News
Piano Quintet: Fosdyke Wash
In March 2010 I took part in an inspirational exchange project involving staff and students from the Royal Academy of Music and the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, led by Peter Sheppard Skærved and Michael Alec Rose. When I was in Nashville I began to collaborate with the pianist Zubin Kanga and developed some material for the ‘inside’ of the piano, including the use of an e-bow to activate individual pitches. Sketches for piano and string trio were experimented with during a series of workshops, and I then developed this material into a new work for string quartet and piano to be performed by Zubin and the Kreutzer Quartet, who recorded the piece in April 2011. The recording can be heard HERE. The subtitle of the piece is taken from an area of salt marsh near to my home town of Spalding in Lincolnshire. It is possible that this is where King John lost the crown jewels shortly before his death in 1216.
Caprice VII "Only Connect' at the National Portrait Gallery
A performance of my Caprice VII "Only Connect" given by Peter Sheppard Skærved has been filmed on site at the 'Only Connect' exhibition that he curated at the National Portrait Gallery. Click above to watch the video. The piece consists of thirteen chords and connections between them, which may be interpreted freely by the performer. The chords and connections are derived from the exhibition itself, with the chords having been taken from each of the composers exhibited.
Orfordness
I am currently writing a 'virtuosic' solo piece for the pianist Zubin Kanga, which he will premiere at King's Place in February 2012. The piece, Orfordness, is named after a shingle spit on the east coast of Suffolk that was used for secret military testing from the first-world war until 1993, when it was acquired by the National Trust. Each of the short movements of the piece is based on one of the mythologies that surround the area, including the mysterious evacuation of a nearby village, a secret over-the-horizon radar system, an alleged UFO encounter, and the testing of Britain's first nuclear weapon. The collaborative process in the testing of ideas and development of techniques has been recorded, and Zubin and I gave a presentation about the first two movements at the 'Tracking the Creative Process in Music' conference in Lille in September of this year.
Project with Stefan Östersjö
I met the Swedish guitar player Stefan Östersjö at a conference in Maastricht about research in music conservatoires. We decided to collaborate together on a project about composer-performer collaboration, as this was something in which we both had interest and experience (it was also the subject of Stefan’s PhD SHUT UP ‘N’ PLAY! Negotiating the musical work, published by Lund University). We are meeting regularly to develop new music for guitar, filming our discussions. The first piece was completed in 2011; it is written for eleven-string alto guitar with optional live electronics. The alto guitar is tuned to a 6th- and 3rd-tone system that Stefan and I developed during one of our first workshop meetings, and the piece borrows material from Dowland’s ‘Forlorn Hope Fancy’. Stefan and I gave a presentation about the development of the project at the Performance Studies Network Conference at Cambridge University on the 14th of July 2011. The presentation identified three stages of development: the testing of new tuning systems on the eleven-string alto guitar; the transcription of John Dowland's Forlorn Hope Fancy for the eleven-string guitar tuned to 'tuning system 1'; and the composition of the 'galliard' section - one of the seven 'partes' of the first piece, Forlorn Hope, which Stefan performed at the end of the presentation. This video was played as part of the presentation; I had devised contrasting microtonal tuning systems for the eleven-string alto guitar, two of which are tested in the clips by Stefan. An alteration is made to the second tuning system, and this is then compared to the first system through extended improvisations. The tuning systems provoke Stefan to improvise contrasting materials.
Photos from Wolfson College
In an event at Wolfson college, Oxford, on 31 May, Mark Rowan-Hull painted live while Christopher Redgate performed the solo version of my Erinnerungsspiel for oboe, and also to improvisations by Chris and guitar player Gerald Garcia. For some of the improvisations Chris played his new Lupophone - a kind of bass oboe with attitude. This is only the fourth such instrument ever made.