Category: News

October 2024: to Trinity Laban Conservatoire for preliminary work with Head of Keyboard Ji Liu on my recent Bach reworking.

Partita Weaving uses materials from the first five Bach keyboard Partitas: the Prelude and Allemande from No. 1 in Bb; the Sinfonia from No. 2 in C minor; the Sarabande from No. 3 in A minor; the Overture from No. 4 in D; and the Praeambulum and Gigue from No. 5 in G. These materials are very extensive – significant portions of, or even whole, movements rather than brief quotations – and the result is a combination of medley and mashup with movements flowing into and out of each other (hence ‘weaving’) and frequent superimpositions. Musical ‘re-engineering’ aside, my aim in this piece has been to create only gentle disturbances in Bach’s originals; even when the right hand of one dance is superimposed on the left hand of another (as in the Prelude and Allemande from No. 1) my ear was guided by combinations that were almost plausible or plausible for just long enough before clearly departing from Bach’s harmonic world. I am not interested in modernist shock tactics nor postmodern irony and Partita Weaving joins a number of reworkings of mine – such as JPR, Distant Beauties and Tanzë – that stand as homages to their original creators.

It was exciting working with Ji on this music. He is the kind of pianist who regularly throws off Rachmaninov concertos or programmes of all Chopin’s Études and the range of colours he can bring to the keyboard through his formidable technique is vast. Even on a preliminary play/read-through the potential was there for a really special premiere. But Ji is a lot more than a virtuoso performer; I first encountered him as external examiner for his PhD on programming Schubert’s unfinished piano sonatas and Ji continues to investigate, though his pianism, ways of reinvigorating the contemporary piano recital. He is also a composer – for the piano, of course, but of orchestral music too. I look forward to working with Ji further before the new piece is unveiled.

September 2024: myself, Ian Gardiner and Imogen Burman organised a conference at Goldsmiths dedicated to music by British composers who forged their musical language from US minimalism and English experimental music.

Organising a conference is a nerve-wracking experience; not only are there a myriad arrangements to take care of, beforehand and on the day, but there is always the nagging worry that no-one will be interested in the research niche being presented. This was particularly the case for Ian and I because the impetus for the conference had arisen from a very personal source; in July 2021 the composer Jeremy Peyton Jones passed away – a mutual friend and colleague, both of us were deeply shocked when we heard the news and, following a chance meeting whilst on external examining duties, we decided that something needed to be done to commemorate Jeremy’s life and work.

Ian had already organised a memorial concert for Jeremy in 2022, before he and I had become acquainted. Both of us were involved in what might be termed the alternative British contemporary music scene within which Jeremy was so important: Ian was a more central figure – a member of George W. Welch – whilst my activity centred around Icebreaker who arrived later, in 1989. We decided that this period warranted greater investigation, documentation and academic representation so a conference, one-day initially to ‘test the water’, was the way to go.

What transpired was a day that exceeded our expectations by some distance. The conference attracted a large audience many of whom (but not all – younger delegates and presenters featured too) were active in the period concerned and there was a definite ‘buzz’ and feeling of importance, of something valuable and relevant being shared.

A more or less complete set of conference materials are available at the above link but some of the themes I noted down for my summing up presentation give a flavour of the range of topics discussed: institutions; venues; process vs system; the impact of experimental music and John Cage; politics; multimedia/interdisciplinary/cross-arts practices; pulse-driven music and performance skills in undergraduate music education; instruments and technology; looking forward to further work may involve: oral history, mapping networks, archiving, lived experience and interleaving of artists’ lives into their work, preserving a legacy, focus on ensemble music-making.

Suffice to say that Ian and I are not going to leave it there – ideas are percolating and plans gradually forming for ways of taking this work forwards. Watch this space…!

July 2024: time to lay down some harpsichord! Jane, Simon and I were at Vestry Hall in Ealing recording Divertissements, the notes written in the score as well as some we improvised together on the day.

We recorded over three days with a view not only to getting the piece as written ‘in the can’ but gathering as much recorded material as we could to use creatively: takes in different tempi, ornamental passages, multiple harpsichord registrations. It is unclear at this stage quite how all this material will be used – perhaps a ‘straight’ version followed by some kind of extended mix, we’ll see. What is certain at the moment is that there is a long editing job ahead!

April 2024: yet another version of Divertissements is in the offing, this time for harpsichord and vintage synthesisers courtesy of the University of West London’s Townshend Studio.

This iteration of the piece involves a three-way collaboration between myself, Jane Chapman and Simon Zagorski-Thomas, indeed Divertissements has, to some extent, now evolved into a trio – not only the synths but the recording studio itself is set to play a major role in shaping the sound of the music. The studio is, of course, very audible in most pop recordings but far less so in the production of classical music. Simon’s research, as articulated in his book The Musicology of Record Production and his AHRC project in Classical Music Hyper-Production, pays considerable attention to ways in which classical music might profitably interact with a creative approach to the recording studio.

At this stage, though, we are simply trying to get our ears round the vast resources of the Townshend synths. It looks likely we will only focus on a fraction of the collection but, even with this restriction, the possibilities are vast – and exciting!

April 2024: at St Nicholas Church, Longparish, with Tim Redpath and Rachel Calaminus (2/3 of Trifarious) to try out our arrangements of Beethoven, St Georges, Gonzaga and Elkington.

One of the benefits of having six weeks ‘on the sick’ (see previous news item) was having time to complete the arrangements for this long-standing project. Chief amongst these were a condensation of the first movement of Beethoven’s fifth symphony (including finding ways of moving out of and back into the arrangement in order to use it as a ‘container’ for the other pieces on the programme) and a transcription (for clarinet, bass clarinet, violin and viola) of Lilian Elkington’s Out of the Mist. Elkington’s piece was composed to mark the repatriation of the Unknown Warrior in 1920; reminiscent, perhaps, of Delius, Out of the Mist is a sombre, deeply lyrical lament that, like all of Elkington’s music, disappeared from public view until a chance rediscovery (some fifty years after its premiere) in a Worthing bookshop. It has been a great pleasure to help bring Out of the Mist back to life.

St Nicholas Church proved a wonderful venue and we are looking forward to playing the programme here early in 2025.

January 2024: the new year did not get off to the best of starts – a cycle ride one Sunday ended with me being taken to hospital in an ambulance after skidding on a roundabout and landing heavily on my right hip. I’ve come off my bike before and bounced (sort of) but not this time unfortunately. Still, there have been some compositional upsides!

A hip replacement operation is pretty major surgery with the result that I find myself on six weeks sick leave. It has not been easy coming to terms with suddenly being an invalid – there is lots to get used to, lots of physio to fit in, lots of pain/discomfort to manage, lots of rest and recuperation. But I have also been suddenly handed just a little more composing time and this has helped me push certain projects forward and begin to disentangle the threads of overlapping, long term pieces of work. Chief amongst these has been the project with Trifarious that involves exploring the intersection between composing and arranging whilst constructing a seamless programme of familiar and less familiar classics capable of being easily toured around village venues. I’ve completed an arrangement of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 for clarinet and violin that contains ‘openings’ into other works on the programme. I have also arranged Lilian Elkington’s orchestral memorial Out of the Mist, a piece depicting the arrival of the body of the ‘unknown soldier’ in 1920; here, live instruments are complemented with recorded tracks. The Elkington is an austere lament for the victims of war and, I hope, will form a kind of ‘still centre’ to the programme.

December 2023: the latest release by the Delta Saxophone Quartet – Late Music – contains cut-down versions of my Arabic lute transcription, Damascene Redux, alongside pieces by composers associated with Late Music York as well as music by Joe Duddell, Steve Martland, Hayley Jenkins and others.

The digital release of the album includes an EP on which an extended version of Damascene Redux can be heard (the versions on the physical CD are blink-and-a-miss length and function as connective tissue between other pieces).

It was way back in 2014 that the Deltas premiered this piece which is actually a reworking of an earlier brass quartet, Damascene Portrait, so it is very gratifying to hear them revisit it almost a decade later. They have been busy with the piece, performing it in workshops with school children and students up and down the UK. Damascene Redux was always conceived as being open to improvisatory exploration so I am delighted it is being used as a vehicle for music education.

July and September 2023: in central London working with pianist and fellow composer Nathan Williamson and a trio of singers. Our aim is a modest one – nothing less than to reconfigure the traditional classical vocal recital!

With singers Clara Barbier (soprano), Magid El-Bushra (countertenor) and Rob Gildon (baritone) Nathan and myself are attempting to establish a five-way collaboration in which we all work from the ground up to create a seamless programme of song. I am leaving details deliberately vague at this point but we aim to challenge convention through choice of song, use of translation, contrafact, arrangement and improvisation. We need to perform a delicate balancing act in which we maintain enough connection with the tradition of Western classical vocal performance to be able to attract seasoned as well as new audience members.

What has been most gratifying about the two sessions we have held so far is the way in which we have quickly adopted an improvisatory mode of working. As Nathan puts it we are ‘working to tape’ – trying things out, recording and listening back to the results rather than relying on notation with its imperative for the singers to ‘learn’ and practice things. The resulting spontaneity has been refreshing for us all and, more importantly, resulted in an exploratory and risk-embracing working method that has already yielded some surprising and beautiful results. Watch this space!

August 2023: down to the country (Hampshire to be exact) to work with Tim Redpath and Rachel Calaminus of Trifarious on our latest project. Like so much of the work I’m involved in at the moment this one is running and running, by which I mean it’s taking a long time (!), but this session felt pivotal in moving from one phase to another.

Without wanting to give too much away, together we are exploring that very productive interface between composition and arrangement. Whilst there is very little, if any, original music in the programme we are designing there is, we hope, very original intervention in already existing music. Beethoven enters the picture in the shape of his fifth symphony and its famous first movement; Tim and Rachel have already made a multitrack version of most of the orchestration but the project has become rather overwhelming in scale so what we aimed to do in this session was to plan out a more collaborative approach that shared the considerable burden of completing the music. As always, though, with collaboration we ended up somewhere rather different and are now thinking of the Beethoven as a kind of ‘glue’ between the other elements of the programme. Making such an iconic piece work as a kind of connective between other, mainly much less well known, pieces looks likely to pose a range of challenges however there is a precedent of sorts in Luciano Brio’s use of the scherzo from Mahler’s second symphony in his Sinfonia of 1968. We are working to different aesthetic values from Berio but it is reassuring someone has tried this before us.

June-July 2023. It was lovely to return to the Music and/as Process conference a decade after my last visit. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since I presented back in 2013: my own academic career, the research group itself and the state of practice research in academia have all evolved. Ma/aP now appears more diverse and wide-ranging with a marked emphasis on projects situated both inside and outside the academy engaging with music in a swathe of sociocultural settings. Practice research has established a stronger footing in academia, at least in the UK, although it remains depressing how often University senior research managers need to be reminded that there are outputs in research other than those involving the written word churned out in journal articles. I feel more sure of myself as a practitioner-researcher these days, of how I want to present my work and the function of research and writing within my various compositional projects.

The theme of this tenth anniversary conference was ‘making music together’. My paper, Together Apart: Collaboration, Distributed Creativity and Technology in a Transatlantic Musical Partnership, discussed The Gramophone Played – my ongoing project with cellist Madeleine Shapiro – and the ways in which the heavily technologically mediated aspect of our collaboration (we have met in person only once in the eleven years we have been working together) has affected the ways in which we have worked on the music and, indeed, is reflected in the music we have produced. I should actually have used the phrase ‘our paper’ because Madeleine contributed significantly to the content in the shape of audio reflections on our joint work that I was able to integrate and respond to; she also joined delegates and myself for a live Zoom Q&A from New York.