Once again, it's been a while, but the funny thing about being busy is that one's left with so little time to write about it! Anyway, here goes.
The first thing to point out (and the eagle-eyed among you will already have spotted this), is that I've made a little addition to the website, a scrapbook of Sketches and Work in Progress. Aside from my ongoing larger compositional work, the main strands there will be: harmony exercises based on Vincent Persichetti's "Twentieth-Century Harmony"; Bach chorales arranged for classical guitar quartet; a potential collaboration with the viusal artist Anno Mitchell based on Aristophanes' "The Birds"; species counterpoint exercises; and more Bach chorales - this time with my own re-harmonisations. I'm also posting some of the many sketches I did as part of my Master's course at Surrey, although some of that work might seem a little jejune by now!
OK, moving swiftly on... I've had lots - and I mean lots - of classical guitar whatnot going on. Principally, of course, this has centred on the launch of The Brighton Guitar Quartet's 2025 season. Having done a couple of warm-ups at Springboard and at Hove Library's lovely monthly "Live Lounge" earlier in the year, we kicked off in earnest in May with our return to St Laurence Church in Falmer. Our new set is a bit of a monster, mostly comprising new material, including a Vivaldi concerto for strings arranged by Jurg Kindle, excerpts from Vincent Lindsey-Clark's "Away to New Zealand" (its UK premiere!), the Brazilian composer Paulo Bellinati's fiendishly tricky "Baião de Gude" and my own arrangement of John Barry's "You Only Live Twice".
We went on to roll out the same set at Christ Church in Worthing in June, our third visit there! We're now taking a brief break over the summer to work on some new material (including a new piece by the Brighton-based composer Chris Gander), in preparation for autumn gigs in Shoreham (as part of the Adur Arts Live festival), West Blatchington, and Rottingdean. And we've already got our first show of 2026 lined up, as part of Brighton Unitarian Church's lunchtime concert series. Full details are on our website, and you can follow us on Instagram for updates. But in the meantime, thanks to everyone who's come along to support us, to the concert organisers for inviting us to play, and of course to the estimable Gregg Isaacson for whipping us into shape!
Under slightly less pressure, I've had a lot of fun sitting in on various ensemble workshops. In April and May, I attended Bach-focused workshops in Lewes led by the brilliant Steve Gordon. Given the amount of prep the BGQ shows have required, I asked Steve to keep me on the (apparently) simpler guitar 3 and 4 parts, but, well, it's Bach, so it's never exactly a walk in the park. But as I say, a lot of fun - so thanks to Steve for inviting me. Oh, and at one of the workshops, my buddy Paul Dallaway and I turned in a performance of Lindsey-Clark's lovely duet "Paraguaya":
Steve also asked me if I'd sit in on an ensemble he was leading in Bexhill last weekend, part of an AK Classical Guitar Society session, this time taking a look at a Mozart trio. Lovely stuff! The afternoon also featured a presentation from luthier Stephen Eden and a fantastic recital by Simon Pearce. And as part of the "student" performance, Tom Ansell (an excellent young guitarist also based down here in Brighton) and I turned in a performance of Andrew York's highly atmospheric (if quite tricky!) "Andantino". Thanks to the AKGS's founders Kianush Robeson and Anastasiya Kryvanos for organising these excellent events and for inviting me along.
I've also been hosting "Second Thursday Club", a monthly, er, soirée for classical guitarists, mostly students of my teacher Gregg, which have been huge fun - a, dare I say it, safe space for guitarists of all standards to try out new material and well, to just hang! I've enjoyed turning in a couple of solos, as well as playing in duos with Paul and Tom and of course with the BGQ. Thanks to everyone for coming along and making it such a blast (and to Sarah for her continued forbearance!)
Next month I'll be at the Royal Greenwich Guitar Festival, working on ensemble pieces by Luc Lévesque, Carlos Gardel, Thierry Tisserand and Jurg Kindle, and I'll be back with Steve Gordon's group in Lewes looking at some Brahms (which will will be interesting on guitar!)... so I really should be practicing than writing this blog post. Sigh.
On to some composition updates. I've had two premieres of short pieces performed over the last month. In York, the fantastic Duncan Honeybourne played my piano miniature "Vexopédie No.1 (An Ostracised Beetle)" as part of a concert commemorating the centenary of Erik Satie's death, put on by Late Music, York. Thanks to Duncan for his wonderful playing, and to David Lancaster for inviting me to participate. Here's Duncan's performance:
A week later, back here in Brighton, my recent piece "Maraṇasati" was premiered by vibraphonist/percussionist Adam Bushell and cellist Bela Emerson in a concert showcasing graphic (or otherwise non-standard) scores by NMB composers. The concert was a huge success, and I was thrilled with how Adam and Bela interpreted my score. Thanks to them both for all the huge effort they put into preparing all the music; to NMB's John Petley, Lluís Nadal, Roger Harmer and Martyn Adams for their hard work in putting the concert on; and of course to my friends and family who came along in support.
The next NMB concert is in September and features woodwind players Hannah Shilvock and Catherine Underhill, and pianist Viola Lenzi. I've contributed a short piece, "Jazz-Rock Kidnap Showdown on the Vallance Road" (yes, it's a mouthful), written for oboe, bass clarinet and piano. Here's my programme note, for context: "This piece started out as an homage to the Miles Davis sideman and bass clarinettist Bennie Maupin, but try as I might, I couldn’t stop it turning into a pastiche of 70s UK cop show themes. Oy veh: honour thy mistakes as hidden intentions. So instead, imagine Maupin, on a rare London visit with Miles, bundled into the back of a Ford Cortina at the end of a sawn-off shotgun, driven through the back streets of Bethnal Green to meet a jazz-lovin' and slightly demanding gangster’s girlfriend, with Regan and Carter in hot pursuit. Or something."
This score video of the piece features fairly shonky MIDI; I can't wait to hear it played by real musicians!
I've also recently written another guitar quartet, "A Curious Lobster", for one of Gregg's non-BGQ guitar quartets. It's intended to be an intermediate-level piece, although I have to say that some of the chord voicings and campanella effects in guitar 3, and some of the 12th-17th fret lines in guitar 1, might be a tad challenging! It turns out it's actually rather tricky to write convincing music that's nonetheless relatively easy to play and put together. Who knew?! Once again, this rendition is MIDI-only, and it will be lovely to hear it played properly at some point.
And I'm currently working on yet another guitar quartet, this time an arrangement of Neil Young's "Don't Let It Bring You Down", which I'm hoping to play with Paul Dallaway, Tom Ansell and Shaun Bullard at Guitars by the Sea here in Brighton in October. (By the way, there are still places left on the course, so any local budding classical guitarists who haven't already signed up really should - it's great fun, and hugely rewarding!). Anyway, the piece needs a lot of work, but here's a sketch of work in progress:
And should regular readers (both of you) think that my falling in love with "the dots" means that I've abandoned my more longstanding practice of electro-acoustic composition, fear not! Here's my latest sketch for a potential collaboration with Anno Mitchell; I'm not sure if the "collab" will come off, but I think the pieces I've done so far stand up in their own right, so who knows, there may at least be a new Boom Logistics album in it!
Finally on the composition front, as I mentioned at the top of this post, I've recently embarked on a fairly mammoth task, working through the several hundred harmony exercises in Vincent Persichetti's "Twentieth-Century Harmony". It's early days so far, but I'm collating score videos of the short exercises as I go along in this YouTube playlist. Here's an example, a short piece for three Bb clarinets exploring dissonant and consonant intervals:
Here's a snapshot of my listening since April. Hat tips, as ever, to John Kieffer' Sound Unbound, Ted Gioia, Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone on BBC 6Music, Radio 3's New Music Show and Record Review, and Boomkat. Next week I'll post a full list of the new releases (albums and EPs I've been listening to over the same period.
I committed at the beginning of the year to do a lot more "deep" reading this year, but I have to confess that I haven't been true to my word. So little time! However, in May, I did read two wonderful, if very different books, Michael Symmons Roberts' "Quartet For the End of Time" and Alexander Goehr's "Composing a Life". The latter might be a little too technical or specialist for the general reader, but I can't recommend Symmons Roberts' book highly enough. While it takes the Messiaen piece of the title as its starting point, it's really a highly poetic exploration of grief (specifically the loss of one's parents) and religious faith. Really beautiful stuff. Both books were birthday presents from my wife and soul mate, Sarah (who appears to know me better than I do - I didn't even know about these books).
Finally, a short round-up of things I've been reading and listening to online, with the usual caveat that not everyone will share all my somewhat heterodox leanings
The Critic: What killed English football fandom?
Paul Lay: Musical morphine - Radio 3 has given up its time-honoured mission to inform, educate and entertain
The Spectator: Geoff Dyer – the Proust of prog rock and Airfix
Ted Gioia: Hollywood Will Be a Ghost Town in Five Years
Ted, again: Substack Has Changed in the Last 30 Days
And again: Are We Living in a Time of Cultural Collapse?
Stars after stars after stars: How CDs help fight distracted listening
And again: Why record stores are fighting to survive
notizen zur musik: The Endeavour of Allan Holdsworth
Matthew Crawford: Your call is important to us... The effectual truth of AI
Neuguitars’s Substack: Terje Rypdal Group, NRK TV-Special Live in studio (1978)
Pierre d’Alancaisez: Cultural institutions are offering kindergarten radicalism
IEA: Is it time to drop the word “liberal”? A response to Rod Liddle
The Classical Nerd: The “Supermusic” of Alvin Lucier
Luca Watson: Nobody likes the yookay aesthetic
History Reclaimed: Sonita Alleyne and “Lived Experience”
Rob Henderson: Thoughts on communist takeovers + a review of “Meeting with Pol Pot”
Cultural Capital: How to read and why
We Have Ways of Making You Talk: 5 Days in May - The build-up to Dunkirk
The Rest is History: Peter the Great and the Rise of Russia
Sam Harris: An interview with David Deutsch
Milton Mermikides: From Thin Air - Minimalist and Process Music from Africa to Arvo Pärt
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