November 2025: yet another version of Divertissements received its world premiere at the Orgelpark, Amsterdam, courtesy of Prix Annelie de Man 2025 and the ensemble Black Pencil. The piece’s champion, harpsichordist Jane Chapman, teamed up with percussionist and composer Enric Montfort augmented with a ‘tape’ part utilising vintage synthesisers from the Townshend Studio at the University of West London.
This version (the number of which I have lost count of at the time of writing!) is essentially a more ‘formalised’ approach to the kind of improvisation with that characterised the improvised version Jane and I performed at the LCM Composition Festival in June. This time there is a score but it is largely schematic, with brief verbal instructions/guides for the percussionist and fragmented stimuli for the harpsichordist to improvise with. The tape part uses the trusty Jupiter 8 and Moog Voyager alongside the Sequential Circuits Prophet 10 and the Yamaha DX1 – a more expensive cousin of the widely-used DX7. I made recordings of improvisations on these instruments and then either used these directly or after various kinds of digital manipulation in Logic Pro 11.
Jane’s and Enric’s performance was very good indeed. Jane and I had minimal communication with Enric prior to the performance but he had absorbed the score and the soundworld of the piece astutely and he and Jane improvised with great awareness of each other and the ‘tape’ part, sometimes dialoguing, sometimes going their own way. The result produced an instance of Divertissements that I could never have notated but, more importantly, had an energy characterised by the tension that a spontaneously created performance can bring.
