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Re-envisioning 'How Two Minds'

One of the earliest compositions of mine that I have documented on this site is How Two Minds Can Know One Thing.

I wrote this the year after I finished my LLCM at Napier University. In retrospect I can see that, by taking on the writing of a three-movement piece for chamber orchestra, I was cementing my ambition to move beyond being a jazz trumpet player and arranger, in order to position myself as someone who was also a 'composer' of 'contemporary classical' music. In that sense, it was succesful: I even managed to get a Scottish Arts Council funding for the work.

However, truth is, with 28 years of hindsight, there always were some problems with the piece. I remain very grateful to the staff and students involved in the original performance, but the truth is not everything came off that well. I suspect the concert was recorded, and that somewhere I might still have the file, but I seem to have deliberately lost it. In fact, I've recently been reminded by someone who played at that concert that the third movement broke down and had to be restarted.

As I approach my 65th year, I'm looking back on my younger composer-self with mixed feelings. I admire the clarity that I had then about the kind of music I was writing and why I was writing it. I'm less fond of the passive-aggressive (or just aggressive!) programme notes, and some of the music seems to me a little short-winded now, not developed at enough length.

Also there has often been a conflict between the rhythmically driven jazz/prog phrasing that is natural to me, and the way that classically trained musicians tend to play these rhythms once they are written down. To take a very simple example, the obvious way for a jazz trumpet player to play this:

Is like this:

Whereas a trumpet player used to playing in a classical context will aim to play both notes equally. To go further: if I was playing that phrase I would stop the 'dit' note with my tongue: which is always wrong in straight trumpet playing! So even if I mark the notes with a tenuto and a staccato, the straight player will still not get it right.

So, to make a long story short, I'm in the process of revisiting and revising How Two Minds, to make it more like the piece it was trying to be.

The first movement I may abandon. The second movement is actually fine as it is, and I've already re-purposed it elsewhere. The third movement I'm in the process of rescoring, moving away from strings and oboe to clarinets, accordion and trumpet, with the aim of getting a more direct jazz/prog sound and a better articulation of the rhythmic material.

Pic below is trying out some of the clarinet material with the help of students from the RCS.

Surprise performance!

I had a rather wonderful early birthday suprise last week!

Several months ago had I showed my piece 'Ha!' to Andrea Gajic, Head of Strings at the Royal Conservatoire, to see if perhaps the string department would take it on.

Andrea was a little noncomittal, and after broaching the subject with her a couple of times I resigned myself to the idea that it wasn't going to happen.

A couple of weeks ago, I got several reminders from various string students about a concert that was being put on as part of the string festival at the RCS. Thinking nothing of it, I turned up to the concert, where it was announced that there would be a surprise piece on the programme.

So, yes: as a total surprise to me, they played 'Ha!' as the last item on the programme. I was completely taken aback, and, indeed, very moved, not having heard the piece since the first performance 23 years ago.

Update 2025-04-02 recording is now up https://youtu.be/MHGuWfu2u-s

More 12/8

The 12/8 groove in yesterday's sketch has got me thinking about an older piece of mine, the second movement of 'Bridge River Valley':

It occured to me that perhaps the two ideas might be part of the same piece, but now I listen to it my thinking is that actually what I should do is extend the rondo ABA form of BRV into something like ABACA to make it into a more substantial piece.

That would be a biggish job, though, the original notation for BRV was in Finale and very fiddly, so some considerable effort would be needed to redo it in MuseScore before even getting to writing a C section.

Also… how did I compose this?!? I feel like at one point I could almost play some of it, but a long time since I put my hands on a piano with that kind of vigour!

New year sketch

Begun sketching a new idea for the new year :)

Not sure where this is going yet. Had intended it as a big band piece, but feels like perhaps it wants to be some sort of post-minimalist prog-contemporary piece.

Certainly not the final instrumentation: the rh of the piano would be woodwinds, probably saxes…

2025-01-01-new-year-sketch.mov

Looking back over the year

The tempation to 'share' on proprietary online platforms means that I don't document my work here as frequently as I should! So, here's a roundup of some things I've produced this year: as much a reminder to myself as anything else.

That syncing feeling

In order to be able to work up sketches for ‘Perang Gagal’ at ICLC in Limerick, I wanted to use Logic to compose demos of the material for the live players that I could then improvise with in SuperCollider. This poses the problem of how to sync the pulse and tempo between the two programmes, which proved annoyingly difficult to accomplish!

Ideally, I would have liked to set the tempo in SuperCollider for Logic to follow. A straightforward way to do this would have been for SC to send MIDI clock and have Logic follow but, annoyingly, Logic does not support slaving to MIDI clock.

According to the Logic help, it should be possible to sync to an audio click from Logic. I couldn’t get this to work, and nobody on the Logic Users Group seemed to be able to help either.

The eventual solution was less than perfect. I used Logic to send MIDI clock, and had SuperCollider slave to that. This involved using the MIDISyncClock extension from H. James Harkins ddwMIDI quark. Not perfect, but got the job done.

What did work very well indeed was the recently released Blackhole tool for passing audio between mac applications. I’d definitely recommend this as a replacement for Soundflower!

Livecoding gamelan

The work that I will be taking to ICLC 2020 in Limerick is entitled ‘Perang Gagal: a Series of Inconclusive Battles’, and is a collaboration with Professor Mel Mercier at the Irish Word Academy of Music and Dance. I will performing livecode in SuperCollider as part of a small gamelan ensemble let by Mel. Here’s the demo video I submitted to the conference call:

I had thought that the eventual piece would be straightforward to devise, but it is proving trickier than I thought. There are couple of limitations. We won’t have access to a full gamelan for the conference. I had hoped to visit Limerick to work with the players in advance, but that has not proved possible: instead, I am going to send sketches of the material I am working on to Mel, and we will put the piece together during the conference.

The third limitation is around pulse. I want this piece to be rhythmic, but I do not feel confident about trying to get SuperCollider to follow the tempo and pulse of a live ensemble of gamelan musicians. Consequently, I am having to devise material where SuperCollider establishes some sort of groove that the live players will follow.

So far I have four potential sections for the piece. As ever, I am reworking existing materials. ‘fibblesticks’ and ‘Adrift & Afloat’ are ‘counting pieces’ that employ numerical frameworks to allow performers to play together in time, while leaving pitch inderminate: or rather, when working with the gamelan, projecting the entire complement of available notes, pelog in this case.

I have on a number of occasions performed a sort of quasi-Javenese gamelan texture in SuperCollider, using samples of the Spirit of Hope instruments here in Glasgow. For Limerick, I have reworked this by adding a balungan part for the live players.

The fourth section for the piece is new, and is based around a couple of musical ideas that occured to me in a dream and that were still in my head on awakening:

Many of my musical ideas originate in this way!

Livecoding brass

As 2019 draws to a close, I’m spending some time getting ready for the International Conference on Livecoding in February in Limerick. I put in two proposals. The first of these was to be called The ‘All-Pressure No-Method’ System, and would have involved me working with four live brass players. I say ‘would have’: this has had to be abandoned, we were not able to fund the travel and accomodation for the players.

The central idea, however, is one I’d like to return to. Inspired particularly by the work of Kate Sicchio in livecoding dancers, the intention was to livecode the brass players by means of a repertoire of typed and projected instructions. Here’s a demo video of the concept:

A visit to CoPeCo

In my day job in charge of the masters programmes in music at the RCS, I can't help but be interested in innovative new models of postgraduate study. So I was very happy to be able to visit Hamburg this week to observe the CoPeCo programme in action. This is a joint European masters in contemporary performance and composition, where the students study in four different institutions in Estonia, Sweden, France and Germany. The first cohort of the programme are just finishing up at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, where I was able to attend a concert involving two of the current students, Émilie Girard-Charest (cello) and Sylvain Devaux (oboe), joined by HfMT student Fanis Gioles (percussion).

Speaking with them afterwards they were at pains to point out that this concert tonight was perhaps not typical, featuring as it did mostly precomposed music rather than devised, improvised, or collaborative work. For all that, it was a deeply engrossing evening. The first work was Mauricio Kagel's Con Voce, 'for three mute players'. The clue is in the title, with the work opening like a putative companion piece to Cage's 4'33, the three players intense, motionless and… utterly silent. For a very long time! Or, until, as Kagel's direction has it 'the listeners' level of attention is in danger of crumbling'. A piece that demands, and was given, great commitment and concentration from the players.

The next piece was the premier of a new composition by American composer Heather Stebbins, who it seems had crossed paths with the CoPeCo cohort in Tallin. A great piece, called Crow song, a duet for oboe and cello, working from tentative, unvoiced sounds through to something approaching a melodic shape, and back again. Émilie then gave a performance of Enno Poppe's work for solo cello Herz, all microtones and glisses, beautifully played with an ethereal and un-cello-like tone.

The last piece was Dmaathen by Iannis Xenakis, for oboe and percussion. I do enjoy this kind of piece, but admittedly an odd combination: I found my attention drawn more to the percussion writing than to perhaps rather dominated oboe.

I'm looking forward later this week to meeting up with Konstantina Orlandatou who coordinates the CoPeCo programme in Hamburg. Of course, this is a tragically bad time to be even thinking about European collaborations, but… it would be great if we could set up some sort of partnerships along these lines beteen the RCS and comparable institutions on the continent.