Mmm... so if memory - or rather more accurately, Googling - serves, this is only my, er, third post here this year. Admittedly, I covered quite a bit of ground in those previous posts, which were quarterly round-ups, but I think I can do a little bit better and at the very least post monthly updates. (I've also hinted, in previous posts, that this has been something of a difficult year, so I'm not going to beat myself up. Or at least not too much.)
BGQ and other classical guitar stuff
The Brighton Guitar Quartet continued our 2024 season on July 20th with a lunchtime concert at St Peter's Church in West Blatchington, one of Brighton's prettiest suburbs and home to a rather lovely mill. The church itself had a quite wonderful acoustic and we all agreed that this was one of - if not the - best performance we've ever turned in. We played to a full house too, which is always nice. Thanks to Gill and Michael Evans for inviting us to play, and of course to everyone who turned up to see us. (And my personal thanks to three of my - frankly far more accomplished - fellow composers from New Music Brighton, Peter Copley, Chris Gander and Barry Mills, for coming along.)
We won't be playing at St Margaret's in Rottingdean in September as we'd hoped as the church is being refurbished(!), but we've got other irons in the fire and I'll keep you posted.
I've been especially busy on the composition front. I've arranged my favourite Bond theme song, John Barry's "You Only Live Twice" for guitar quartet and the BGQ has just started to work on it. Hopefully we'll be rolling it out later this year. In the meantime, here's a score video of the arrangement, albeit with not-entirely-satisfactory MIDI-guitar audio. If I get chance - and that frankly seems a little unlikely - I'll record all the parts myself and re-post at some point.
And then, well... on July 3rd I became a grandparent, with my oldest son Joe and his fabulous partner Molly giving the world one Albert Frank Nikky Ferrier-Hopkins*. What's a sentimental old would-be composer to do other than write a piece of music to commemorate such a thing? So here's a little lullaby for two classical guitars that I wrote to welcome Albert to the world. Once again' it's a slightly crappy MIDI rendition, but I'm hoping to perform and record it with the excellent Shaun Bullard at the Guitars by the Sea festival-come-workshop** here in Brighton in October.
Look out for the "narrative nudges" I've put in along the way, something I started to inlude in my guitar sextet "The Level at Midnight" which I hope to be posting here soon. And while I'm at it, I'm constantly adding to the "Chamber Work & Scores" page here at DGMFS, so keep checking in. Oh, and here's the piece's dedicatee, nestled in the arms of some gammon in a metal t-shirt.
I've written about my struggles with solo classical guitar solo performance recently, mostly in the light of failing a performance diploma with Trintity College not once, but twice. I'm still unsure about how to proceed; it might simply be that I've started way too late in life to be a seriously strong solo perfomer. So I'm mostly throwing myself into composition and ensemble performance. But, but... I am thinking about taking ABRSM's somewhat lower level (and, it has to be said, rather controversial) ARSM exam over the next year or so. I just love learning new material! So I'm currently at work on "Rosedale" from Takemitsu's three-movement "In the Woods" suite for guitar. I think that what I really get from the process of learning stuff at this level is more about compositional understanding, but I do love getting pieces "under the fingers" somewhat. This pic of my mark-up on the first page alone gives you some idea of what a head fuck the piece is. If nothing else, learning pieces like this night at least keeps dementia at bay for a while, even at the cost of inducing other forms of madness...
For what it's worth, here's what it should sound like, played by someone that's closer to my grandchild in age than to me. In beach wear.
Reading, more widely
I wrote a few pre-lockdown years ago about upgrading my reading by beginning to tackle the "Great Books" programme. That project is somewhat, er, "ongoing" (or stalled). Luckily, the jazz critic and polymath Ted Gioia has launched his own truncated, and yet in some ways more wide-ranging or capacious version, a "Twelve month immersive course in the humanities". Thanks to a good grammar school education I'm slightly ahead of the game, but it it's still a lot or reading. And it's not been helped by my best mate Kate Norton generously gifting me a subscrition to Mr B's Emporium, who seem to have me down as a sci-fi fanboi, which is probably not entirely unfair. So here's the current bedside reading pile:
Read/watched/listened to elsewhere
A little gingerly, I'm going to introduce this element of my (hopefully more regular) updates, partly because the "read elsewhere" section of our Angel Academe newsletter is quite so popular. I say "gingerly" as some of these links may indicate a wider set of interests and opinions that are potentially unpalatable to some. In the future I may offer some commentary, and will hopefully be a little more comprehensive. Who knows? As so much else in these parts, it's work in progress.
Sean Thomas in the Spectator: Avant garde is Boring
Ted Gioia: 52 Reasons to Fear that Technological Progress Is Reversing
Samuel Andreyev: 10 short MUST-HEAR 20th century masterworks
The Critic Magazine interviews SDP leader William Clousdon
A Mania for Subjugation: A new podcast series about Alexander the Great from Dan Carlin
The Rest is History podcast tackles the roots of World War I
Again, I hope to have much more of this in future updates. But hopefully this is enough to be getting on with (and won't make you hate me too much!)
Some Listening
A couple of playlists to leave you with. Here's a snapshot of my listening in July, with major hat tips to Stuart Maconie's ever-brilliant Freak Zone on BBC 6Music, BBC Radio 3's Record Review and Late Junction, and of course to Ted Gioia.
And here's a playlist I put together after reading Thurston Moore's memoir, "Sonic Life". If I get chance, I'll say bit more about the book at some point (ultra short version: loved the book, not sure I'd want to hang out with the author).
From the DGMFS archive
Here's the first fully-fledged 2014 album from my Boom Logistics project. It's much sparser and more, well, pastoral, than later efforts, but I think it stands up, not least thanks to Simon Heyworth's frankly alchemical mastering.
That's it for now!
Notes
* If "Ferrier" rings a bell for the more classical music-literate among you, yes, little Albert is not-too-distantly related to the the great English contralto Kathleen Ferrier, who, by co-incidence, was born about half a mile from where I grew up in central Lancashire. There is also possibly a Reginald Smith Brindle connection, but let's not go there. Yet...
** There are still some places left on the course, by the way, so if you're a classical guitarist of any standard who's interested in getting some ensemble playing experience, sign up!
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