I've been doing quarterly and, more recently, monthly updates on the blog here all year (sadly not much else), so this will be something of a round-up of roundups; as a result, I'll try to keep it light and refer to the previous posts where necessary.
Now I normally concentrate mostly on music and general art stuff in these round-ups, but I have to begin with something else. The highlight of what has been, on several fronts, a frankly difficult year, was that Sarah and I became grandparents, welcoming one (ahem) Albert Frank Nikky Ferrier Hopkins to the world. Congratulations to Molly and Joe for bringing a real ray of light into all our lives!
OK, on to more usual matters. It was the busiest year so far for the Brighton Guitar Quartet, with shows at St Laurence Falmer, St Peter's West Blatchington, Christ Church Worthing, Hove Library and the Chapel Royal in Brighton. We also did quite a few "private" shows, including, a couple of the excellent "Platform" shows organised by Jon Rattenbury, at Ellis Gordon Court in Newhaven (commemorating Housing 21's 60th birthday), at the Springboard competition in Hove (adjudicated by Richard Durrant), and at the annual bash at Bom-Banes in Kemptown organised by my teacher Gregg Isaacson for all his students and student groups. For the season we introduced a whole bunch of new material, including Phillip Houghton's very challenging "Opals" suite, pieces by Turina, Mussorgsky and Boccherini, and two of my own arrangements (of Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze" and, er, John Barry's "You Only Live Twice").
We're working on new material for this year, and already have shows lined up in Falmer and Worthing, with more to be announced - keep an eye on the website for details. As ever, my thanks to Ruairi Gann, James Hartt and Olivier Thereaux for their great company and hard work, and to Gregg for his endless patience and guidance. Here's a recording of our concert in Worthing in June:
I've also been playing, somewhat more informally, in a great little classical guitar trio with Paul Dallaway and Shaun Bullard (whom I met at the Greenwich Guitar Festival a couple of years back), performing Roland Dyens' quite lovely "O Trio Magico" on a couple of occasions. Oh, and Shaun and I have put in a couple of performances of "The Aleph", a slightly warped take on a lullaby, written to celebrate Albert's birth (here's a MIDI version of the piece - I'm hoping to record it with Shaun at some point this year):
I've only attended one festival/workshop this year, the hugely enjoyable third instalment of Guitars by the Sea, organised by Jon Rattenbury and Steve Gordon. This year featured Mark Eden of the fantastic Eden Stell Duo as guest workshop leader and a Saturday evening concert by the brilliant young guitarist Kianush Robeson.
October marked the 10th anniversary of my taking up classical guitar and starting lessons with Gregg at the tender age of 47. If memory serves, I had a couple of reasons for taking it up. I was, frankly, embarrassed at my almost total inability to read music, despite having played guitar on and off since my early teens (and, yes, despite being awarded a diploma in jazz from the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles way back in 1987). I was also acutely aware of not being able to play solo, and not really having any repertoire to play "on demand". I had no idea where it would lead all those years back (and certainly not to a Master's degree!), but it's been the ride of my life - not without its challenges and disappointments, but rewarding at a very deep level. My deepest thanks to Gregg for being without doubt the best teacher I've had in any discipline: patient, yes, and endlessly insightful, but always demanding, a combination that's been perfect for me.
In general, for reasons discussed here, I've taken a break from solo performance over the last year, concentrating instead on ensemble playing and composition (of which more below), but I'm hoping to return to it more seriously in 2025, and am already at work on Takemitsu's "Rosedale" (because of course I am). In the meantime, I'm gradually recording all of the pieces I've learned over the decade and I'm posting them on SoundCloud.
I took up "formal" musical composition even later than I took up classical guitar, really picking it up while studying for my Master's at Surrey in 2021/2. This year I've really got stuck in with a vengeance, not least spurred on by several opportunities to submit pieces for performances at various New Music Brighton concerts. Pieces this year include: two classical guitar sextets, "The Honeycomb Conjecture" and "The Level at Midnight"; two solo piano pieces, "Johnson & Johnson" (premiered by the brilliant Karen Kingsley at the Friends Meeting House in Brighton in October) and "A Prayer, Lightly Offered"; and the aforementioned guitar duo "The Aleph"; "The Pillars of Hercules", an electric guitar duet (which Paul D and I premiered, also at the FHM back the spring). I also began work on a set of solo guitar studies, which I'm calling "Picotudes", inspired by Reginald Smith Brindle's "Guitarcosmos" series. And finally, I've been continuing to transcribe pieces for the BGQ, recently arranging Handel's beautiful aria "Streams of Pleasure Ever Flowing" and, rather more differently (mentioned earlier), Barry's "You Only Live Twice". You can see score videos of all these pieces on my YouTube channel, but here's the most recent I've posted, the sextet "The Level at Midnight"; it was originally written for an NMB concert given by Jon Rattenbury's Brighton Guitar Group in the summer, and I've finally got around to recording it myself:
On the subject of New Music Brighton, in November I was appointed its chair, taking over from Guy Richardson, who's steered the organisation brilliantly for the last nine years - big shoes to fill! (I also seem to find myself increasingly involved with the Lewes-based string orchestra Musicians of All Saints - not sure how this keeps happening, but there you go). In the meantime, despite diving into "proper" composition quite so deeply, I'm still swimming in the same electro-acoustic waters, albeit less frequently. In the spring I finally got around to finishing "Ghosts of the Kemptown Branch Line", with which I resurrected my Abyssal Labs project, which I began work on in Annecy in 2023 (yes, I know, not a fast worker... ) The piece is still awaiting mastering and a formal "launch" on my Bandcamp page, but here it is in its pre-mastered form:
And over Christmas, I began work on a new Abyssal Labs piece, "An Unanswered Prayer". The piece is something of an experiment, trying to bridge the gap between how I've been making music since 2011 with my more recent "formal" practice, and takes a single piece of midi from a passage in (the aforementioned) "A Prayer, Lightly Offered" as its sole material. Although I worked in Logic to produce some of the atmospheres, both this and "Ghosts" before it were built in Ableton Live, which I'm now pretty much sold on it as a composition/production tool. Thanks to Frank (more of him anon) for AL tech support and advice! Although the piece is only in sketch form at the moment, in the spirit of presenting work in progress, here it is:
For a host of reasons, I haven't made it along to much live music this year, at least not by my standards. I did have a complete ball on the Friday of the Arctangent festival, headlined magnificently by Meshuggah, of course. Other standout shows included Tool at the 02, Richard Thompson at the Dome in Brighton, Patricia Kopatchinskaja performing Schoenberg's Violin Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor at the Troxy. I have, however, been to a lot of classical concerts in and around Brighton, organised by NMB and MAS and also Sussex Musicians' Club. It's been a delight to hear a huge variety of (often very challenging) music performed at a very high standard by semi-professional and pro-am players. I urge everyone down here to get along to some of these concerts and support a vital, but overlooked, part of our local music ecology.
For personal reasons perhaps the most meaningful live gig I went to this year was Frank playing the Waiting Room in Stoke Newington. Frank had taken something of a hiatus from both live performance and recording, and this was his first show of 2024, so it was great to see him back on such great from after a very difficult year. Frank's major release of the year was the fantastic "Echoes of Tomorrow EP", but here's his most recent single, "Loss Function", released at the tail end of the year:
While it's not been an especially big year for me on the live music front, I have nonetheless been listening to a huge amount of new music. A lot of listening recommendations have come from friends and family, but of the more traditional "gatekeepers", I have to mention: Ted Gioia's substack; Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone and Gilles Peterson, both on BBC 6Music; on BBC Radio 3, Record Review, The New Music Show, Late Junction and The Early Music Show; Metal Injection; and The Quietus. I attempted to compile a "Top 50 albums of 2024" in my last post of the year (a tricky exercise!), but in the meantime here's a snapshot of my listening over the year (although at 1100 pieces and a run time of 110 hours "snapshot" probably isn't the right word):
Oh, and one more playlist to be going on with. Back in March, to celebrate International Women's Day, I put together a "Women in Modern Music" playlist to celebrate the often underappreciated contributions of female composers and musicians to a range of contemporary music, from orchestral and chamber work to electro-acoustic, free improvisation, sound art, jazz and out-rock. At the time the time I first published the playlist, it ran to 100 pieces. However, I've been continuing to research and add to it, and by IWD this year I'm hoping it will be up to 200!
I have to confess that this hasn't been a big reading year for me, and in 2025 I'm really hoping to have more time set to one side for deep reading rather than endless scanning of online articles and blogs, but we'll see. I have to mention two standouts. I am, of course, a total Neal Stephenson fanboi, so it was great to see him back with the rollicking Polostan, the first of a new historical saga (his first since the Baroque Cycle). On the non-fiction front, I found David Goodhart's The Care Dilemma typically insightful, following on from the previous two books in his informal state of the nation trilogy, The Road to Somewhere and Head, Hand, Heart. As the year starts, I'm hugely enjoying Caitlin Horrocks' The Vexations, a fictionalised account of Erik Satie's life (thanks to the brilliant Anno Mitchell for the recommendation!)
Away from music and (vaguely) intellectual pursuits, another confession: this has probably been my least athletic year in over a decade. But I have tried to keep at least somewhat in shape. I ran just two half marathons this year, The Brighton Half in February and the fantastic Three Forts Challenge, an annual trail run in the South Downs with which I normally celebrate my birthday in early May. But the biggest, well, ordeal I put myself through all year was the sponsored 100 Push-ups a Day Challenge I did for Cancer Research. I raised just shy of a grand for the cause; thanks so much to everyone who sponsored me. My God, it was brutal at times, but by the end of it I was pretty buff (for a 57-year-old, at any rate!)
A final word. The older I get, the more grateful I am to have so many great friends around me. It's perhaps invidious to pick out individuals, but I will anyway; so thanks to the following for immensely welcome support, great company and fantastic conversation over the year: Kate Norton, Amy Taylor, Marc Jaffrey, Anno Mitchell, Nick Reynolds, Steve Morgan, Melissa Richardson, Nigel Huddleston, John Souter and David Kaplowitz. Thanks also to my amazing kids Joe, Frank and Lily, who've had their own truly horrible year. And of course, thanks to my wife, Angel Academe co-founder and soul mate Sarah Turner for her constant support and endless patience - none of this would be possible without her.
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