It's been a busy start to the year, but mostly on the "prep" front, so this won't be a long post*, but here goes...
The Brighton Guitar Quartet had already started work on material for our 2025 concerts at the end of this year, but we're now diving in in earnest, and are currently working on Vincent Lindsey-Clark's "Away to New Zealand", and Paulo Bellinati's "Baião de Gude". They're both challenging pieces and are taking a lot of work, but I think they're going to sound fantastic by the time we roll them out. We've currently got shows lined up at Hove Library in April, St Laurence, Falmer in May and Christ Church, Worthing in June. Check out our website or our Instagram feed for more details and new concert announcements.
Having eased off on the festival/workshop front last year, I've already lined up quite a few for the year: Steve Gordon's Bach workshop in Lewes in March, a short course at West Dean led by Andrew Gough and Vincent Lindsey-Clark in April, The Greenwich Guitar Festival in July, and, later in the year, Gerald Garcia's annual weekend at Benslow Music in Hitchin and the fourth Guitars by the Sea here in Brighton.
So with a huge amount of ensemble music to get together over the year, I'm going to let solo repertoire continue to take a bit of a back seat. That said, I'm still grinding away at it to some extent. I've discussed my struggles with it on a couple of occasions here, so won't reiterate them. But one route I'm taking is to visit much simpler material than I've been tackling over the last few years, and trying to make it sound as lovely as possible. When working on more challenging material it's all too easy to neglect the quality of tone. As I work on these more straightforward pieces I'm recording them and posting them on my Soundcloud page. Here's an example, Andrew York's "Awake" from his short suite 4 in A in 4.
And finally on the guitar front, Jon Rattenbury has invited me to join an electric guitar quartet with him, Brian Ashworth and my good friend Paul Dallaway. It's very early days yet and who knows if anything will come of it, but the sounds we were making at our first rehearsal recently were definitely promising. I'll keep you posted!
Lots of stuff going on on the composition front too. In January I finished a piece for inclusion in a Late Music, York concert in March commemorating the centenary of Erik Satie's death. Composers have been asked to write pieces of no more than two minutes taking inspiration from Satie's life and work. I decided to mash up Satie's most famous piece, the first "Gymnopédie" with perhaps his most notorious, "Vexations". Here's a score video of the finished piece (MIDI at this stage), complete with Satie-esque surrealist performance instructions. (Many thanks to the excellent David Lancaster for inviting me to participate).
The next project on my plate is to write a graphic score for a New Music Brighton concert to be given by Adam Bushell (vibraphone and hand percussion) and Bela Emerson (cello) at the Friends Meeting House in June. I've got until March to complete the piece, but I have to say it's pretty daunting. I've been researching a lot of the most famous (notorious?) graphic scores in the repertoire, including these beauties by George Crumb and Tōru Takemitsu respectively.
Beyond research, as a starting point, and always keen to recycle sketches, I'm revisiting a short piece I wrote for Cameron Graham's composition class in the first semester of my Master's course at Surrey. The piece, "Maraṇasati" (named after the Buddhist death meditation) co-opted material from Bach's chorale "Every Mortal Soul Soon Will Perish", Emily Dickinson's gothic poem "Because I Could not Stop for Death", and, er, "Scavenger of Human Sorrow" by the great Floridian metal band Death. I'm not sure how much of that will make it into the new piece, but, like I said, it's a starting point. For what it's worth here's the one-page score and an audio realisation:
I mentioned in my last round-up that I'm not neglecting my less "formal" electro-acoustic composition, and have just finished a new Abyssal Labs piece, "An Unanswered Prayer". As I said in my last post, when discussing the first sketch:
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.
So, here's the final (pre-mastered) version. Many thanks to Frank Hopkins for the technical advice and to David Kaplowitz for his feedback.
Finally, I've been working on some sketches for a potential installation project, a collaboration with my great friend, the brilliant Anno Mitchell. It's very early days so far so I'll say no more for the moment, but as ever, in the spirit of sharing work in progress, I'll be posting the sketches on Soundcloud and showcasing some of them here.
Talking of Frank, he's going on tour in March supporting the brilliant Halina Rice, including two shows here in Brighton at the Old Market. Full tour details and tickets are available on See Tickets. Please get along and support him if you can.
And while I'm promoting others' work mode, a couple of more classically orientated shows to encourage you to attend. On Saturday, March 1st the string orchestra The Musicians of All Saints will be performing the fourth concert of their 2024/25 season in Lewes, with a programme that includes work by Bach, Elgar, and Malcolm Arnold; tickets are available here. And on the afternoon of March 22nd New Music Brighton will be hosting our first concert of 2025, at the Friends Meeting House in Ship Street. The concert is a memorial to the composer Malcolm Lipkin and will feature a performance of some of his work by Nathan Williamson alongside new work by some of NMB's composers. Tickets are available here.
Ahead of International Women's Day on March 8th, I've been busy extending the "Women in Modern Music" playlist I put together for last year's IWD. The playlist now runs to over 200 pieces, with more jazz, free improvisation and electronica than last time around, although still with a strong emphasis on chamber and orchestral work. I'm also compiling a long blog post to accompany the playlist, with explanatory notes and links to all the composers and musicians featured. I'll publicise it all on March 7th.
In the meantime, here's a snapshot of my listening in January:
I'll leave you with some things I've been reading, listening to and watching over the last few weeks, with the usual caveat that not all of my readers will share my tastes, inclinations and leanings!
The Rest is History on Suetonius' "Lives of the Emperors"
Unherd: In Search of Wild Gods - Nick Cave and Tom Holland in conversation
Sam Harris: Letters to a Christian, Part 2
Dana Gioia on Stephen Sondheim
Matthew Crawford: Living in Wonder - A review of Rod Dreher's new book
Sympathetic Opposition: Contra Scott Alexander on Taste - Good taste is the capacity for pleasure, and the discernment to find it
Ted Gioia: Why Gregory Bateson Matters - Or what a counterculture might look like in the 21st century
And more from Ted: John Coltrane's Love Is Still Supreme at Age 60
And on more: The Music Business is Healthy Again? Really?
Dan Carlin: A Mania for Subjugation - the second part of his epic account of Alexander the Great
NS Lyons/The Upheaval: Colonization, Replaceable Man, and Love of One’s Own
Joel Kotkin: LA’s dreams went up in flames - Politicians are to blame for a shocking lack of preparation
Matthew Crawford, again: Managerialism will be an impediment to cultural renewal. What Netflix can teach us about the deep structures of en-shit-ification
These Times (Helen Thompson and Tom McTague): What Trump Wants - Greenland and more
Dominic Cummings: Reading list (from 2022)
Charles C. Mann: Fertilization, irrigation, genetics: the three practices that let us feed the whole world for the first time in history
More next time!
* Er, turned out not so much ;-)
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