This years Plug 2009 festival of new music at the RSAMD starts soon, 27 April - 1 May. One of the features this year is a new set of 'Glasgow' sequenzas, written variously by students and staff and interspersed among larger programme items. Mine is for trombone and, between myself and Head of Composition Gordon McPherson, we've cooked up a plan to, um, kill a trombonist? Here's my description from the score;

'Over the course of an extended period of time (30-60 minutes) the trombonist is asked to play a 'virtuosic' passage in alternation with vigorous bouts of physical exercise. The piece becomes harder to execute as it progresses; not through any development in the music, but through the physical deterioration of the player. At intervals during the performance we hear a tireless computer rendition of the piece as it 'ought' to be.'

So we've got Davur Magnussen, the brilliant new young principal trombone of the RSNO running on a treadmill over the course of an hour, whilst attempting to play 'virtuosic' material of one sort or another in competition with the computer. Should be fun! (Well, not so much fun for Davur, perhaps :)

Draft version of the score available as pdf.

I'm quite excited today to discover a free/open-source music notation program I hadn't previously heard of, MuseScore. (That I hadn't heard of it probably has something to do with the fact that they've only just released a mac binary.) Very early days so far, but already I'm very excited to see the beginnings of what could be a foss alternative to Sibelius and Finale, something which I think the world badly needs. I had a play with it; it's ok, got used to the note entry and editing interface quite quickly, kind of like a cross between Sib and Fin in the way it works. Didn't take long to notate the gamelan tune I heard in my dream this morning, although I could have done with a custom key signature;

I was able to export it as a midi file, which had some small problems, and also as .xml which, again after a bit of hacking I was able to open very nicely in Sibelius. Now, if I was dead pure rich and that, I'd give these guys a bunch of money to really develop this!

https://flic.kr/p/65rB8N

(Pics by Tamara Polajnar)

Nice piece on 'Bare Wires' by Clare Sinclair in the Skinny;

'The lines between technology and the arts are blurring at an astronomical pace: the latest laptops and computers position themselves not only as tools for business, but as home entertainment centres where anything seems possible.

J. Simon van der Walt, performing as part of the Cryptic Nights season, parallels this revolution yet takes it back to the 'Bare Wires'. As Edward 'Teddy' Edwards and the Electr-O-Chromatic orchestra, he presents and electronic symphony of music and performance.

Van der Walt's imagination takes us on a technologically devised musical jourrney with improvisation, composition and electro-junk. His passion as a performer, actor, director and composer is apparent, and he strives to blend musicality, innovation and theatricality into one.

Luckily, Cryptic's creative drive lies in a similar field, making the Cryptic Nights season a perfect match for the composer. He arrestingly combines his "creative misuse of technology", such as text-to-screech (the warping of standard computer text-to-speech software), with reverting back to his childhood use of electronic junk as instruments. This piece could reinvent the way we experience music, and its place in a modern society. The electronic age is vibrantly creative, and with 'Bare Wires' the performing arts are keeping pace.'

Got hold of a loan of a very cool instrument to use in the show;

Yup, it's a cynthcart, a Commodore 64 hacked up to play as a synth! Tried it out in rehearsal today, works great. (Thanks to Col for the loan.)

Well, that worked out easily enough. If the longer numbers are in the region of five mins, I reckon I can just about bring that in at 45 mins.

Also working on a list of instruments, looks like twenty-two different bits of gear, including laptops, effects units and conventional instruments.

Driving work the other morning, I wrote this waltz in my head;

It's called 'Slipping Away' because, as you might have noticed, each time it repeats it accidentally slides down a semitone; like the last slush of winter on a window pane, or someone slowly, gently, dying...

I think I'll use it in the show on March 5th. Which now, finally has a fourth player! And, I got a loan the other day of an *extremely* cool instrument to use in the show, more details to follow.

I was round at Eddie's house the other day, and we had a go at circuit bending an old Yamaha RX17 drum machine;

This is pretty standard stuff, a well-known bend linking pins 4 and 12 of IC 116. After some experimentation, we decided on a 100k log pot with a 1k resistor in series. Ed is a bit iffy about the whole idea of circuit-bending, kind of goes against the grain for someone who was trained in electronic engineering! But we had fun - going to use this in the show on March 5th.

I've finally managed to persuade Ted to let me post some of the amazing back catalog he's built up over the years. Below is a piece called 'slacion' which he did 'sometime in the late 70s', using an adapted version of the PE Minisonic synth plus tape loops plus a spring reverb. The video is also by Ted, a recent digital remix of 'some old Betamax that's up in the loft'. I can't wait to find out what else he has up there…