Work in progress: ‘The Seventh Voyage’

I’m working on about three new pieces at the moment. The second of these is a collaboration with pianist Silviya Mihaylova on a shortish work for piano and laptop. The piano part is kind of done: Silviya took my sketches and added some ideas of her own. Apart from that, I have a program note, and some programming:

The title of this piece is taken from Stanisław Lem’s 1971 science fiction comedy classic ‘The Star Diaries’. In ‘The Seventh Voyage’ the hero of the stories, hapless cosmonaut Ijon Tichy, finds his rocket trapped in a loop of time. His attempts to repair the ship’s rudder are continually frustrated by the appearance of younger and older copies of himself:

“Just a minute,” I replied, remaining on the floor. “Today is Tuesday. Now if you are the Wednesday me, and if by that time on Wednesday the rudder still hasn’t been fixed, then it follows that something will prevent us from fixing it, since otherwise you, on Wednesday, would not now, on Tuesday, be asking me to help you fix it. Wouldn’t it be best, then, for us not to risk going outside?”

“Nonsense!” he exclaimed. “Look, I’m the Wednesday me and you’re the Tuesday me, and as for the rocket, well, my guess is that its existence is patched, which means that in places it’s Tuesday, in places Wednesday, and here and there perhaps there’s even a bit of Thursday. Time has simply become shuffled up in passing through these vortices, but why should that concern us, when together we are two and therefore have a chance to fix the rudder?!”

from Stanisław Lem ‘The Star Diaries’ – Chapter 1 ‘The Seventh Voyage’

Lots under the hood, but here’s the front page of the pd patch so far:

Composer’s screenshots

Working on a new piece

Here’s how composing looks to me at the moment:

(
a=[46!5,39!4,41!4,36!3,44!3,43!2,37!2,38,42].flat;
Pbind(\midinote, Pstutter(
Pwhite(5,17,inf), //min max number repeated notes
Pxrand(a,10) //get 10 pitches (actually 8???)
),
\dur, 0.25,
\legato, 0.5
).play;
)


Nine hours of improvisation

Update: link to sponsorship page at https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/margaretsmith1

My friend and colleage Kath has persuaded me to sign up for a ten-hour sponsored improvisation which she is organising. The event is in support of Common Wheel, a Glasgow-based charity who provided ‘meaningful activity for people with mental illness’. They have two strands to their work, a bicyle project and the music project ‘Polyphony’. The latter runs at Gartnaval Hospital, where they are asking interested musicians to join them on 28 January for ten hours of sponsored musical improvisation.

I’ve agreed to sign up for nine hours, which is the longest they are allowing people to attempt. I’m intending to play a variety of instruments, probably all piped through the laptop, maybe sruti box, trumpet, ketipung, and a synth. Should be interesting! As an experiment I had a wee go myself at improvising vocally and over the sruti box the other night, was able to keep going for well over an hour. Still, nine hours… I wonder how that is going to feel!

As well as the musical challenge, of course, it’s about the money. If you’d like to sponsor me, you can use the donate link on the Common Wheel website, send me an email as well so that I know, tedthetrumpet (at) gmail.com.

‘Running in the Dark’ in Bremen

Just found out that the Bremen gamelan group Gamelan Kancil are playing Running in the Dark on Nov 27, working from the score they found here. Hope they make a recording, be curious to see what they make of it…