compositions
Chromatic Field 82a-z
This is the last section of Chromatic Field 82z, completed today. It is the last of a set of 26 pieces in which the performer plays at least one note from each event (events progressing from pairs of notes to chords of 3, 4, 6, 8 and 10 notes).
cf. Material (1960) for any ensemble of harmony instruments by Cornelius Cardew.
Regeneration Game (100 one bar variations on a C major scale)
I wrote Regeneration Game in the summer of 1993 whilst house sitting in Kensington, London. There was a grand piano and a lot of space. It was a summer of transition; I’d given up my flat in Lansdowne Crescent* and I was buying a flat in Wilbury Villas, Hove (now the city of Brighton and Hove).
*Lansdowne Cresecnt is the street where Jimi Hendrix died at the Samarkand Hotel in 1970,
I had worked with Ikon Corporation, a London gallery for contemporary furniture and design, who had commissioned music from me for four exhibitions. One day I called in and they had a copy of Paolo Pallucco’s 100 Sedie In Una Notte (100 chairs in one night), a book cataloguing a design project, published in 1990.
The 100 Sedie begins with a neutral, black, square dining chair: Square seat, square back and four square legs. The designer then goes on to create 100 variations on this basic design by, for example, extending, reducing or reshaping the back, or the seat or the legs.
I decided to write a version in music. To do so I needed a neutral theme in music to correspond to Pallucco’s basic chair design. I decided to use a C major scale, that is, a one octave ascending C major scale notated in quarter notes, starting on middle C and ending one octave higher (with a time signature of 8/4).
I then wrote 100 one bar variations on the theme, the first of which is the same C major scale, but descending; a retrograde.
The score is available to download from the British Music Collection. Print copy available from soundkiosk.com
Untitled, Lincoln 2015 (Incidental Music) now on SoundCloud
Sonata 1997 (composition)
The structure that emerged during the composition of Sonata 1997 was a series of short sections with a hiatus of one to two bars between them.
I placed these short sections into a series of 8 ABCBA arch structures. Once I had one ABCBA section I could perceive the scale of the whole composition. The sonata opens with a section based on a 12 tone row. Other sections use a limited pitch palette and the composition ends with a coda consisting of a repeated-pitch cadence.
The illustrations are a section of my notebook from February 19? and the corresponding sections in the typeset score.
On the notebook page you can see how I changed the way the chords are written from fully notated rhythm to a series of double whole notes; and on the lower right of the page, the opposite.
The score of the sonata is available from the British Music Collection:
http://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/score/sonata-1997
Sonata 1997 (diary)
Julian Haxby had performed my Game No.7 at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, in 1996. The performance was perfect! I had begun my series of pieces with the title ‘Game’ with ‘Boy Game’ in 1993. The ‘Games’ were all experiments and I was delighted to hear that Game No.7 (obviously the 7th in the series) worked.
I was absolutely thrilled with the performance and, with Julian Haxby in mind as a performer, I began sketching out ideas for a new extended composition as soon as I arrived back in Hove. I had no idea that these sketches would become such a large scale piece at around 40 minutes. What became Sonata 1997 was composed from the detail outwards. The structure became apparent as the composition grew.
Julian Haxby performed the Sonata at Conway Hall in London in April 1998. I travelled up from Brighton with Chris Pearcy and David Perkins. (I would later work with David Perkins on my spoken word opera Cockahoop in 2002.)
I will never get complacent about the excitement of having a work performed by an excellent pianist in front of a packed hall. My sonata occupied the full second half of the concert and was well received.
David Kassner of President Records (my record company at the time) didn’t like it. When I played him a recording of the sonata he said: “Who would want to listen to 40 minutes of this?” I guess my answer was “me”!
From my diary, 23rd April 1997, the day before the concert:“It’s amazing. It seems like everyone I’ve ever known is bending over backwards to get to the sonata concert tomorrow including people I knew a long time ago, my sister Julie, Shirley and Mick and other people from Brighton…
Who will I talk to?”
(Sonata 1997 is dedicated to my dad who died that year.)
The score of the sonata is available from the British Music Collection:
http://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/score/sonata-1997
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