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Gathering of the Gamelans

From Thursday of this week to Monday of next I'm going to be at the Gathering of the Gamelans in York. This event is part academic conference, and partly a performative celebration of gamelan in the UK, most particularly the 30 years that Gamelan Sekar Petak has been at the University of York.

For the last couple of months, gamelan groups all over the UK have been rehearsing both separately and collaboratively towards 'Lokananta, Gamelan of the Gods'. This will be a wayang kulit, an all-night shadow puppet play in the Central Javanese style, under the direction of dhalang Matthew Isaac Cohen. To translate dhalang as 'puppeteer' is about as misleading as translating wayang as 'shadow puppet play': both descriptions are accurate, but neither captures the breadth and depth of the form. Over the course of approximately seven hours, the dhalang has the responsibility for creating, leading and performing a multi-modal piece using puppetry, song, dance, and the voice, encompassing everything from high philosophy to low humour, from archaic texts in high Javanese to the most contemporary of references.

This concert in York represents a very rare opportunity to see a complete wayang performed in English. I attended a number of performances in Java, which were fascinating but impossible to follow in detail without a knowledge of the language. (One exception to this was a performance by Ki Purbo Asmoro's with live translation into English by Kitsie Emerson: a two-hour video of one of these is available here, with at least some of the translation visible).

The musical direction for this project has been undertaken by one of the UK's most pre-eminent gamelan musicians, John Pawson, himself a York graduate. Both Matthew and John are keen to keep some surprises up their sleeves, so I'd better not reveal too much! Suffice to say that the Scottish Gamelan (made up of members of Naga Mas and Gado-Gado from Glasgow, and a group from Aberdeen University) will have something very culturally distinctive to offer during our segment of the show. And it ain't shortbread. (Or whiskey. Or tartan. Or golf.)

Performances at Plug

I'm having two new pieces performed at the Plug festival at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland next week. The first is called Dr Mueller? Dr Mueller!? Oh, boy :( and is a postlude  to Spiricom, the third piece in Gordon McPherson’s 2007 trilogy Ghosts. The ‘spiricom’ was a psuedoscientific electronic device built by a couple of cranks in the 1980s, who convinced themselves that with it they could hear and talk to dead people including, supposedly, a certain ‘Dr Mueller’.

The piece is for clarinet and acoustic laptop: by which I mean a laptop with no additional amplification, transforming the sounds of the clarinet, to be played by Fraser Langton. This one is in Plug 1, the Monday lunchtime concert.

The second piece is on Wednesday evening: The Black Rain again involves laptop and live instruments, this time five players from the Scottish Ensemble through a SuperCollider patch, more on that one below.

Working on 'The Black Rain'

After the success of the 'The Seventh Voyage', I have high hopes for my next two laptop-and-acoustic-instruments pieces, both to be performed at Plug 12 in a month's time. Today I'm working on 'The Black Rain', which is for five players from the Scottish Ensemble - two violins, viola, cello and double bass - and live processing in SuperCollider. Here's the (rather long and convoluted) programme note:

‘When the last trace of the rocket’s presence, a whitish haze, had been absorbed by the atmosphere, when the wandering sandy waves gradually began to cover up the naked rock of the ground, at the same time filling in the deserted digging spaces – only then, much later, did a dark cloud gather in the west. Hovering low above the ground it pushed closer, grew, encircled the landing area with a threatening arm. There it remained, motionless.

As the sun was about to set, a black rain fell on the desert.’

‘The Black Rain’ takes its title from the first chapter of Stanis!aw Lem’s 1967 science fiction novel ‘The Invincible’, in which a mighty spaceship and her crew are overcome by a race of microscopic mechanical flies, individually insignificant, but capable of joining together into a vast quasi-intelligent ‘cloud’: surely one of the first fictional works to speculate on the possibilities of nanotechnology, calling to mind such devices as the nanostats which inhabit Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel ‘The Diamond Age’, and the EDust, or Everything Dust, in Iain M. Banks 2000 ‘Look to Windward’.

Aesthetically, ‘The Black Rain’ carries forward the composer’s ongoing reconstruction of the career of his fictional alter ego Edward ‘Teddy’ Edwards. Something like:

‘In 1959, Edwards created a work for string quartet (or quintet?) and five (or four?) taperecorders, incorporating radio equipment borrowed from Aldermaston, where he was at the time employed as an engineer on the ill-fated Blue Streak missile system. Working from his original sketches, I have replicated the piece using the music programming language SuperCollider, with the addition of a reconstructed lost (?) part for double bass.’

In terms of musical devices, ‘The Black Rain’ represents, through self-quotation, a critique of a group earlier works of mine (‘smir’, ‘4thought’, ‘5lipside’ etc), all of which float angular melodies across polymetric rhythmic frameworks, usually according to some quartal scheme, and usually, it would seem, in roughly the same key.

Premiere of 'The Seventh Voyage'

Picture of Silviya Mihaylova

I'm happy to say that my collaboration with pianist Silviya Mihaylova The Seventh Voyage, for two pianos and laptop, has been given pride of place as the closing work in the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's piano festival.

The concert is at 1300 this Monday 12 March, in the Guinness Room. Tickets are available from the RCS box office, although, confusingly, they still have the wrong concert listed on the website https://boxoffice.rcs.ac.uk/, it's billed as 'Piano and Strings'. Tickets are £7/5.

Update also on the programme, all piano musice: Haydn Sonata in E Major, Liszt Spanish Rhapsody, Enescu Pavana and Silvestri Baccanale.

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:

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;
)


Some notes from a concert

Took the time to go to a concert of contemporary music tonight, a rare pleasure for me these days. Psappha, at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, playing a concert of largely new work. Sean Friar's Scale 9 which opened the programme was likeable and energetic, a sort of andante and allegro, or rather andante and blues, in a post- (very-post-) Gershwin vein. Nice to see an ensemble conducting themselves.

I like my flavours strong and simple, and Francesca Le Lohé's Blind Men and an Elephant was a little too detailed and finely wrought for my taste. It had the merit of turning out to be shorter than I thought it would be, which sounds snarky, but is actually an honest and well-intentioned comment: a compressed, rich piece.

Shows how out of touch I've become that I didn't even know Gordon McPherson had a big three movement prem tonight, Stunt Doubles. The gag here was having a synthesised ensemble play along with the real players. This worked very well: even just a few years ago this would have been a very different piece, but today's huge sample libraries make a much better job of it than the old 128 midi sounds. The first movement was… maximal, a million notes, but still very clear and structured. In the second movement Gordon dipped into a jazz bag which he normally keeps very well hidden, up in the loft somewhere behind an old sofa: we all liked this.

The third movement gave me some pause, with a slightly, er, naff, pastiche, of a filmic whistly-march type tune. The end of this piece oddly made more sense to me, where we heard this tune again, this time on the synthesised ensemble. Overall I thought this was a good piece, a bit tiring in places.

Dimitrios Skyllas New Miniatures for the Universe rather exceeded my C21st 140-character attention span. Seemed to be rather large miniature. And, the Steve Reich Double Sextet: boring.

But, very well played by Psappha, as were all the pieces in this well balanced and engaging concert.

Nine hours of improvisation

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.

calling-all-musicians_sponsored-improv-jan28th.pdf

Recording from 'Night of the Earthmen'

Not be much to listen to, maybe, but feels an important moment for me: a new direction after finishing the PhD, satisfyingly far away from score-based contemporary 'classical' nonpop, or whatever you call all that stuff. Next up: more of this kind of thing, plus more gamelan. Happy days.