David Gorton - composer

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. Full size images of the tuning systems, along with other photos, can be viewed by clicking the images on the left.