Well, ok... it's early April and I haven't posted a damn thing here this year. That's slack, even by my standards. Why so? Well, the short version is that there's been what's euphemistically called a "health scare" in the household. The longer version... well, that's not the kind of thing I go into here, but suffice it to say that I've been distracted by fairly serious issues on the home front, and those issues aren't going anywhere for a while, sadly.
That being said, I have been at least reasonably busy on the music front, so I thought I'd catch up on a few things.
The Brighton Guitar Quartet had a bit of a winter hiatus following our Rottingdean gig in October. In March we returned to the lovely St Laurence Church in Falmer, playing a full set to a packed house. The set was mostly new material for us, including two movements from the late Phillip Houghton's astounding "Opals" suite and my own arrangement of Bach's famous aria "Sheep May Safely Graze". Thanks to everyone who came out and supported us. You can hear the full set here:
The BGQ also put in our annual appearance at the Springboard Competition here in Brighton. Alongside them I also put in a performance with a somewhat ad hoc trio featuring two excellent players, Paul Dallaway (more of him later) and Shaun Bullard, whom I first met at one of Gerald Garcia's Benslow weekends, if memory serves. Oh, and the day's adjudicator, Richard Durrant conducted an ensemble workshop in which I played electric bass (and can I just say to my teenage self, via time travel, take up the effing bass, you pillock!)
Anyway, the quartet's got several more gigs lined up this year, including Hove, Blatchington and Rottingdeam. Check out our website for details.
I haven't played with Jon Rattenbury's Brighton Guitar Group for some years, although I'll be perennially grateful to them - it's with them that I cut my ensemble and sight-reading teeth. But Jon's group are working on an exciting project, a concert of specially commissioned pieces from composers in the New Music Brighton group, of which I'm a member. I've written a piece for the concert (of which more below) but in the meantime, Jon's asked me to join the group for rehearsals to beef up the numbers, and I have to say I'm having a ball! Thanks to Jon for inviting me and to all the other players for indulging me. The concert is on Saturday June 15th; keep an eye on the NMB website for details.
I'm also still rehearsing - albeit somewhat occasionally - with Steve Gordon's Bach Band, including working on Steve's fiendishly tricky (although ingenious) guitar ensemble arrangement of Bach's 6th Brandenburg Concerto. No gigs lined up at the moment, but I'll keep you posted.
Now before I move on from classical guitar news, something a little more glum. I mentioned in my final post of 2023 that I'd just re-sat my performance diploma with Trinity and reported that "if I don't make it over the line this time, I have some serious re-thinking to do about the whole solo classical guitar thing." Well, I'm afraid that's exactly what happened - in fact, I scored even lower this time round. I have to say that I was genuinely shocked; I think it's fair to say that I'm at least reasonably self-critical, and I really did feel confident that this was a good performance. But there you go. In all my previous "marked" performances (grade exams, my Master's recitals, and competitions) I've always had pretty much the same overall feedback, which can essentially be boiled down to: "very musical performance somewhat marred by technical flaws", which given how late I took up the instrument I can live with. This time the musicality of my performance was criticised too, and apparently couldn't, er, save the day.
So what about the "rethinking" I said I'd do if this happened? Well I certainly have some underlying technical issues to sort out (not least my pretty unreliable rest stroke). And then there's the performance anxiety. Given how infrequently even serious amateurs like me get to play solo in front of a live audience, it's difficult to see how I can really address that, although of course all the ensemble work really does help. I'm just not sure at the moment. Maybe I'll just carry on working on solo material for my own pleasure - and of course as a way to help me develop my underlying chops and compositional understanding. No decision as yet, but I can report that while I was thinking of tackling some simpler pieces and more basic etudes, my teacher Gregg Isaacson has thrown the last, insanely virtuosic movement of Roland Dyens' "Libra Sonatina" at me - so who knows?
Away from performance, then... I mentioned earlier that Jon Rattenbury's guitar group are putting on an NMB show in the summer. I put myself forward to write a piece, a guitar sextet, and managed to knock out a first draft pretty quickly thanks to a Covid-enforced isolation leading up to Christmas. In the event, Jon thought that the piece would be a bit too challenging for the group to pull together in time, which I think on balance was fair. Rather than re-work the piece, I decided to reserve it for an expanded lineup of the BGQ, and knocked out another one over the Christmas "break". It's rhythmically more straightforward than the first piece, but uses broadly the same kind of "additive cells" approach that I've unashamedly nicked from Leo Brouwer. Having played it in rehearsal with the group, I'm happy with how it's coming together, although some of the hocketing and syncopation (or a combination of the two!) is presenting some challenges.
The piece, entitled "The Level at Midnight" (an obvious homage to Charles Ives, who I quite somewhat obliquely at a couple of points) will receive its premiere at the June concert, so I won't spoil that by presenting it here. However, I can give you a sneak preview of the first piece I worked on for the group, "The Honeycomb Conjecture". Here's a score video for the first draft - and I do stress draft - this needs a lot of work in terms of dynamics and other performance directions. It's also just MIDI guitar for the moment, but it should give you an idea of how the piece might eventually sound. (Also, I should note that following Richard Durrant's ensemble workshop at Springboard, I'm thinking seriously about adapting the contrabass classical part for electric bass... ) Anyway, here it is:
And I had yet another composition deadline over Christmas, again for an NMB concert. The group occasionally puts on a "composers' concert" in which members get to play their own pieces or get other composers from the group (and any willing friends) to do so.
I decided to write a piece for two electric guitars to perform with the excellent Paul Dallaway. I was hugely enjoying exploring Reginald Smith Brindle's classical guitar duet "The Pillars of Karnak" with Paul, and my electric piece takes some of its structural and harmonic grammar and (in my head at least) munges it with 80s-era King Crimson. Or something. We premiered the piece this weekend at the Friends' Meeting House in Brighton. My sincere thanks to Paul for putting in the time to nail it and helping me finalise the score.
Now that the premiere is out of the way, here's a score video of the piece. It's a slightly naff MIDI guitar rendition at the moment. Saturday's concert was recorded; when I get a copy of our performance I'll post it here.
Talking of "Reggie" Smith Brindle (my hero!) I started working on his "Guitarcosmos" series of etudes earlier in the year, as part of the aforementioned rethinking of my technique. A few studies in, it struck me that I was interested in them as much to gain insight into RSB's compositional thinking as to work on my chops. A natural leap from there was to use each study as a basis to write my own; ok, perhaps not a natural leap for everyone, I grant, but it suggested itself readily to me. So I got down to work. I've only completed a handful of these studies (which I'm calling "Picotudes"), but here's a couple to be going on with. In an ideal world, I'd knock one of these out every week, but as I said somewhat cryptically at the head of this post, I'm far from living in a "perfect world" at the moment. (Note, once again, that these are MIDI renditions.)
Until very recently I was continuing my music theory and composition studies with Peter Copley down here in Brighton. We'd been working in parallel on Bach chorale harmonisation (especially realising figured bass) and species counterpoint. For the moment I'm putting those studies on hold, but here's where I'd got to in my counterpoint studies: species 2 in 3 voices.
Away from music, I've been trying to keep my body in vaguely working order. In February, as ever, I ran the Brighton Half Marathon. Not a great time (2'09"), but five minutes better than last year and not bad for my age, I guess.
And as I write this I'm a week into a particularly mad challenge, a commitment to do 100 pushups every day in April to raise money for cancer research. I started in batches of 20 reps across the day and am currently at two sets: 60 + 40. Ouch. I'd love to get to the end of the month able to do the 100 in one go, but that might be a push (as it were). If you'd like to sponsor me, you can do so on my giving page. Thanks to everyone who's sponsored me so far!
Next month it's the Three Forts Challenge half marathon trail run in the South Downs. Not sure I'm quite up to it yet, and I certainly need to get some hill training in over the next three weeks, but most years it tends to come together, so let's see...
A couple of things to leave you with. For International Women's Day in March, I put together a Spotify playlist commemorating the often undersung contribution of women to modern, post-modern and avant-garde over the last half-century or so. The set is mostly "contemporary classical" (whatever that now means) with the odd foray into jazz, electronica, free improvisation and outsider rock. I hope you find something in here to enjoy:
And here's a snapshot of what I've been listening to overall since the beginning of the year:
Finally, from the DGMFS archive, a score video of my piece for mezzo-soprano and guitar, an adaptation of three sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning written as part of my Master's compositional work at Surrey, sung beautifully by my fellow student Yi Zhang:
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