show, we did ourselves proud.

There were, of course, considerable barriers to overcome. I think it's not unfair to say that my fellow students' spoken English level meant that we had to get into a rhythm when communicating in real-time. Translation apps are all very impressive, but they don't make for spontaneous conversation. I was mindful about speaking as clearly and straightforwardly as possible but I have to say that the others were punctilious about doing 80% of their conversation in English for my benefit. My impression is that their conversational English genuinely improved over the last few weeks.

Then there were the cultural differences. There are two issues here: the different nationalities, of course, but even more pertinently, age and experience. I don't mean this arrogantly, but I've literally got over twice as much life behind me as they have, and consequently, a lot more cultural and musical references on which to. I can't just suggest, say, "let's do a kind of Ella Fitzgerald-meets-surf guitar type thing"[1] and know that they'd instantly "get it". Instead, I resorted to sending a lot of YouTube and Spotify links over our WhatsApp group, with only qualified success, (see below).

Talking of WhatsApp, both this and Zoom were key to overcoming our final collaboration barrier: the fact that I'm not based on campus. Over the course of the collaboration, I tried to get over to Guildford at least once a week, but it was tricky and not helped by the fact that at different times Yi, Jeongyi, and I all managed to get ill (only Chaoran seems indestructible!) But the distance issue did mean that a lot of the collaboration was necessarily what Joe Bennett refers to as "asynchronous"[2].

This is at the heart of what could have been more successful about the project. As Tom has pointed out in one of his comments, we agreed on the shape of the show arguably a little too quickly. The project then settled into a certain pattern: we would take ideas away from our in-person (or online) meetings and work on them discretely, bringing the results back to the next session. This was highly productive, and meant we got a lot done in a relatively short period of time[3]. And I have to say that the others were immensely responsive. Honestly, I could put a message on WhatsApp asking for, say, a few arpeggios and scalar melodies in Am and they were there by the next time I opened the app!

However, this led to a certain lack of spontaneity, and we did very little real-time collaboration. Our in-person sessions had more of the characteristics of a rehearsal than, say, a jam session. Yes, we made some adjustments to arrangements and so on, but never really took ideas in new directions. The other collaboration group clearly benefitted from being more improvisatory both in their preparation and final performance. In contrast, we didn’t tap into the potential Rose and MacDonald hint at when they observe that “improvising musicians have a shared intuitive understanding of the benefits of not allowing the music/playing to become overly analysed before it has taken place”[4].

Trying to look useful while Chaoran and Jeongyi perform

I mentioned Bennett’s models of songwriting collaboration models earlier. I think that of the models he maps out, ours mostly resembled the “Svengali” model, which as I write makes me slightly cringe. On more than one occasion I was described as the group’s leader, and while that’s a mantle I didn’t take on willingly, I think it was somewhat inevitable, given my remarks above about experience. It’s possible that in fact, I could have taken this model somewhat further, and used my unasked-for “leadership” to really push the others further into Lev Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development”.

Honestly, I did try! Having said above how immediately responsive everyone was over WhatApp, my messages that received the least response were links to YouTube clips and Spotify playlists that suggested other ways of both presenting musical theatre and approaching songs[5]. It was the ensuing silence in response to these prompts that suggested to me that I could only push so far, but I think I lost my nerve to some degree. Nonetheless, I think that, given the various barriers and constraints I’ve discussed, we did to a considerable degree achieve Moran and John-Steiner’s “intricate blending of skills, temperaments, effort and sometimes personalities to realise a shared vision of something new and useful”.[6]

I want to finish with a note about the others, with whom I’ve enjoyed working immensely. Yes, as I said above, I think they could have moved a little bit further outside their comfort zone, but everyone did so to some extent. I think I'm right in saying that Yi had never sung pop before, and did so assuredly. I was especially impressed that she wrote the closing piece of music, a Chinese folk pastiche; she was uncertain about doing it, yet it worked extremely well[7]. Given that musical theatre is Jeongyi's bag, arguably she was the most at home. Nonetheless, she dealt with my attempts to undermine the form with alacrity, and her story-telling (both in the writing and delivery) really made the performance cohere. The person who impressed me the most was Chaoran. I don't think I'm being unfair in saying that she started the project with the least confidence in her spoken English, and is clearly somewhat shy. However, she really came into her own on this project. She was incredibly responsive to suggestions and became gradually more confident in making her own. Most importantly, her skills as an accompanist (not to mention her sight-reading) improved dramatically.

We’ve already discussed recording the performance properly over the summer and I hope that we do: I really look forward to working with them all again.

 

[1] Although that sounds great!

[2] J Bennett: “Constraint, Collaboration and Creativity in Popular Songwriting Teams” (2012, Routledge)

[3] Interestingly, in a recent fascinating interview, psychologist Daniel Kahneman and organisational strategist Olivier Sibony discuss how Covid-enforced virtual working actually vastly accelerated the completion of their recent book “Noise” precisely because it limited the kind of digressive/discursive activity that arose in their previous face-to-face collaboration: https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/daniel-kahneman-and-olivier-sibony-noise

[4] S Rose & R MacDonald: “Improvisation as Real-time composition” (Routlede, 2012)

[5] For instance, this re-creation of David Toop’s “Crooning on Venus”:

[6] S Moran, and V John-Steiner: “How Collaboration in Creative Work Impacts Identity and Motivation”. (Free Association Books, 2004)

[7] And I confess that, yes, this was a much better way for her to move into her ZPD than performing a piano duet with Chaoran!

"Butterfly Lovers" reflection Pt 1: The Show

Last minute tech prep; spider plants not essential

After several weeks of preparation and a spate of last-minute rehearsals, on Tuesday we finally put on our "Butterfly Lovers" collaboration, "we" in this case being me and three of my fellow students: singers Yi and Jeongyi, and pianist Chaoran. So it's time to ask: how did it go? I'll do this from two angles. Firstly, I'll talk a little about the performance itself - what worked well and what could have been done better. Then in my final post I'll move on to some wider thoughts about the collaboration that resulted in the show.

But before I do that, a word about the "opposition". I jest of course - I mean our fellow students' other collaboration group: Natalie, Nicole, Misia and Max. I have to say, their performance was fantastic: a live, partially improvised performance (on two violins, cello and voice) accompanying a series of short, impressionistic films on the subject of - and summoning up the mood of - dreams. The whole set balanced pre-recorded electro-acoustic soundscapes with live playing very convincingly, and the overall sense was one of unease and barely contained violence. I particularly enjoyed the last film, a kind of mashup of L'Age D'or and Blair Witch for the TikTok generation.

Oneiric multimedia electro-acoustic improvisers at work

Clearly, the whole group had done a lot of work, but if I had to guess, I'd say that Misia and Nicole in particular had had to step some way outside their comfort zone, with Nicole playing cello to an at least partly indeterminate score, and Misia (ordinarily a fine pop singer) turning in a truly arresting set of Yoko-esque vocalisations (friends will know that I mean this very definitely as a compliment). If I had one very slight criticism it's that I think they could have made one of the pieces more, well, song-y. Now this is a bit ironic, because in our group I was pushing for the exact opposite! But given Misia's normal milieu I wonder if the others might have met her halfway? I'm thinking Yoko again here, but also Arthur Russell (I know Max is a big fan) or even Nico's post-Velvets work. Anyway, just a quibble - this was really great stuff.

So, on to our show - a very different beast indeed! (I won't go over the performance's form and content: my last post did that in some detail.) I think broadly it went very well - and certainly everyone truly "stepped up to the plate", to use that ghastly phrase. It was very apparent that everyone had done a lot of work on their individual contributions in the final few days before the show.

I've said before that the show was always going to be somewhat disparate, formally speaking, but the balance of pre-recorded tracks and atmospheres with live performance worked, I think, as did the balance of narration and song. Put another way, despite its very different parts, it was cogent structurally.

This was the first time we'd performed the piece with amplification, and while this led to a little trickiness (see below) it certainly gave the piece more punch. As a musical theatre specialist, Jeongyi has great mic technique, but this was apparently the first time that Yi had sung with a mic; nonetheless, once Jeongyi showed her how to avoid too much "mic pop", she handled it well. Their solo singing was of course great, but I especially enjoyed their singing together: the blend of very different vocal techniques made for a lovely sound.

Jeongyi wrote an English version of the folk tale which she narrated over some atmospheres I'd made from bits and bobs recorded at our rehearsals and the results were particularly effective. You could certainly tell that Jeongyi had previously studied stagecraft: her narration was perfectly paced (she also suggested stage directions to Yi which I thought brought their duets to life nicely).

The "big number", "Why Did You Make Me Fall in Love with You?" worked especially well, although it may be the piece in which the others were most in their comfort zone, so arguably it didn't entirely pass muster in terms of the project's aims -  but it sure worked musically. The decision we made a few weeks back to break it down into slightly different textures was the right one, with solo and duo singing over piano accompaniment, followed by a brief but very lovely piano interlude (with Chaoran almost sounding Jarrett-like!) and a concluding beautiful a cappella duet. I'd made a few suggestions about the arrangement, but sat this one out and just enjoyed it.

So, the tricky sound issue... As I said, this was the first time we'd performed the piece with amplification, and I'm not entirely sure we got the balance right. We were positioned slightly behind the PA speakers with no monitoring; I had the opportunity to step out front during setup, and I think we broadly got it right, but it's hard to tell in the moment. In retrospect perhaps I should have sat at the front, but I didn't want to look too conspicuously like "the director", and I wanted to sit next to Chaoran both to be able to communicate with her clearly and also not leave her a little isolated on the stage. (As it happens, I think the staging - thrown together in minutes, truth be told - was pretty good, in an austere way.)

Honestly, not an 80s New York "happening"

The problem with monitoring was especially felt in the first song proper in the set, "Who is He?" I've written about this previously, but in brief, I'd written and recorded a backing track for the piece that uses a lot of arpeggiation and delay which makes it potentially difficult for the others to follow. In our last couple of rehearsals, we'd pretty much nailed this, albeit with me doing a lot of pseudo-conducting. On the night, as it were, even I was struggling to keep track of proceedings, and we definitely drifted somewhat. That said, the drift only really happened in the last section of the piece, which is pretty much diatonic to Db, so I think we got away with it! But in all seriousness, I knew this was an accident waiting to happen and should have prepped a more straightforward backing, with clearer rhythmic cues.

The song that really didn't work, at least for me, was the closing number "The Truth", which Jeongyi and I performed as a voice and guitar duet. It's a rather lovely song, and Jeongyi sang it beautifully. It was my accompaniment that rather let it down. Given all the background research I did in preparing my recent Barrett Browning settings, I might have written a richer guitar part, but as it was, in truth I rather "jazz busked" it. Given the amount of layering and arrangement in the rest of the show, I think this closing duet was a whimper-not-a-bang moment.

But overall, I think the performance was a qualified success, and it was clear that the others really enjoyed participating in it. Next time, then, a final word about the collaborative process itself.

Our final "Butterfly Lovers" rehearsal

I wrote on Wednesday that I managed to submit my second semester composition portfolio with about three hours to spare (including a nail biting 30 minutes waiting for the 400-ish mb file upload - I won't bore you with my frustrations about still being on ADSL in central Brighton). What I didn't mention was that immediately afterwards I had to head straight up to London, as Angel Academe was hosting a social event in Porter Novelli's office in Southwark. I may have drunk more than my allowed daily units (oh come on, I was in need of decompression). I only bring it up now because I was back on campus the next day for the final run through of our "Butterfly Lovers" show and I may not have been at my sharpest, or most tolerant.

In any case, mild fuzziness aside, it was, well, an interesting session. I think we're getting there, but I'd be being economical with the truth if I didn't say that I'd like us to be a little more, er, "on it". I get it: everyone's been busy with deadlines. But I was a little perturbed that no-one else had quite clocked that the final performance is next Tuesday. Once we established that yes, we're performing this bugger in about five days and this is the last opportunity we'll have to rehearse before the day, we got down to it and did some serious work.

To recap: the performance is a re-telling of the traditional Chinese folk tale "The Butterfly Lovers", and is something of a portmanteau of existing songs from Chinese musicals based on the story, along with some original material. The set opens with an "overture" that I put together from recordings of Yi and Chaoran, which starts off all ambient bubble-bath and goes a little bit mid 90s trip-hop via Laurie Anderson. (Apologies to my more diligent readers, but I'm going to re-post some audio clips, just to give an overall sense of the piece.)

Simon Hopkins · Butterfly Lovers Overture

Jeongyi then picks up the story with a brief narration over a little atmosphere I built from a recording of her and Yi singing a rather lovely pentatonic melody:

Simon Hopkins · Butterfly Lovers Atmosphere

We then move into the fist song proper, "Who is He?". This will either make the performance or cast us adrift very early on. I think I've mentioned this before, but anyway, I've put together a (truth be told) slightly cheesy 80s-ish strings-and-synth backing track that I think Chaoran is, not unreasonably, struggling to follow. Of course, in an ideal world she'd be listening on headphones to a version of the backing with a click track. As it stands, she's got a lot to contend with, given my penchant for delay and arpeggiators (my first LP, "proper", aged 9, was a Tangerine Dream live set and I never entirely recovered). This is quite a big, drifty ballad, so none of this might matter so much, except that the piece modulates not once but twice to quite distant keys, so if we drift, we drown. And, continuing the dodgy aquatic metaphor, Yi and Jeongyi will find themselves in choppy waters. (Oh please - ed.) I should also add that these remote keys involve ludicrous number of flats; I don't know how that works for pianists, but for a guitarist like me the score might as well be written in a script discovered by SETI while listening in to broadcasts from Betelgeuse. Here's said backing track:

Simon Hopkins · Who Is He Actually? (Backing track)

Back to Jeongyi and a bit more story (if I've got the right end of the stick, we've moved to the lovers' quarrel stage), and a bit more spooky ambient nonsense from me:

Simon Hopkins · Butterfly Lovers Atmosphere 2

Then it's the big number, "Why did You Make me Love You?", which Jeongyi and Yi sing with Chaoran accompanying, apart from a rather lovely a cappella duet at the end. And yes, we dropped the piano four hander. I wrote previously that I suspected Yi was dodging this because Tom said so, but in fairness she has got a lot on and maybe this isn't the right moment to be moving this far out of her comfort zone. (Although I'm still just a tad disappointed). Here's the original:

Jeongyi then relates the final bit of the story (you know, the standard tale of boy dies, girl - on her way to be married to someone else - jumps into boy's tomb, both emerge as butterflies), with this warbling away in the background:

Simon Hopkins · Butterfly Lovers Atmosphere 3

Then the final number, "The Truth", which Jeongyi sings with me accompanying her on classical guitar. Again, here's the original (our version will be somewhat more "supper club"):

And, to close, a piece of outro much which Yi is working on.

So... how's it all going? Well, as I said above, I'd like to be slightly ahead of where we are, but, but... these are highly competent musicians and I think we'll be able to bring it together on the day. We've all got work to do and it's all do-able, even in the tight time frame.

There was (at least for me) an amusing moment after Jeongyi and I did a run through of "The Truth". The others looked mildly shocked and asked: was that the first time you've played it? It was but... while I'd loved to have kept up the image of having LA session player sight reading skills, I came clean and pointed out that the score had chord symbols on it precisely to accommodate numpty guitar players like me. (There's actually a serious flip side to this, of course, which is that, from what I've seen, a lot of highly trained classical players who are quite happy sight reading 8 note chord stacks but aren't sure what to do if asked to play, say, an Fm7 chord. But that's a whole other topic, and one I touched on in the commentary accompanying my semester 1 recital, which I might get round to posting here.)

Finally, I wanted to say a brief word about "leadership". I was slightly embararssed that when, at the end of session, I apologised for being a bit bossy and Yi referred to me as the group's "leader". This is exactly what I didn't want to happen... and exactly what I expected would. Anyway, as it turns out, it's not a "brief word" I wanted to say at all, but rather a rant-y essay, so I think I'll hold that thought until my next post. 

 

My latest composition portfolio

I've reported here recently that I have been pretty much flat out finishing off three pieces - fully scored and realised as audio - for my second semester composition portfolio. I've posted some of the work here before, but here it is all in one place.

It's certainly a mixed bag. I concluded in my accompanying commentary:

One obvious question that comes up in listening back to these pieces is: do I have a “voice”? I’ve deliberately set out to explore different approaches to composition, scoring and realisation. I wonder whether this has sacrificed something in terms of identity?

In the final analysis, I'm not sure I can answer that, at least not fully. And perhaps it doesn't matter. I will say that if the pieces have anything in common it's that they all have some ambiguity at their heart, or reside in some kind of liminal space. The first presentation I had to make as part of last semester's Research Training for Practitioners module was around a draft artist's statement (which I frankly found excruciating, and was done with an internal voice intoning: "oh get over yourself"). I identified some key polarities in music, and how so much of the music to which I'm drawn sits between them, or bridges them in some way. They included:

• Narrative vs texture (or temporal vs static)
• Consonance vs dissonance
• Intuitive vs theoretical
• Composed vs improvised
• Electronic vs acoustic
• Beauty vs brutality
• High art vs low 

I'm not sure the pieces below address all of these polarities and their bridging, but I think they do touch on several of them. Anyway, in no particular order...

"On the Empty Pianos, Puppeteer Spiders" (for string quartet and electronics) was the final piece to be completed. It's something of a curate's egg, as it's simultaneously the most satisfying piece here, personally speaking, and yet for all the considerable toil in putting it together, on the page is arguably the least impactful. The piece was inspired by Tom's lecture on the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski's "chain"-based approach to composition, which I used as a stimulus to try to re-invent the way I make electro-acoustic work (principally as Boom Logistics). It took a lot of work, and several initial runs, to settle on a process, but in then end the work-flow did end up bridging improvisation and formal composition, as well as electronic and acoustic (although the strings are all played in Sptifire's String Quartet sample library). Structurally, it's ended up a long way from Lutosławski, not least as the "chain" method doesn't strictly work for a small ensemble, and yet retains some of his sound world (albeit via Jonny Greenwood, perhaps).

Next up, "Doom Scrolling", a math metal piece based on Joseph Shillinger's approach to rhythmic construction. I wrote about the process in my last post. But here's the final work:

Simon Hopkins · On The Empty Pianos, Puppeteer Spiders

 

Finally, of course, there's my suite of three settings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, beautifully sung by my fellow Master's student Yi Zhang, which I've mentioned, and indeed posted previously, but for the sake of completeness, here it is again:

 

So there you have it. I've spent so long on these pieces that in all honesty I can't really "hear" them at all anymore, let alone draw any conclusions about their quality, or what commonalities they share. Looking forward to the feedback! In the meantime, there's our "Butterfly Lovers" show to rehearse, and a competition and recital to prepare. Let's hope I can remember how to play the classical guitar...

Hard at work on "Doom Scrolling" on Sunday morning...

 

 

Atmosphere downloads for "Puppeteer Spiders"

These are the three atmospheres for use in performance of "On the Empty Pianos, Puppeteer Spiders".

Puppeteer Spiders - atmos 1

Puppeteer Spiders - atmos 2

Puppeteer Spiders - atmos 3

 

A quick MMus update

Bit of a scrapbook entry this one, so bear with me while I rattle off a few updates.

The bottom line is that it's deadlines all the way down at the moment. Next Wednesday, the 25th, is the deadline for this semester's composition portfolio; the week after (the 31st) is showtime for our "Butterfly Lovers" collaboration (this semester's Research Training for Practitioners focus); and the week following that is the final recital of the semester. Oh, and on top of that... I'm delighted to report that my Elizabeth Barrett Browning settings have made it to the final of the Joyce Dixey competition, which is gratifying, but of course means yet another deadline: June 6th. Let's go through some of these projects, then.

My composition portfolio certainly looks like it's going to be a mixed bag. The EBB songs will go in of course, but I'm working on two other pieces, too. "Doom Scrolling" is a sort of post-metal piece based loosely on Joseph Shillinger's approach to rhythm, especially his thinking on "resultants", and some harmonic and melodic concepts taken from both Bartók and Messiaen. Putting the piece together has been an interesting exercise, and somewhat the inverse of how I would previously have written something like this. I scored the whole thing in Sibelius before so much as touching the guitar, although I did occasionally export the midi into a metal-ish template I'd knocked up in Ableton, just to check things were headed in the right direction sonically speaking (Sibelius users will know exactly what I mean):

Bar a bit of snagging, the score is finished and I'm now assembling the piece - again from an exported Sibelius file - this time in Logic. Logic 9, to be precise, as I have a whole suite of sounds in there used in previous metal-ish projects such as this. It's all a bit nerve-racking as the old iMac runing L9 is, well, creaky. Save every 2 minutes, Simon, every two minutes! Anyway, I'm now ready to replace the midi guitar parts with real ones, at which point I'll see if I can play electric guitar anymore. 

The third piece - "On the Empty Pianos, Puppeteer Spiders" - is different again, a piece for string quartet, electric guitar and tape/atmos, inspired by a lecture Tom gave on Lutosławski's chain" compositions. In the end, the piece only bears superfical resemblance to Lutosławski (how could it not?!), but I'm running with the idea of individual musical incidents linked into a larger whole. I've had a few runs at this, trying to figure out the best approach. The one I've settled on is quite different to what I've employed on "Doom Scrolling". I chose a set of pitch class sets that complement each other (although often in unsettling ways) and then improvised with them until coming up with a motif or gesture that seems to work. I'm then notating each of these individually for use in the score, which is more akin, perhaps, to a large diagrammatic outline of the piece. The string quartet parts are all played in Spitfire Audio's String Quartet sample set, which is quite lovely, and the final assembly is coming together in Logic:

Only a week out from the deadline, and there's a lot of work to do on both pieces (and a commentary to write, of course). You may not see me posting here for a few days. Oh, before I move on to other projects, here's a Spotifly playlist I've put together of music I've been listening to (and in many cases reading): over five hours of listening pleasure, from Britten to Meshuggah. Don't say you weren't warned.

On the "Butterfly Lovers" front, we were due to get together to rehearse on campus yesterday, but it turns out everyone is deadlined out (the others have to turn in a 3000 word essay on Mahler, apparently, which made me feel better). But we did get a late afternoon zoom session in to discuss progress.

We'll be getting together towards the end of next week for something of a dress rehearsal, but in the meantime we've all got tasks to be getting on with. Yi has taken it upon herself to write a piece of music for the outro, in a traditional Chinese folk style, Jeongyi has got a narration to write, and Chaoran's got a lot of piano parts to learn!

We also had a brief discussion about whether Yi and Chaoran should play a brief piano duet. I mentioned in my last post that in feeding back on our last session, Tom brought up Lev Vygotsky's notion of of the "zone of proximal development", but I didn't really get into why. It was all about this particular piano duet: Tom felt that Yi was moving somewhere beyond "proximal" and that perhaps we should drop the duet. On the call yesterday it was clear that Yi and Chaoran had decided, indeed, to drop the duet, not because they thought it was the right thing to do, but precisely because Tom had suggested it. Which I think rather misses the point! In any case, I'm pushing back a bit, partly because I like the dramaturgy of the duet, and, well, because I'm quite high in the disagreeablness trait. But I suspect it's an idea headed towards the cutting room floor. 

If nothing else, it's a good example of the iterative approach at work. In his essay "Constraint, Collaboration and Creativity in Popular Songwriting Teams" (Routledge, 2012), songwriter-turned-academic Joe Bennett establishes this useful "stimulus evaluation" model:

Bennett is discussing collaboration in songwriting teams in particular, but I think as a model it definitely applies to how we're been working over the last few weeks. Personally, I'd like to have seen a little bit more of the "negotiation" at work, especially around my attempts to subvert the Broadway tendencies at work. As it stands,  it's been mostly "adaptation" or "approval" - but I can live with that. So... two weeks and counting. Gulp. 

Finally, and a little to one side, I particularly enjoyed an essay by guitarist and educator Andy Jurik in the latest issue of Soundboard (the journal of the Guitar Foundation of America). "Embracing Organised Chaos" traces the history of improvisation in Western classical music generally and in classical guitar music more specifically. Jurik looks at improvisation's decline from the mid 19th Century onwards, and then at its revival in recent decades in the work of some cutting edge classical guitarists, including Leo Brouwer, Ralph Towner (who's arguably a jazz guitarist who happens to play solo nylon-strung guitar), Dušan Bogdanovic, and the late, great Roland Dyens, who was renowned for the improvisations that opened his concerts.

I bring it up here because I was already beginning to think about classical guitar-based improvisation as the basis of my next stage of study, whatever form that takes. I've spent most of my musical adulthood working in some kind of improvising context. It was only by taking up classical guitar that I really started to perform fully written work. To date, however, improvisation and classical guitar have been non-overlapping magisteria for me. I wonder if I can start to bridge the gap in my own playing? 

I'll leave you, then, with one of Dyens' masterful improvisations. In the meantime, I've got some deadlines to which I must attend...

Our "Butterfly Lovers" collaboration: a brief update

I was back on campus today for another "Butterfly Lovers" collaboration session. Sadly, Jeongyi couldn't join us, as she's somewhat under the weather, though mercifully C19-free, if testing is anything to go by. As I reported a post or so ago, we've pretty much got the shape of the show down, so we're at the point of finessing the arrangements of individual "numbers" (as I slip further into West End argot). We tackled the overall arc of the show, including the atmospheres I've put together to play behind Jeongyi's narration, and then looked at some specific song arrangements. 

After the overture, the opening number (there I go again) is "Who Is He?". I've written a backing track comprising strings and arpeggiated synth. Although I've posted it before, here it is again:

The tricky thing here is tying it all together (who knew?!) There's a lot of dibbly-dibbly stuff going on with the synth which I think makes it particularly difficult for Chaoran to follow on the piano. It doesn't help that the whole thing goes into like 85 flats at various points and modulates here and there by a semi-tone (it seems that that the truck driver's gear change has become an international phenomenon), which is of course easy enough on the guitar (shift fingers one position), but for singers and pianists, well not so much. But on the whole, I think it's starting to make sense; the key thing it to make it, er, ethereal.

The second major song is something of a portmanteau, or at least it is as we've arranged it. The opening features Jeongyi and Yi singing a duet with Chaoran's piano accompaniment, moves on to a brief piano duet and finishes with an a cappella vocal duet. Obviously, without Jeongyi there today it was impossible to really nail it, but it's getting there. We spent quite a lot of time in particular on the dynamics, which is key to making this one work. I've urged Chaoran to really belt out the opening of the song (honestly, I would love to do a metal arrangement of this section - it's crying out for it), and then really drop down to almost nothing at other points. Again: work in progress. 

The final number will be a duet: Jeongyi and me on guitar. I've written a guitar accompaniment which I tried out with Yi, and it seemed like it worked, but hopefully we can work on that next week with Jeongyi, as it's her "big moment".

Between songs, Jeongyi will be narrating the story, and I've proposed that we have sonic "atmospheres" behind these. I've already posted a couple of these, but here's another I've put together this evening from a brief recording I made of Chaoran this afternoon:

So how's this shaking out as a collaboration, then? In terms of outcome and general process, I have to say I think it's going well. Broadly speaking I think we've found a groove. One of the key things for me is that, for the most part, the others are now discussing the project in English. Of course, there's the odd lapse into Chinese, in what I can only assume translates as "what the Hell is he going on about?" (Which, frankly, is a question a lot of native English speakers ask around me.) Speaking selfishly, it's a great challenge to be as clear as possible, given that we're discussing things at quite a deep technical level, and this has forced me to really hone my comms "chops" (and therefore think as clearly as possible). 

In our debrief, Tom brought up Lev Vygotsky's notion of of the "zone of proximal development", which draws on child development psychology to suggest that learning new stuff should- and I'm clearly paraphrasing here - stretch a student/practitioner beyond their existing skillset - but not too far. How well are we doing on that front? I guess I would have to say 50-50. From my own perspective I'm certainly moving into area that are new, but adjacent to my usual practice, for example the string arrangements above. And the others are definitely tipping their toes into new waters. But I'd still really like to push it. As it stands, I think we're going to end up with a series of (occasionally subverted) West End-style songs with bit of electro-acoustic jiggery pokery in between.

That said, we've got three weeks, so let's see where we end up.

Simon Hopkins · Butterfly Lovers Atmosphere 3

A few MMus sundries

Just rounding off the week with a few things following on from my day on campus on Tuesday.

I mentioned in my last post that on Tuesday I recorded Yi Zhang's vocals for the last of my Elizabeth Barrett Browning settings. Yesterday I got round to assembling the whole little suite. So here it is in full:

As I've promised previously, I will get round to writing about this piece at more length - in fact I might put together a video based on the presentation I gave on Tuesday. For now,  just a note on the recording. Attentive listeners will spot that the audio on the vocal on the second piece isn't as good as the others - in fact, there's a little bit of clipping when Yi sings really loud (which she does seemingly without effort). As I said above, I was recording this somewhat on the fly on Tuesday in a rehearsal room rather than in what passes as a studio in my flat. But excuses aside, it was poor engineering on my part, which I've tried to rectify in the final mix, but, well, sow's ear and all that.

In the meantime, I've put together another atmosphere for potential use as link/transition in our "Butterfly Lovers" show. This time I've used Chaoran's piano (turning it into something rather more resembling cathedral bells) and Jeongyi's story narration (rendered as chattering ghosts, or something). I think the others like what I'm doing with these atmoses ("It feels like it has very rich acoustics!"; "This echo is great!") but we'll have to see whether they make the final cut.

Finally, on the subject of collaboration more generally, yesterday the maverick econ blogger Tyler Cowen linked to a fascinating conversation with Nobel Laureate economists Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens. The subject of the interview is academic and research collaboration. Of course, they're discussing working together over the long-term, so not everything here is strictly relevant to this semester's Research Training for Practitioners work, but there's some good stuff in here, including:

• Distance-based collaboration can work (they were doing it mostly using fax* back in the 90s!), but time together in person at the beginning of a project is essential. (As an aside: I think this is one of the reasons that working from home, however necessary, has been deletrious to the careers of younger workers, something I've witnessed directly with my own kids).
• Write stuff up immediately after meetings.
• Be open to admitting your mistakes.
• Be direct in your communication (which makes trust a key issue).
• Where necessary, get your Intellectual Property  agreements in place asap (not that that's going to be an issue on our little project - or at least I hope not!)

Anyway, here's the interview in full: 

* For readers under 40: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax