2024 Q2 Round-Up

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).

Strange things are afoot at Hove Library...

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.

Keeping it metal on the Three Forts Challenge

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.

2024 Q1 round-up

Well, ok... it's early April and I haven't posted a damn thing here this year. That's slack, even by my standards. Why so? Well, the short version is that there's been what's euphemistically called a "health scare" in the household. The longer version... well, that's not the kind of thing I go into here, but suffice it to say that I've been distracted by fairly serious issues on the home front, and those issues aren't going anywhere for a while, sadly.

That being said, I have been at least reasonably busy on the music front, so I thought I'd catch up on a few things.

The Brighton Guitar Quartet had a bit of a winter hiatus following our Rottingdean gig in October. In March we returned to the lovely St Laurence Church in Falmer, playing a full set to a packed house. The set was mostly new material for us, including two movements from the late Phillip Houghton's astounding "Opals" suite and my own arrangement of Bach's famous aria "Sheep May Safely Graze". Thanks to everyone who came out and supported us. You can hear the full set here:

Brighton Guitar Quartet · St Laurence Church, Falmer, March 2024

The BGQ also put in our annual appearance at the Springboard Competition here in Brighton. Alongside them I also put in a performance with a somewhat ad hoc trio featuring two excellent players, Paul Dallaway (more of him later) and Shaun Bullard, whom I first met at one of Gerald Garcia's Benslow weekends, if memory serves. Oh, and the day's adjudicator, Richard Durrant conducted an ensemble workshop in which I played electric bass (and can I just say to my teenage self, via time travel, take up the effing bass, you pillock!)

Anyway, the quartet's got several more gigs lined up this year, including Hove, Blatchington and Rottingdeam. Check out our website for details.

I haven't played with Jon Rattenbury's Brighton Guitar Group for some years, although I'll be perennially grateful to them - it's with them that I cut my ensemble and sight-reading teeth. But Jon's group are working on an exciting project, a concert of specially commissioned pieces from composers in the New Music Brighton group, of which I'm a member. I've written a piece for the concert (of which more below) but in the meantime, Jon's asked me to join the group for rehearsals to beef up the numbers, and I have to say I'm having a ball! Thanks to Jon for inviting me and to all the other players for indulging me. The concert is on Saturday June 15th; keep an eye on the NMB website for details.

I'm also still rehearsing - albeit somewhat occasionally - with Steve Gordon's Bach Band, including working on Steve's fiendishly tricky (although ingenious) guitar ensemble arrangement of Bach's 6th Brandenburg Concerto. No gigs lined up at the moment, but I'll keep you posted.

Now before I move on from classical guitar news, something a little more glum. I mentioned in my final post of 2023 that I'd just re-sat my performance diploma with Trinity and reported that "if I don't make it over the line this time, I have some serious re-thinking to do about the whole solo classical guitar thing." Well, I'm afraid that's exactly what happened - in fact, I scored even lower this time round. I have to say that I was genuinely shocked; I think it's fair to say that I'm at least reasonably self-critical, and I really did feel confident that this was a good performance. But there you go. In all my previous "marked" performances (grade exams, my Master's recitals, and competitions) I've always had pretty much the same overall feedback, which can essentially be boiled down to: "very musical performance somewhat marred by technical flaws", which given how late I took up the instrument I can live with. This time the musicality of my performance was criticised too, and apparently couldn't, er, save the day.

So what about the "rethinking" I said I'd do if this happened? Well I certainly have some underlying technical issues to sort out (not least my pretty unreliable rest stroke). And then there's the performance anxiety. Given how infrequently even serious amateurs like me get to play solo in front of a live audience, it's difficult to see how I can really address that, although of course all the ensemble work really does help. I'm just not sure at the moment. Maybe I'll just carry on working on solo material for my own pleasure - and of course as a way to help me develop my underlying chops and compositional understanding. No decision as yet, but I can report that while I was thinking of tackling some simpler pieces and more basic etudes, my teacher Gregg Isaacson has thrown the last, insanely virtuosic movement of Roland Dyens' "Libra Sonatina" at me - so who knows?

Away from performance, then... I mentioned earlier that Jon Rattenbury's guitar group are putting on an NMB show in the summer. I put myself forward to write a piece, a guitar sextet, and managed to knock out a first draft pretty quickly thanks to a Covid-enforced isolation leading up to Christmas. In the event, Jon thought that the piece would be a bit too challenging for the group to pull together in time, which I think on balance was fair. Rather than re-work the piece, I decided to reserve it for an expanded lineup of the BGQ, and knocked out another one over the Christmas "break". It's rhythmically more straightforward than the first piece, but uses broadly the same kind of "additive cells" approach that I've unashamedly nicked from Leo Brouwer. Having played it in rehearsal with the group, I'm happy with how it's coming together, although some of the hocketing and syncopation (or a combination of the two!) is presenting some challenges.

The piece, entitled "The Level at Midnight" (an obvious homage to Charles Ives, who I quite somewhat obliquely at a couple of points) will receive its premiere at the June concert, so I won't spoil that by presenting it here. However, I can give you a sneak preview of the first piece I worked on for the group, "The Honeycomb Conjecture". Here's a score video for the first draft - and I do stress draft - this needs a lot of work in terms of dynamics and other performance directions. It's also just MIDI guitar for the moment, but it should give you an idea of how the piece might eventually sound. (Also, I should note that following Richard Durrant's ensemble workshop at Springboard, I'm thinking seriously about adapting the contrabass classical part for electric bass... ) Anyway, here it is:

And I had yet another composition deadline over Christmas, again for an NMB concert. The group occasionally puts on a "composers' concert" in which members get to play their own pieces or get other composers from the group (and any willing friends) to do so.

I decided to write a piece for two electric guitars to perform with the excellent Paul Dallaway. I was hugely enjoying exploring Reginald Smith Brindle's classical guitar duet "The Pillars of Karnak" with Paul, and my electric piece takes some of its structural and harmonic grammar and (in my head at least) munges it with 80s-era King Crimson. Or something. We premiered the piece this weekend at the Friends' Meeting House in Brighton. My sincere thanks to Paul for putting in the time to nail it and helping me finalise the score.

Paul, me, and a couple of lovely guitars!

Now that the premiere is out of the way, here's a score video of the piece. It's a slightly naff MIDI guitar rendition at the moment. Saturday's concert was recorded; when I get a copy of our performance I'll post it here.

Talking of "Reggie" Smith Brindle (my hero!) I started working on his "Guitarcosmos" series of etudes earlier in the year, as part of the aforementioned rethinking of my technique. A few studies in, it struck me that I was interested in them as much to gain insight into RSB's compositional thinking as to work on my chops. A natural leap from there was to use each study as a basis to write my own; ok, perhaps not a natural leap for everyone, I grant, but it suggested itself readily to me. So I got down to work. I've only completed a handful of these studies (which I'm calling "Picotudes"), but here's a couple to be going on with. In an ideal world, I'd knock one of these out every week, but as I said somewhat cryptically at the head of this post, I'm far from living in a "perfect world" at the moment. (Note, once again, that these are MIDI renditions.)

Until very recently I was continuing my music theory and composition studies with Peter Copley down here in Brighton. We'd been working in parallel on Bach chorale harmonisation (especially realising figured bass) and species counterpoint. For the moment I'm putting those studies on hold, but here's where I'd got to in my counterpoint studies: species 2 in 3 voices.

Away from music, I've been trying to keep my body in vaguely working order. In February, as ever, I ran the Brighton Half Marathon. Not a great time (2'09"), but five minutes better than last year and not bad for my age, I guess.

One more push...

And as I write this I'm a week into a particularly mad challenge, a commitment to do 100 pushups every day in April to raise money for cancer research. I started in batches of 20 reps across the day and am currently at two sets: 60 + 40. Ouch. I'd love to get to the end of the month able to do the 100 in one go, but that might be a push (as it were). If you'd like to sponsor me, you can do so on my giving page. Thanks to everyone who's sponsored me so far!

Next month it's the Three Forts Challenge half marathon trail run in the South Downs. Not sure I'm quite up to it yet, and I certainly need to get some hill training in over the next three weeks, but most years it tends to come together, so let's see...

A couple of things to leave you with. For International Women's Day in March, I put together a Spotify playlist commemorating the often undersung contribution of women to modern, post-modern and avant-garde over the last half-century or so. The set is mostly "contemporary classical" (whatever that now means) with the odd foray into jazz, electronica, free improvisation and outsider rock. I hope you find something in here to enjoy:

And here's a snapshot of what I've been listening to overall since the beginning of the year:

Finally, from the DGMFS archive, a score video of my piece for mezzo-soprano and guitar, an adaptation of three sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning written as part of my Master's compositional work at Surrey, sung beautifully by my fellow student Yi Zhang:

December and November round-up

Right, the usual apologies for the lack of a recent update; as ever, busy busy busy on multiple fronts.

On November 28th I re-sat my classical guitar performance diploma with Trinity. I won't get the results until after Christmas, but I felt pretty good about it. Let's just say that if I don't make it over the line this time, I have some serious re-thinking to do about the whole solo classical guitar thing. But let's not get too ominous just yet.

I certainly did a lot of performance prep for the exam. On the Friday before I ran the complete set for my son Frank and his gf Izzy. Frank is, of course, a discerning music fan and a music maker of no mean ability, so that was daunting enough. But then on the Saturday, my teacher and the Brighton Guitar Quartet's "dear leader" Gregg Isaacson put on an informal intra-player afternoon concert at the delightfully bonkers Bom-banes in Kemptown. The BGQ turned in a couple of numbers as did Gregg's other more intermediate quartet (more of them below), and a bunch of us did a solo slot.

An identity line-up in Bexhill

Then on Sunday I went over to Bexhill to play at one of the regular AK Classical Guitar Society events organised by the excellent Anastasiya Kryvanos and Kianush Robeson, and played Turina's "Homage a Tarrega", with which I went on to open my exam recital (no pressure there!) As part of the event, Kia turned in a fantastic half-hour solo set, the highlight of which was, for me at any rate, a relatively rare outing of Reginald Smith Brindle's "Five Etruscan Preludes". Kia has a beautiful sound and touch and he really brought out the mystery in these miniatures. Incidentally, the piece is featured on the recently released first volume of the complete Smith Brindle solo guitar works performed brilliantly by the young Italian guitarist Duilio Meucci.

Anyway, thanks to Kia and Anastasiya for organising such an enjoyable afternoon; I hope to be popping along to Bexhill again next year (details on upcoming events here).

But the classical guitar fun (or series of ordeals, depending on one's point of view) didn't end there, as last weekend it was the final Platform event of 2023 here in Brighton. I've mentioned Platform on many occasions on this blog. Organised by Brighton guitarist Jon Rattenbury, it provides a great opportunity for players of all levels to perform to each other, either solo or in various ensembles. The concerts always kick off with The Brighton Guitar Group, an orchestra led by Jon, and this time round they were in great form, performing pieces by Praetorius, Sor and Carulli. The BGQ played a couple of pieces from the new set we're working on, an arrangement of Mussorgsky's "The Old Castle" and the first movement of the late Australian composer Phillip Houghton's thrilling, numinous "Opals" suite. I also really enjoyed depping for one of the players in Gregg's "other" quartet who couldn't make it on the day; a bit of a semi-sight-reading by-the-seat-of-the-pants performance, but great fun.

Jon and the Brighton Guitar Group

By the way, Jon's orchestra is going to be performing a special concert next year organised by New Music Brighton, a group of composers based down here on the south coast. The concert will feature new music commissioned from NMB and at some point over the next few weeks I will submitting a piece. Or at least that's the plan - more soon on that front.

Lots of guitar stuff is already scheduled for 2024. The BGQ have gigs lined up in Brighton, Falmer, Rottingdean and Worthing with more to be announced. I'll be playing at the annual Springboard competition in Brighton in several solo categories and in a trio with Paul Dallaway and Shaun Bullard. Oh, and talking of Paul, I'm hoping to write an electric guitar duet for us to play at the New Music Brighton composers' concert in April. Something else to get cracking on. On and then there's Steve Gordon's Bach Band, with whom I'm going to be playing Brandenburg 6 at point, which is, er, daunting.

Anyway, news on all that as I have it. In the meantime... I've mentioned my continuing music theory and composition studies with Peter Copley here before. We're continuing with Bach figured bass realisation, and here's my latest effort:

Simon Hopkins · Bach: "Lasset Uns mit Jesu Ziehen" (harmonisation exercise)

We're also working on species counterpoint, working through Fux's "Gradus ad Parnassum". I haven't posted anything here so far as it's all a bit, well, exercise-y, but here's my first attempt at species 4 exercises (suspensions and syncopation) which start to almost resemble music.

A couple of other bits of miscellany. Long-term readers and friends will know of my abiding love of John Zorn's work; indeed, only last year I wrote about the life-changing moment of seeing Zorn's Naked City playing in London in 1989. Much to my surprise, Zorn's Tzadik label catalogue is now available on Spotify. I've done my best to keep up with Tzadik over the years, but the wallet can only be emptied so far, so this is great news (I shall of course continue to buy the CDs that particularly grab me). I've especially been enjoying the work he's written for the quartet of guitarist Julian Lage, pianist Brian Marsella, drummer Chas Smith and bassist Jorge Roeder. Here's  just one of their recent albums, "Full Fathom Five":

Somewhat re-engaging with Zorn's work brought me to a couple of interviews he'd done over the last few years with Bill Milkowski, republished to commemorate the composer's 70th birthday. I was particularly taken with this quote, and will leave it here without comment: "I was never a believer in applying for grants. I don’t like to put my hand out to somebody and say, “Please help me.” I just went and did what I did and I managed to survive in the marketplace. I understand how some people can’t do that and need the grant process, but I find the grant process itself is so demeaning. Immediately, it’s like you’re asking daddy for a handout, you’re being judged by people who have no right to judge you, and if you do get the grant it’s usually half the money you asked for two years too late."

I also really enjoyed the first volume of the brilliant jazz pianist Brad Mehldau's memoir, "Formation; Building a Personal Canon". It's a gripping read, and at times shockingly candid, but among all the addiction and sexuality stuff, or indeed the Allan Bloom and Theodore Adorno (honestly, it's that kind of book) it's very profoundly about music. And also often very funny. I did of course, particularly enjoy the chapter about prog, which ends with an observation I can hardly fault: "... Punk is childlike as well, or teenage-like at least; it's immature to just say "fuck everything" indefinitely and never suit up and do something constructive in society. In my own wanderings, I've found grown-up proggers a happier bunch than grown-up punkers. They seem to age better." Quite.

That's it for this update. I'll try to get in a 2023 round-up over the next week or two. In the meantime, from the archive... Here's a recording of the first and only live outing for my project Boom Logistics. This was a performance at the Unitarian Church in Brighton supporting the improv group Fourth Page, whose bassist Peter Marsh and Paul May joined me in what turned out to be something of a loop-athon. (Brilliantly, the show was on the main Saturday evening of the London Olympics - the "greatest night in Britsh sporting history" as one friend put it - so the audience was somewhat threadbare). I actually find myself liking it rather more than modesty should allow, and am starting to wonder, ten years and several releases on, what a "mature" Boom Logistics live show might turn out like...

Some thoughts on my piece "She Erases a Constellation" for Flute and Guitar (2021)

I've just posted a score video for my 2021 piece for flute and classical guitar, "She Erases a Constellation", which was the first full submission on my Master's course at the University of Surrey, and to be honest my first real attempt at anything one might call "formal", or at least notated composition. I've posted the commentary I had to write about the piece below. (The course was at least in part research-based, so all creative work submissions required an accompanying reflective commentary.) But before that, some thoughts two years on.

• I guess the first thing that strikes me is that it is a little jejune. To be sure, there's a lot of influence in there, which you would expect after >45 years of listening to music seriously. But if an informed listener were to come to it cold, I think they'd immediately see this was the work of a student finding his way. (I think this goes for the commentary too).
• That said, I can see that I was already starting to grapple with some of the themes that I'd continue to work with on the course (and since), in particular rhythmic and harmonic ambiguity.
• The piece was written, as I recall, about six weeks into the course, at which point most of the composition modules had been led by Milton Mermikides (now Gresham College's Professor of Music). On each week of the course we'd been set various compositional exercises and I really threw myself at them, turning out sketch after sketch (as anyone following my Soundcloud "Surrey Sketches" playlist at the time will testify). A lot of the material ended up recycled in this piece.
• As a result, as I noted in the commentary below, there's perhaps a little too much going on stylistically. Like I say, a bit jejune.
• The recording is currently midi-only. I'm hoping to record it properly in 2024 if I can find a flautist to work with. I think at that point I'll re-work the score, and try to incorporate more idiomatic writing for the flute. Are some of those passages even playable?!
• And on that point, I realise that the guitar part is a bit of a monster at times, particularly the faux-metal ostinato passages. One thought I'm paying with is to re-score the piece for flute and electric guitar, which I think could work well. We'll see.
• I think I'm mostly struck by the distance between this piece and my final submission, the small ensemble composition "The Poems by Li Bai". Although some of the approaches in that piece are foreshadowed in "She Erases", the difference in scale, ambition, materials, attention to detail and execution is pretty colossal. It was quite a year!

I'm hoping to re-work the DGMFS website over the Christmas, er, "break", including a page dedicated to all my scores so far, so expect more score videos like this one over the next few weeks. In the meantime, here's what I had to say about it two years ago.

 

Commentary (October 2020)

Process

Following Reginald Smith Brindle’s observations about the difficulty of starting with a blank page[1], I started with a simple sketch of the piece’s outline:

I then outlined the piece purely rhythmically, initially working with cells such as this:

The entirety of the agitato A section and much of the Tranquillo B section were written as rhythms only, according to the narrative structure outlined below. Different harmonic and melodic approaches were ascribed to “zones” of the piece. The melodic lines and chords were then written into this framework. I worked on paper with the first full draft, adding dynamics, expression and correcting errors in the scoring:

The scoring was finalised in Sibelius and the audio was rendered (in midi) in Logic X.

Structure/narrative

The overarching narrative took its cue from the first movement of Leo Brouwer’s “El Decameron Negro”[2], especially in its juxtaposition of agitated and reflective passages. Essentially ABA in structure, the piece’s sections respectively move from rhythmic and harmonic dissonance towards a more congruent endpoint.

Analysis: rhythm, harmony & melody[3]

 The piece employs rhythmic dissonance throughout. The opening (bb 1-11)[4] and duet in the Tranquillo (bb46-69) use radically different rhythmic groupings in the parts to render them apparently independent, somewhat influenced by Morton Feldman[5]. The guitar solo (bb70-92) uses guitaristic Euclidean rhythms in the style of John McLaughlin[6] and Roland Dyens[7]. The ostinato groupings in bb22-33 are obliquely inspired by the math-metal of Meshuggah[8] and Tool[9].

The harmony draws on a range of approaches The opening (bb1-10) is based on two whole-tone scales, and is polymodal from b9. The chords in bb11-17 are Lydian AITs based on the notes of the first AIT. The approach is modal in many places (eg. Lydian dominant and altered scale in bb18-30; Dorian #4 in bb54-67; Aeolian, Dorian and Lydian in bb68-90). Trichords are deployed extensively (eg. bb16-18 and bb54-67).

The melodies were mostly drawn instinctively from the harmony. The melody in bb 46-57 is based on a palindromic dissonance contour (IC: 16234543261); this is foreshadowed in the flute solo. The flute part in the recapitulation is in large part melodically inverted from its initial appearance.

Notation

I drew on Eliane Gould’s Behind Bars (2011)[10] for notation guidance. The guitar part is more closely annotated (see below); RH fingerings and string directions are given where necessary to avoid ambiguity but are indicative only[11].

Critical reflection

I’m broadly happy that the narrative objectives of the piece and the intended tension between dissonance and consonance (generically speaking) have been achieved. I would love to have worked with a flautist to explore the flute more idiomatically, and of course to have had the time to record the guitar parts properly. Overall, I may have employed too many of the approaches discussed in the course so far, and in retrospect might have given a little more breathing space to fewer.

[1] “Another important factor must be borne in mind when we begin a piece: too much detail at that stage can be a handicap.” Reginald Smith Brindle: Musical Composition (1986), p5

[2] See The Music Salon Blog (2012): http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2012/12/townsend-el-decameron-negro-i-el-arpa.html

[3] For a full breakdown of the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic approaches, see Appendix: Annotated Score

[4] Observations about the opening A section apply to the recapitulation.

[5] See Samuel Andreyev: “Morton Feldman's Bass Clarinet and Percussion: Analysis” (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emeDjNSxsCs

[6] eg. Mahavishnu Orchestra: “Faith” (1975) https://open.spotify.com/track/3jobR8lLBgq4VZiqRcZhae?si=50c396dc7bd2405c

[7] eg. “Lettre mi-longue” bb33-35 and “Lettre à soi-même” bb6-14 (2001)

[8] See Jonathan Pieslak, "Re-casting Metal: Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah"(2007) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/mts.2007.29.2.219?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

[9] See Rick Beato: "What Makes This Song Great? Ep.15 TOOL" (2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScRG40_7zb0

[10] For flute: pp253-260; for guitar: pp373-389

[11] “My fingerings are offered only as suggestions throughout, but students are urged to consider the rationale behind them before throwing them out!” Gerald Garcia, introduction to “25 Etudes Esquisses” (1995)

Download She Erases a Constellaton - Annotated Score

 

A recent round-up

 

My life in a nutshell, sadly...

Well, it looks like it's been over a month since my last post. Plus ça change, etc. Anyway, it's been a busy few weeks, so I thought I'd do a quick round-up.

In October I had three consecutive weeks of classical guitar fun, with the odd bit of terror in there for good measure.

BGQ in Rottingdean; L-R, your correspondent, James, Olivier, Ruairi

On Saturday 7th the Brighton Guitar Quartet played our first full concert since the summer, at St Margaret's Church in Rottingdean. The set was a slight adaptation of the one we've played a few times this year already with a couple of new/revived numbers thrown in: Leo Brouwer's "Toccata" and Luigi Boccherini's "Introduction & Fandango". We had a really good turnout and the set seemed to go down very well. From my point of view it was the most enjoyable concert we've played yet, with the material really bedded in.

We're now working on a largely new set to roll out next year (with candidate material including work by Phillip Houghton, Vincent Lindsey-Clark, Mussorgsky, Bach and more) and already have some 2024 shows in Falmer, Blatchington and Worthing lined up. Thanks as ever to our brilliant director Gregg Isaacson for organising the show and his consummate leadership.

Gerald putting us through our paces (photo credit: Anne Fotherby)

The following weekend I attended another of Gerald Garcia's excellent guitar ensemble weekends at Benslow Music in Hitchin, working on a whole bunch of music Gerald had sent ahead of the workshop: some of Gerald's own work, plus his arrangements of Piazzolla and Bach, and a mesmerising trio by the Croatian composer Filip Alilovic, "Spiritus Vitae". As ever, it amazed me how the pieces came together between the usual shonky opening session on the Friday night to the final concert on Sunday. What can I say? Gerald somehow makes it happen (some shouting may occur).

Along the way there was the traditional late evening, er, drunk sight-reading session and a student concert on Saturday in which I performed some Stravinsky duets with my Brighton guitar buddy Paul Dallaway (Theodore Norman's late 60s arrangement of the piano studies "Eight Pieces") and an arrangement of McCartney's "Blackbird" with the singer Alison Du Crane (I encouraged a bit of a singalong, of course.) All in all, exhausting fun. Thanks to Gerald for his energy and incredible musical insight, and to Greg Gomberg for pulling it all together. I'm already looking forward to next year.

Oh, almost forgot, one of the other players at the session, Bernhard Crede, who was making a return to Benslow after a gap of some years, shared this hand-drawn timetable from the weekend back in 1988 - a real work of art by Gerald!

And then (I said I'd been busy) it was time for last weekend's Guitars By The Sea down here in Brighton, organised once again by Jon Rattenbury and Steve Gordon. This was GBTS's second outing and if anything was even better than last year's. The weekend comprised rehearsals in small ensembles and as an orchestra with all the players in attendance. The small group I was in worked on Steve's typically brilliant arrangement of Telemann's G Major viola concerto, while the "orchestra" looked at Akis Filio's "Eight Little Corninthians in Tub" and Luc Lévesque's quite mad montage of tunes from Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker".

The weekend featured a lot of great direction from Jon and Steve, of course, but it was particularly thrilling to be steered through Steve's arrangement of the Telemann by Chris Stell. Chris is a fantastic guitarist in his own right, but has pretty much dedicated his life to ensemble playing, most notably with Mark Eden in the Eden Stell Guitar Duo. It showed; I have rarely been exposed to such insight about classical guitar ensemble playing.

The weekend culminated in a final get-together at Essex Hall in Brighton. The session opened with great presentations by the renowned guitarist Paul Gregory and luthier Stephen Eden, followed by some individual performances ahead of the final small ensemble and orchestra performances. I was honoured to play with the aforementioned Paul D and Shaun Bullard in a trio playing another of Akis Filios' pieces, "Dry River" - it's a blast to play with such lovely players. And I was relieved to somewhat redeem myself after my car crash in last year's final GBTS concert, making it through the solo part of the Telemann opening movement with at least 90% of the right notes in 90% of the right places. That said, it was the largo movement, so anything else would have been a disgrace, but still...

Anyway, another great weekend. Many thanks to the apparently indefatigable Jon for making it happen, and so seamlessly! Check out the GBTS Facebook page for updates.

Front row: Mark Eden, Steve Gordon, Paul Gregory, Jon Rattnenbury, Stephen Eden, Emmanuel Sowicz

In other news, I'm continuing my harmony and theory studies with the composer Peter Copley. As I reported recently, I've slightly stepped back from the Bach chorale work in order to work through Fux's "Gradus ad Parnassum" species counterpoint exercises (oh, the joy of it!) but I'm still doing the odd one. Here's my re-harmonisation of the chorale "O Ewigkeit, Du Donnerwort":

Simon Hopkins · Bach: "O Ewigkeit, Du Donnerwort"

And then, as a gig-goer, it's been quite a few weeks. First up, of course, I have to highlight my son Frank Hopkins' first headline show in London, at the Pickle Factory in Hackney. Frank's done a lot of support gigs over the last year or so but this was immense: a 70-minute set of music that ran from spatial, ambient electronica to genuinely jump-up-and-down dance numbers.

Frank in a slightly Jean-Michel Jarre moment

Anyway, I can't really describe it. To get an idea of what Frank does, check out his most recent album, Aeturnum:

In non-family-related gig news... I saw Brad Mehldau turn in a solo recital at the Wigmore Hall (in the company of my long-term musical collaborator Steve Morgan and his brother Paul), and it was, honestly, among the finest concerts I've ever attended. I think the sheer number of encores (four? five?) said it all. Sebastian Scotney captured it well on London Jazz News. When Mehdldau turned to Neil Young's "Don't Let It Bring You Down" I felt close to passing out. I'm certainly looking forward to reading Mehldau's autobiography over Christmas.

I also popped down to Bristol to see the Swedish post-metallers Cult of Luna with my bezzie Kate Norton. A night out in Bristol with Kate was always going to be great fun - and it was - and the gig was phenomenal. I'm not entirely sure why CoL haven't achieved stadium status, given how epic they are. But maybe I am. Here's their most recent album:

Finally, Sarah and I went to a fantastic Sunday afternoon concert given by the Brighton Philharmonic, the first in their 2023-24 season. Joanna MacGregor's role as musical director seems to be having quite an impact; conducted by Clark Rundell, this was a show exclusively of 20th Centrury American work (Gershwin, Bernstein, Ives and Adams) and a total blast from beginning to end. MacGregor's perfromance of the Gershwin piano concerto was utterly exhilarating. The rest of the season's programme is equally exciting - please get along and support their new direction.

On a lower note, I was genuinely saddened to hear of the death of the great jazz pianist and composer Carla Bley. With such a storied and brilliant career, it's invidious to point to any of her work in her particular, but what the hell. Here's her mercurial, genre-defying, and, truth be told, entirely bonkers 1971 masterpiece Escalator over the Hill, featuring contributions from, among others, Jack Bruce, John McLaughlin, Charlie Haden, Gato Barbieri and Linda Rondstadt (I did say "bonkers"):

From the archive Here's a reminder of my score video for the guitar quartet I wrote as part of the composition module on my Master's back in December 2021. The BGQ has been playing the middle movement, "The Age of the One Moon", as a standalone piece in recent concerts. Hopefully we'll get to roll the whole thing out at some point - although that last movement does look tricky!

Finally, a snapshot of my listening in 2023 to date. Happy shuffling!

Recent round-up and a look forward to the autumn

Right then, a little round-up of what I've been upto and a little look forward. Lots on (and hence not much written here of late, sigh).

In August I attended a guitar course West Dean for the first time since I began my Masters in the autumn of 2021. The was the 30th annual West Dean International Classical Guitar Festival, and was the fourth I've attended, if memory serves. As ever, the event comprised concerts by some of the world's finest classical guitarists (including Xufei Yang and Craig Ogden), small ensembles, an orchestra led by the brilliant Vincent Lindsay Clark, lots of workshops, private lessons, a final student concert and of course a lot of fun socialising. 

The ensemble I played in was led by the renowned young British virtuoso Laura Snowdon. This was apparently her first time leading a group like this and she did it quite fantastically, and with infectious enthusiasm. I especially enjoyed working on Jürg Kindle's 2009 piece "Techno" - a challenge for us to pull off, but a total blast. Here's the piece played by the Eos Guitar Quartet (somewhat more "in the pocket" than our rendition, it must be said, but still... ):

Playing in Vincent's orchestra was a blast as it always is, of course; we worked on a couple of his pieces and a great arrangement of Peter Warlock's "Capriol Suite". I put in a couple of solo performances, rolling out Jobim's "Estrada Branca" at a lunchtime concert and Roland Dyens' "Lettre Française" at the final (and always nerve-racking) student concert. And great to catch up with friends that I've made at the festival over the years, including Hilary May, Stephen Boreham and Clive Kemp. All in all, great fun, if exhausting - and I'm already signed up for the spring course! Thanks to the indefatigable festival organiser Andrew Gough for pulling it all off.

In other news... My music theory studies with Peter Copley continue apace. I'm still working on Bach chorale harmonisation and figured bass realisation, but have now also started work on Species Counterpoint, for my sins, working through Johan Joseph Fux's (infamous? notorious?) 1725 treatise "Gradus ad Parnassum". I'll let you know how it goes, and might even post some of the results here as I progress.

(I also note, somewhat wryly, this observation about species counterpoint from Reginal Smith Brindle's autobiography: "... I now know that to study Species Counterpoint was probably the worst musical study I could have chosen. It bears no relationship whatsoever to composition of an inspired nature, and is only a mechanism for cerebral exercises. There is absolutely no room for creativity. But who knows, this study may have started that taste for those elements of constructivism which were to characterise some of my later music. On the other hand, it should have given me forever such a strong distaste for any artificial structures, that I would shun them ever after.")

Earlier this month Sarah and I took our first holiday together this year, and spend the best part of a week in the delightful city Annecy, in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of Southeastern France. In and amongst the lake swimming, hill walking and excellent food (and possibly some wine), I started work on a new Abyssal Labs piece. Now, diligent DGMFS readers will know that Abyssal Labs was a project that ran from 2012 to 2014: five albums of soundscaping designed as an accompaniment to contemplative practice. To be honest, the music didn't really work against its stated aims, but listening back to some of the work while launching the DGMFS Bandcamp page recently, I have to say I was pretty pleased with some of it as music in its own right, and started thinking about reviving the project as an outlet for long-form, slowly evolving soundscapes.

Anyhow, just before going to France I'd made a recording (I hesitate to call it a field recording - Chris Watson it ain't) at the entrance to Sainsbury's in Lewes Road, Brighton, having been somewhat entraced on a previous visit by the sound the travelator seemed to be making (yes, I know, I know...) Then while on holiday I started playing around with the recording and, well, something started emerging. I'd decided beforehand to work mostly in Ableton Live, to try to break out of old Logic-based habits, and I have to say this turned out to be a good decision. The work so far is definitely in the Abyssal Labs "mode", but using a new DAW, with a wholy different arrangement paradigm and new set of sound effects and instruments to work with has definitely taken the work in a new direction. So here's an early draft - it still needs a lot of work, but should give you an idea of where it's heading. I'm hoping to complete it over the coming weeks.*

Simon Hopkins · Ghosts of the Kemptown Branch Line (first draft)

That being said, the coming weeks are busy, very busy! After a short summer break, the Brighton Guitar Quartet was back this weekend. We played a 20-minute set as part of the first concert in the 2023-24 Sussex Musician's Club season, at the Unitarian Church, alongside sets from mezzo Pamela Cross and the astounding young student soprano Jem Byrne. We rolled out Andrew York's "Spin" once again, as well as Boccherini's barnstorming "Introduction & Fandango" and Leo Brouwer's head-spinning "Toccata" (our first public shot at it - and one that I think we actually pulled off!) Thanks to Angela Goodall of the SMC for inviting us to play.

Brighton Guitar Quartet · Unitarian Church, Brighton, September 2023

The quartet will be back next month for a full lunchtime concert at St Margaret's Church in Rottingdean.

I've got a couple of guitar-based weekends coming up in October. 13th to 15th I'll be at Benslow Music in Hitchin on Gerald Garcia's annual guitar retreat, playing in the ensemble (Bach, Piazzolla and more) and turning in an appearance at the Saturday evening student concert. This year I'm hoping to accompany a couple of the singers also on the course; I'm currently working on arrangements of McCartney's "Blackbird" and Sondheim's "Could I Leave You". If they let me I might turn in a solo, naturally!

Then the following weekend I'll be at the second outing of Guitars by the Sea (here in my home town of Brighton), organised by the apparently indefatigable Jon Rattenbury. I'll be playing Telemann in a group led by Steve Gordon, and performing Akis Filios' "Dry River" in a trio with my guitar buddies Shaun Bullard and Paul Dallaway.

Finally on the guitar front, I mentioned a couple of posts back that I'd failed my Trinity perfromance diploma back in March. Well, in the spirit of "back in the saddle" I'm going to take another crack at it this November. Let's see... Oh, and on the the subject of failure, an update on my brass quintet, "Casualites of the Dharma", which I submitted for a New Music Brighton concert later this year. I'm afraid the piece didn't make the cut, which is disappointing, but ho hum. If any brass quintets out there fancy having a crack at a post-Messiaen processional dirge (with apparently very tricky timings) do get in touch!**

One of my tutors at Surrey, the polymath Milton Mermikides as recently been appointed Gresham College's 37th Professor of Music. Last week, he gave his inaugural lecture, the fascinating and wide-ranging "Why Music Moves Us", at St Luke's in Old Street, and I was lucky enough to attend. Here it is!

Finally, I'm looking forward to some great gigs this autumn, including Brad Mehldau at the Wigmore Hall, Cult of Luna in Bristol, and Bill Frisell at the Union Chapel. But I'm most psyched, of course, about seeing my son do his first headline gig at the Pickle Factory in Hackney on October 11th. You can get hold of tickets here. While I'm promoting Frank, check out his latest single, a rather beautiful Bach re-imagining:

That's it for now!

 

* I'll explain the name in some detail when I finally release the piece, but in the meantime, here's a taster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemp_Town_branch_line

** Because I'm sure dozens of brass players read this blog. Not.

 

Recent round-up: West Dean Guitar Festival prep , my new Bandcamp page, collaborating with Nick Reynolds... and more!

Right, it's been a fairly full-on week on multiple fronts, and I've definitely got that "just hanging in there" feeling, but anyhow...

There are worse place to spend a week playing classical guitar

Next Saturday I'm off to the West Dean International Classical Guitar Festival for the best part of a week. The festival combines evening concerts by some of the world's finest guitarists (including, this year, Craig Ogden and Xufei Yang), with private one-on-one lessons, masterclasses, ensemble and orchestra classes and lots of opportunities to perform (always a scary task, that, playing in front of a room full of other guitarists, including the luminaries above). This is my first time back there in a couple of years (I took last year off while finishing my Master's) and I have to say I'm not feeling as prepared as I'd like, but I'm sure I'll get there. I'm hoping to roll out some Dyens, Turina, Vincent Lindsay Clark (in a duo with the excellent Hilary May, whom I met many West Deans back!) and Jobim both in either performance or in lessons, and looking forward to playing some of Vincent's pieces with the orchestra. Anyway, stoked about going there, although, as I say, a tad daunted and under-prepared, and I hope to report along the way, should I get a moment to breathe!

The not-in-anyway-anticipated DGMFS Bandcamp page

I've finally got around to consolidating a lot of my Boom Logistics and Abyssal Labs work on to a DGMFS Bandcamp "label" page (I mean, it's not really a label is it? But anyhow...) The most recent work on there, Boom Logistics' Fifth, dates from 2016 and has been available for most of the time since on Spotify and other nefarious streaming platforms. So why move to Bandcamp, so late in the day? Well, for one thing, it's nice to have everything in one place, and anyway, it's not as though I'm making money from Spotify - so frankly I'd rather not make money from Bandcamp, which is in every way a better experience for musicians, with a straightforward interface, a genuine community and, well, a generally better "vibe". Whether it stays that way we'll have to see.

But what I mostly like is that I can actually include some information on each release, not least about the various fantastic musicians who've contributed along the way. A lot of people have commented on Spotify in particular's appalling album metadata (the brilliant Ted Gioia among them), and it is truly woeful. By way of contrast, funnily enough, only this morning I was listening to Dennis Russell Davies' 1978 recording of Ives and Copland (on the original vinyl release) and noted this on the back cover (the back cover - not exactly tucked away!)

Different times, people, different times! Anyway, there's more work to do, not least to consolidate the album artwork. The design for Fifth was done my old buddy Paul Finn of Fitzroy and Finn, and rather makes my own attempts at "design" on the other covers look like that of an 8-year-old let loose with a sawn-off version of Photoshop. So I hope to recruit Paul to put that right. 

I'll still be keeping my Soundcloud page going for all my classical shenanigans, composition sketches and so on, and using it to preview other work in progress. Talking of which... I've got two more Boom Logistics releases to get mastered and put up there, both of which I've collated (again, in pre-mastered form) as Soundcloud releases. Firstly, The Rainbow Faults, talked about endlessly (promised? threatened?) in these pages for several years now. Well, honestly, I swear it's nearly there, and here's the final assembly, at least:

And then, in true London bus style, there's going to be another BL release hot on its heels. A Stag Hill Miscellany is a collection of material mostly done either as part of my Master's at Surrey, or at least inspired by it. I was initially unsure about whether this should be a Boom Logistics release or not, but listening back, it strikes me as inhabiting the same world, which is pretty diverse, after all. The more formalistic side of my studies has definitely taken the music to new places, of course, but... well, see what you think. Here's the first draft of an (unmastered) assembly:

In other news, I mentioned earlier in the week that I'd just had my annual recording session with my long-standing collaborator Nick Reynolds, and indeed, my mangling of one of his excellent clarinet improvisations has made it on to the Stag Hill Miscellany playlist above. Nick has now started posting his own pieces from the session, including this, his own bossa-goes-wrong (and brilliantly titled) piece Floating World, Brutal Powerplay:

Then, sigh, more Bach! I've already mentioned my work arranging Bach's aria "Sheep May Safely Graze" for the Brighton Guitar Quartet, and pointed out how much help I've had from Steve Gordon along the way. Well, here's the finished result, albeit with midi guitars (although I have to say how impressed I am with Native Instruments' Plucked Nylon VST - it even features heavy breathing!)

Amid all this, I've only managed to knock out one Bach chorale harmonisation, I'm afraid. It's his "Aus Meines Herzens Grunde", which was quite a challenge because the melody implies a fairly static harmony, and given that it's a reasonably long, six-phrase-length chorale, it made it quite a challenge to sustain interest. I'll let the reader be the judge of whether I've achieved that.

Finally, I wrote a lengthy post on Wednesday celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of the 2-CD compilation, 152 Minutes, 33 Seconds - A Brief History of Ambient, which kicked off the somewhat cult-status "Virgin Ambient Series". I haven't had much feedback on the post yet, given that there are some contentious issues around the series, but what I've had so far has been complimentary, so maybe I wasn't entirely barking up the wrong tree...

My not-entirely-complete AMBT archive

 

Sheep May Safely Graze (guitar quartet arrangement)

I mentioned in a recent round-up that I've been working on an arrangement of Bach's famous aria "Sheep May Safely Graze", hopefully to play with the Brighton Guitar Quartet. The aria is from his 1733 secular "Hunting" cantata (BWV 208). It's been quite a process adapting it for 4 guitars!

I based my first draft on a piano transcription, transposing it from the original key of Bb up to C, and then ran it past the guitarist and arranger Steve Gordon, with whom I've been working over the last year. Steve suggested that I go back to the original scoring for two flutes, soprano and continuo and assign those to each guitar part. He also suggested transposing it - again! - to A, so that the continuo part in particular could make use of the open strings. 

Now this proved tricky, not least as the original vocal part (assigned to guitar 3 in my arrangement) was written in soprano clef. So at this point I was down to transposing the whole thing by a minor third (from my first draft) and dealing with what Sibelius helpfully calls an "archaic" clef. Arghh. Oh, and I had to work out the continuo part from a non-figured bass line, inferring the harmony from the rest of the original texture and from the piano transcription. All just a bit above my pay grade, but it seemed to work, broadly. 

Back to Steve for more feedback, and his final piece of (as ever sage) advice was to make the continuo part more guitaristic, making the chord voicings more idiomatic to the instrument, to which I dutifully attended. Anyway, here's a midi rendition of the final version. Still no attention to dynamics yet. Bach, being a clearly lazy bastard, hardly attended to such frippery. We'll be taking a look at this when rehearsing with the BGQ...

Simon Hopkins · Sheep May Safely Graze

This year's summer recording date with Nick Reynolds

Boom Studios, Brighton ;-)

This Tuesday, my great friend (and one-time Beeb colleague) Nick Reynolds made his annual trip down here to the hipster capital of Europe to spend a few hours recording with me. Nick informs me that this was our eighth year - if it hadn't been for the odd worlwide health emergency we'd be in double figures by now!

Over the years we've evolved a certain way of working that, well, works - for both of us, I hope! Nick brings down his clarinet and various charts he's been working on, we try out a few arrangements and pretty much hit record. Second takes are unusual! We also generally spend a bit of time capturing some of Nick's solo improvisations which over the years I've worked into a lot of my Boom Logistics and Abyssal Labs pieces. Here's a particular favourite (Nick comes in like a screaming and rather jittery banshee at around 1'06'):

This year Nick brought along three charts: one of his own tunes and his typically wayward arrangements of Dave Brubeck's "Fujiymana" and Nat D Ayer's "If You Were the Only Girl in the World" (yes, really). And yep, Nick did a single-take improvisation that I cut up and turned into a kind of semi-indeterminate generative piece, using Ableton Live's rather fun clip "follow" function and a shit ton of Live's FX plugins. Here it is:

I'm thinking I'll be using the piece in the next Boom Logistics release, hopefully coming this autumn (yes, I know we've been here before). And when Nick posts his pieces, I'll be sure to link to them. Anyway, great fun as always - thanks, Nick!

Simon Hopkins · Soap Bubbles And The Forces Which Mould Them

Recollections may vary: on Virgin Records' 1990s Ambient series

My sadly incomplete AMBT archive

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the release of a compilation album I put together while working as a product manager in Virgin Records' Commercial Marketing Department: 152 Minutes, 33 Seconds - A Brief History of Ambient (Volume 1). This was the mid-90s, remember, and "ambient" had become something of a catch-all for a range of electronic and generally spacey music being spun in, er, chill-out spaces at raves. Or so I gather; I guess you had to be there (I wasn't). As it happened, Virgin's storied 70s catalogue had a lot of rich ambient-related pickings: kraut rock, prog and early electronica. The label also owned Editions EG, the "art" imprint of the EG label, which was a rich seam, not least of course for the four albums released by Brian Eno that effectively launched the very term "ambient". And there was plenty of stuff going on at the label contemporaneously that provided compilation fodder. So the collection was a no-brainer. (I should also point out from the get-go that it was not my idea - I was charged with putting it together by my then bosses, of whom more in a mo.)

Anyhow, one way or another, the release ended up being the first of a series of both compilation albums and new releases that somehow ended up, 20 years later, with its own Wikipedia page, Virgin Ambient Series. The series ran to 24 releases and came to an end in 1997, the year I left the company. For a while at least, the series enjoyed something of a cult status and acquired a bit of an afterlife on the web, so I thought this might be a good moment to share a few random thoughts about it, although as the title of this post indicates, this was a long time (and several careers) ago, so some of my recollections might not be court-worthy. 

The key thing that needs to be said is that this was never conceived as a series - or at least not the one it turned into. Yes, the first release featured the teasing "Volume One", but I think that simply suggested that we might flog the dead horse at least a couple more times. Anyway, the first record sold well enough to follow it up with two more, which mined the same catalogue (with somewhat diminishing returns, truth be told), again riffed on John Cage titles, and featured graphics by Buggy G Riphead, who'd been working with the Future Sound of London, at that time one of Virgin's apparently coolest acts.

Things took a very different turn with the series' fourth volume, 1994's Isolationism, compiled by Kevin Martin, now perhaps best known for his work as The Bug, and whom I'd known since his days with God (I'd encouraged the Virgin imprint to release God's "Possession" a few years earlier). Kevin had written about the darker music around the edges of ambient for The Wire magazine, and (again, if memory serves) coined the term "Isolationism" to describe it; the compilation was Kevin's idea and broke with the series template not only stylistically, but in licensing new tracks.

Albums then came thick and fast, and broadly fell into four categories.

"Historical" compilations The legendary journalist and musician David Toop released several compilations for us, starting with 1996's Ocean of Sound (to accompany David's groundbreaking book of the same name), continuing to the series' last release, 1997's Guitars on Mars. In a similar vein, Kevin compiled the psych-jazz survey Jazz Satellites.

Artist releases This was perhaps the most unexpected area of activity for us, and the series ended up including several releases by Toop himself, Australian composer Paul Schütze, Kevin again under two soubriquets, Techno Animal (with Justin Broadrick of Godflesh and Jesu fame) and The Sidewinder, and Rudy Tambala's Sufi.

Compilations of new material Following Isolationism, Kevin went on to compile further collections of new material for the series, the two volumes of Macro Dub Infection.

Existing planned releases At least two artist compilations that would have gone ahead anyway ended up under the Ambient series banner, a collection of work by Tangerine Dream founder Edgar Froese, and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra's compilation Preludes, Airs and Yodels.

Although more releases were planned for 1998, I left Virgin at the end of the previous year and the series ended there. So... that's the history, again as I recall it, and what follows are a few brief observations (file under "wanting to get off my chest for three decades").

The real heroes of the series get nary a mention on any of the album credits: my then bosses Steve Pritchard and Pete Duckworth. It was they who had suggested the first compilation and from there on out they were nothing but supportive of my work on the series. Given how esoteric things got at times (remember, they headed up the Commercial Marketing team), they let me get on with it and supported me throughout. In retrospect, I think I was pretty bratty about the whole enterprise and not sufficiently grateful at the time. So let me put that right now: Pete, Steve - thank you for your patience with it all!

Not unrelated... In some of the contemporary coverage of the series, there was definitely something of a "major label ripping us off" kind of vibe. As a Quietus review of my own alt-rock compilation Monsters, Robots and Bug Men says: "One of the bands on here used to have a website whose discography advised people not to buy this album, because it was released by Virgin and everything on it was already available on smaller labels." Indeed, in the Wikipedia entry on "Isolationism", Jim Plotkin is quoted as saying that "Isolationism was a Virgin compilation and it needed a marketing angle". Really, a marketing angle?!

Honestly, I get it. But this is definitely not what was going on. After the initial spate of catalogue-mining compilations, the whole shebang consisted of me constantly hustling Steve and Pete to let me put out collections of old material and releases of new work that I wanted to get more attention. If there was anything nefarious going on, it was me trying to build a personal reputation; I don't think even that was the case (and in any case it didn't work), but I'm prepared to concede it. But I can say categorically that it was not a major label "cashing in". If only!

A clear shortfall of the series is that it clearly relies on too small a circle of musicians and journalists - although they were all great, of course. The truth is that I simply wasn't well enough networked, knowledgable nor proactive for it to have been otherwise. As painful as it is to admit it, I think that a smarter, better-connected and, well, more knowledgable "overseer" (as Kevin termed me on the liner notes for Jazz Satellites) would not only have produced (overseen?!) a stronger series, they would have been able to create the attention it deserved.

I'm particularly proud of the limited-period licensing approach we took to new work. Alongside all this activity, one of my roles at Virgin was to "look after" the deeper back catalogue. Part of this entailed making what in retrospect were often entirely specious arguments for keeping low-selling titles in print. (This is one of the reasons I fell so hard for Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" distribution argument, although I admit that it didn't pan out as some of us had hoped. More on that another day.) Seeing (albeit subjective) masterpieces constantly in danger of deletion made me determined that any new work we released should have its release rights returned to the artist at some point after release.

I don't claim that the series created a template for playlist culture. For one thing, mixtapes had of course been a thing for a decade or more before this sequence kicked off. But it is striking to me how popular thematically-arranged, fabulously niche playlists (complete with crossfades!) have become in the age of Spotify, bringing me neatly on to...

The series has definitely had a bit of a strange afterlife, not least on Spotify. I embedded a playlist based on David Toop's Ocean of Sound series earlier. But it gets weirder. Only a couple of years after leaving Virgin I started to see online speculation about the second iteration of Kevin's Jazz Satellites compilation. As I mentioned earlier, we'd already scoped this out before I left the label, and had even distributed sales notes (sadly I can't find a copy of these in my threadbare archive). Somehow these notes had made it into the hands of members of online mailing lists (rmember them?), leading one list member to suggest that there were "definite plans for the second volume when corporate changes sunk the project." Yeah, right: "sunk", and "corporate changes"!

After the initial three catalogue-scraping compilations, I personally put together only one more, the aforementioned Robots. For the longest time, I felt this to be the weakest of the entire series, not least as it got a complete kicking in the press at the time (and a completely reasonable letter of complaint from the brilliant Simon Reynolds pointing out that I'd entirely ripped off his concept of "post-rock" without attribution). But even this release has had its own afterlife and even re-appreciation, with a contributor to AllMusic describing it as "a real peach", and adding, "attempting to condense a genre that encompasses everything into 155 minutes is a thankless task". Honestly, after all these years, I'll take that!

Finally, a word on the composer and trumpeter Jon Hassell, who sadly died a little over two years ago. Jon's amazing work as a composer and band leader naturally featured heavily in the AMBT series' first three releases (again, a by-product of Virgin at that point owning the catalogue of Editions EG, who'd released several of Hassell's key albums and his collaborations with Brian Eno). He then went on to play on Techno Animal's Re-Entry (recently re-issued on Relapse) and Toop's Pink Noir. I regret that the series doesn't feature one of his own records, but again, a better series "overseer" would have made that happen. 

So that's it. In the spirit of this post's title and, I hope, its general tone, I would welcome any feedback, observations, and perhaps most of all, corrections. Again: recollections may vary; it now all feels like several lifetimes ago.