It's been a busy time since my last update, not least on the personal front, but I'll be writing about that some other time - I'll keep this post to (mostly) musical activity.
First up, as anyone reading this will surely recognise, I've done a pretty major rinse of the DGMFS website. Yes, it's a fairly blatant piece of displacement activity, but it's been on the to-do list for a long time. Having been using Typepad since about 2008 I'm kind of "locked in", and unless anything radical happens to the service, I'm stuck with a pretty staid, old-school kind of website. But I can live with that - indeed, it's probably appropriate. In any case, there's always going to be a "new thing" when it comes to online publishing, and chasing that isn't always the right thing to do. (Medium, anyone? Let alone MySpace, Tumblr or Flickr - and yes, I was on them all... )
Anyway, I've got a new, more autobiographical homepage (and opted for first person, which I think better matches the tone of the site overall); there's new (pre-mastered) material on both the Boom Logistics and Abyssal Labs pages; and quite a lot of new music on the Chamber Work/Scores page. Oh, and a new, I hope, more straightforward nav. Any feedback is welcome (and thanks to Sarah and Frank for taking the time to give it the once over).
Beyond that, lots of musical activity! Following the start of our 2024 season in Falmer in March, the Brighton Guitar Quartet has performed a couple of shows. In May we did a mini-set at Hove Library as part of their "Live Lounge" series. Then last week we returned to the lovely mid-19th Century Christ Church in Worthing for a full lunchtime concert at which we performed, amongst other things, Phillip Houghton's "Opals" suite in full, my own arrangement of Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze" and Sébastian Vachez's "Carre d'as", a fantastic, tongue in cheek piece that we haven't played in some years.
Here's the concert in full:
We'll be back on Saturday, July 20th for a lunchtime concert at St Peter's in West Blatchington, with further shows to be confirmed for the autumn.
For some months I've been sitting in with Jon Rattenbury's Brighton Guitar Group, boosting the numbers a little in preparation for a New Music Brighton concert at St Luke's, Prestonville. It's been an incredibly ambitious project for Jon to put on, working for six months on nine new compositions by NMB composers including Guy Richardson, Lluís Nadal, Phil Baker and, er, me. Not only was a lot of the music pretty thorny, but the project was beset with other problems, with quite a few players unable to make rehearsals and/or the final performance.
As it happened, the show worked really well, with the group truly rising to the occasion and playing to a packed house no less! As for my own piece, "The Level At Midnight", well it was certainly a very useful experience to write a piece for a mixed-ability amateur group and then see it come together "from the inside", as part of the group performing it - and to see where the difficulties arose (not always where I expected!) By the way, as part of the Research Techniques module on my Master's course, I wrote an essay about writing challenging, contemporary music for amateur performers. It was interesting to re-read it in the context of this concert, and you can download it here:
Composing Contemporary Music for Amateur Perfromers
Anyway, thanks to Jon for asking me to play, and for his Herculean work on the project!
Talking of New Music Brighton, they have a piano concert by Karen Kingsley coming up October, and I've submitted a short piece for the show, "Johnson & Johnson" - my first formal composition for piano. Here's the programme note:
"This piece is something of a conceit, bringing together melodic materials from "The Witches' Dance" and "Hellhound on my Trail", supernaturally-themed pieces by two very different Robert Johnsons, the English Renaissance lutenist and the great Mississippi bluesman. The main “verse”, played three times, is built on the I-IV-V structure of “Hellhound”, albeit with harmony that’s more Bartók than blues. The slow middle section lays interpolated melodies from the lute piece across a minor blues vamp. The feel of the piece is somewhat improvisatory, taking many of its rhythmic cues from Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau."
Mmm, whatever. All I can say is that writing it damn near broke me! As ever, I did a lot of prep, often in parallel processes. I did a lot of score reading (alongside listening) of solo piano works, from Chopin Nocturnes to Takemistu; in general, I surrounded myself ambiently with a lot of piano music (much of it in this Spotify playlist); and I spent weeks assembling and manipulating material, with a lot of experiments simply binned. In the end, I'm actually rather pleased with the outcome, which is somewhat more "jazz" than I'd anticipated. Whether it gets chosen for the concert, we'll have to see (I'm still somewhat scarred at having had my piece "Casualties of the Dharma" rejected for last year's Brass Fusion concert and at having Jon R push back on "The Honeycomb Conjecture", my original submission for the Brighton Guitar Group show). Anyway, here's a MIDI rendition of the piece. Thoughts welcome, as ever!
In January, I embarked on a series of classical guitar micro-studies, which I'm somewhat cheesily calling "picotudes". The pieces are responses to each study in Reginald Smith Brindle's 1981 collection of studies, "Guitarcsomos", adapting them in various ways or simply using them as a launchpad to explore different aspects of guitar technique. The intention is to work through all of RSB's studies like this, at least in part to try to gain some insight into his compositional process/thinking when approaching the guitar. (I have no idea what shape the next phase of my academic career will take - if any at all - but I'm reasonably sure it would have something to do with Smith Brindle.)
So, here are the first five as score videos (MIDI only at this stage); I'll try to post them here and on the scores page as each batch of five is written.
Away from formal, notated work, I've finally finished my long soundscape piece "Ghosts of the Kemptown Branch Line", with which I'm reanimating by dark ambient Abyssal Labs project, albeit that project's original contemplation-accompanying intent. As ever, there are still things about the piece that I'm not fully happy with, but with something of this scale, that's almost inevitable and in any case, I've got to the point where I can't really "hear" it any more. (As an aside, in a recent, highly enjoyable exchange with the composer Samuel Andreyev, Jim O'Rourke mentioned that Rafael Toral's brilliant "Spectral Evolution" (which O'Rourke has recently released) went through 50 mix iterations until they settled on a fine version. That's a super-human level of attention to detail, in my eyes. Or ears.)
Anyway, here's "Ghosts" on YouTube. It's still a premaster - I'm hoping to get it properly mastered later this summer and will self-release on the DGMFS Bandcamp page.
Away from music, I put in my second half marathon of the year, my annual outing at the Three Forts Challenge in the South Downs, taking in Cissbury and Chanctonbury Rings. As ever, a tough run, but always (at least in part) a beautiful experience. And it was great to run it with Frank and his gf Isabella and great mates Kane and Sam, albeit somewhat behind them all.
I'll leave you with a couple of things. Here's a snapshot of my listening in 2024's second quarter:
And from the DGMFS archive, "Marching into American Sunlight", a very early Boom Logistics piece. Honestly, I was just figuring out how to make this kind of thing back then, but for all that, I actually think it stands up pretty well!
As ever, thanks to Sarah for her love, support, and unceasing patience - none of this would be possible, or even frankly conceivable without her.
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