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.

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.

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:

Supercollider​

Logic​

Sibelius​

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;
)

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.

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

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.

I've been working on a piece for this year's Plug festival at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, which will be in May sometime. The theme this time round is 'postludes'. Head of Composition Gordon McPherson has invited all the composers here, including staff like myself, to compose something which draws on, or reflects, or comments upon in some way, a piece from a previous Plug festival.

I've found myself drawn immediately to one of Gordon's own pieces from 2007, 'Spiricom', part of a trilogy of pieces called 'Ghosts' which deal in various ways with death and a possible afterlife. 'Spiricom' refers to... we'll, you can google it, a strange and mad episode in the history of pseudoscience, a couple of cranks who convinced themselves they had built a machine which would talk to dead people.

My postlude will be for solo clarinet and acoustic laptop: by which I mean a laptop operating entirely by itself, using just the internal mics and speakers. I've written a patch in Pd which will (quietly) transform long notes played by the clarinet, these long notes being a (very) approximate by-ear transcription of certain passages within Gordon's original piece. I have Fraser Langton lined up to play the clarinet, and we've had a wee try out with the patch: sounds ok.

A frustrating, ugly, boring piece to listen to, I imagine. But it will only be short :)