'how shall we sing the lord's song in a strange land: five psalms' score for any instrument

the score can be downloaded as a pdf

'you look like your mother' scored for four voices

friends scoring music for proper musicians and vocalists has always made me a little envious and being unfulfilled with the idea of producing piano scores no one else could read i have long harboured a desire to produce a score for voice or voices.

talking to the composer alex temple about contemporary classical music and trans*/ gender queer and gender variant people within it's fold i decided to put into action my so far only half realised plans for just such a score.

over the last few months i've drawn various diagrams describing how individuals where to move and vocalise which where to be printed on transparencies and laid over texts (i have long planned to set the beautiful but unsettling lyrics of the psalms this way, perhaps i will some day) but have felt each one was to restrictive in how it instructed the individual performer and though i offer some restrictions in my piano pieces i leave it mostly open to the individual player to determine the sound of the piece.

as often with more ambitious work i fretted over this for a long time only to find a solution quite quickly (or rather in a moment of clarity.)

the nine pages of this score incorporate the text of 'you look like your mother (minus the introduction and afterword) and, as with the book, can be arranged in any order. the lines drawn on the page give the parts for each voice and each voice has two parts per page with a third part given to one of the four voices per page.

no durations or instructions are given.

thank you for your time.

deus ex machina: conceptual music and the possibilities of performance

in discusion with the composer james wise (with whom i have collaborated on two albums and aided the research into some of his own compositions) regarding the possibility (or rather joke) of filling a one hundred and eighty five tb magnetic tape produced by sony i came up with the concept of producing a seven day long piece for performance which was to be both filmed and recorded and released on one medium ie. a single external hard drive.

the piece became 'deus ex machina' and it may possibly be performed in some way as people have volunteered to find a venue to host it.

when i wrote the score for it (more in the style of alvin lucier and annea lockwood's sets of written instructions) i did not intend a performance to be attempted, it was purely conceptual. now that possibility may come to be.

treatise pp. 168 -173: completed

as promised i have completed the cardew piece.

i originally intended to record this as a single three hour piece but the logistics (namely that i can only record 1 1/2 hours at a time and don't have an external device) so i recorded it as a series of one hour pieces, taking two hours at a time.

this follows the score pretty closely but deviates slightly by taking sections which cover roughly 1/3rd of the page and making them half the length of the page within the timescale of the performance.

so, here it is: six pages of 'treatise,' three hours of music.

i'll also be engaging in a much looser improvisation for piano based on pages from the score when i have the time.

more cardew (cycles and studies: finding a waveform study in treatise

i've been poring over a print edition of 'treatise' and have found the work to be cyclical and to have sections which can be described as 'movements' where the notation has a consistency.

i have chosen to focus on one of these sections and produce a single piece from it which will be three hours long with a 'preface' of another 30 minute section.

the seven pages i have selected share the same line, sometimes broken, sometimes uneaven, thinning out towards the middle of the final page and i see a waveform there.

my main focus then will be on a waveform study i see in the score and it will be both long and remarkably minimal.

now i only need to find the time needed to perform and record it

stop me if you've heard this one before (more thoughts on cardew's 'treatise')

I've put the realisation of 'treatise' on hold while i wait for a physical copy of the score to arrive in the post and decided to have a look at some random sections from his working notes (published in 'cornelius cardew: a reader' pub. copula) and found something very intriguing:

6th march '63: (written on the score) NB the sound should be a picture of the score, not vice versa

this has led me to consider making two versions of the pages i select to work on with the second based upon sound produced by the data contained in scans of the pages.

treatise page 73

further to today's post regarding cardew's 'treatise' i have completed a first interpretation

i chose page 73 as it gave an easy (though, it turned out, not so easy) entry into the score.

i interpreted this using piano with the central line being taken as a marker of durations for separate sections of the page and as a sign separating the score in two.

i interpreted the top half of the score (channeled to the left in the resultant mix) as having a single note for the left hand (in the later part of the page) while the left hand moved up the keyboard (thinking not of notes but the position of my hands) randomly.

the bottom half of the score was interpreted as having one hand ascending in notes and the other descending.

here is the resultant piece.

 

preliminary notes towards interpreting cardew's 'treatse'

cardew's 'treatise' is one of the legendary works of the 20th century, a massive graphic score of wonderful complexity and beauty and i've decided to try to interpret some pages from it.

when i look at pages like this i see synths and waveforms in the curves and piano or organ notes in the straight lines.

here is see piano notes held for different periods with the line in the middle of the page possibly being seen as a split between left and right channels or left or right hands

other observations are as follows:

forms appearing in boxes are independent sections repeated once, those appearing within curves and circles are loops repeated from the point they occur until the end of the section/ page and groups of parallel lines relate to the density of a waveform on a synthesiser.

this should be fun

cherry blossoms

i and the great drone artist april larson have collaborated on an album about cherry blossoms.

my pieces consist of a drone and a piano improvisation based around repetitions of the word 'fall.'

the idea was that while i, in the uk, look at the cherry trees blossoming in spring for those engaging in the cherry blossom festivals in japan it is autumn, 'fall.'

a random key on the piano was selected to represent the letter 'a' (in 'fall') and the keys corresponding to  the letters f and l where determined from this. this was repeated three times (one for each month of the new year) and the piece improvised from this point.

here is the complete album.




and my piano piece

three scores and some lyrics

two american poets (for keyboard)

mercury, messenger to the gods, path of knowlage

an alchemic process for derek jarman (invert the score for the second set)

notes for 'repetition version 1'

lyrics for an unrealised piece called 'three greenwood songs'