New beginnings, old concerns

One week ago I got married. One of the little projects we attached to this great endeavour was to make a little booklet full of things we like and things we do. One of them was this little piece for cello. I put the sketch from my moleskine in the book because it looked nice. Looking nice isn't necessarily conducive to being able to read a score though, so this is a tidied up and Sibeliused version. I used an inkpen font for the setting, because as Kyle Gann's pointed out before, somehow it makes the score look more suggestive, less prescriptive. That's not the only experiment going on here. Now the biggest project of all is complete, we've got ideas for lots of new ones, of which this is a tentative stp towards one. More of these little cello pieces to come...

(a note on those funny accidentals: + raises by 81/80, ^ raises by 33/32, 7 lowers by 35/36, # raises by 25/24. G is 1/1. If you don't understand any of that, go here.)

Computer Love

The earliest known recording of computer generated music has been unearthed.

(Intriguingly, the 1950s computer shows a healthy disdain for the puny human concept of the tempered scale, as you'll hear every time it hits the dominant.)


Careful! We know where this sort of thing leads:

A short ride in an alternative machine

A spontaneous moment! As we leave the office, L tells me she's off to the Barbican, where ahead of the LSO concert of John Adams works there's a free performance of an arrangement of Mr Adams' "A Short Ride in a Fast Machine" for Gamelan, of all things. Well, I'm a sucker for free stuff, and there's bugger all on telly, so I tag along.

It's great, and when you hear it, it all makes perfect sense, of course - the pulsing rhythms and post-minimalist repetitions of Adams' style transfer very well indeed to the Gamelan. They play it twice, and it's better second time around - people have drifted away and it's easier to get a good view of the players. That ringing, metallic sound is captivating, a sound I know well from second hand imitations by numerous 20th century composers, and (somewhat to my shame) rather less so from hearing the genuine article. It's nice to hear the distinctive tonality, too - when you're surrounded by the western scale, as we all are, it's good to be reminded every now and again that there's always a different way to do things.

At work today, in the middle of researching something else entirely, I came across a review that I didn't realise existed of a piece of mine that was performed in 2001 (I already knew about the one in the Guardian). According to David Harrison of the Manchester Evening News, "The world premiere of Peter Nagle's Infinite Breathing proved a spectral sort of affair with attenuated chords in the violins and violas."

I suspect this is the sort of thing a reviewer writes when he doesn't like the music, but doesn't want to say so.

pitch slack

A friend sent me this article about Robert Johnson today... I'm not sure how convinced I am, but it's an intriguing theory.






On a completely unrelated note, isn't it great once again to hear "Soul Limbo" as the theme music for cricket on telly? :)