Work
Dates
Info
2024
bass clarinet, electric guitar, percussion, violin, ‘cello
9’
link to score and recording on Google Drive
quintet was recipient of the 2024 Tracey Chadwell Memorial Prize.
Programme noteThe musical materials used in quintet come from several different sources. They are mainly from unused sketches and drafts of my older pieces, but there are also newly devised materials. I worked by surrounding myself with these scraps and slowly bringing them together as layers which roll over loosely, attaching to and detaching from one another, some solidifying and others fading away.
With many thanks to Mark Knoop and Plus-Minus Ensemble.
Performances21-06-2024: Plus-Minus Ensemble cond. Mark Knoop, Milton Court Concert Hall (UK) as part of a Guildhall MMus composers' showcase and Making It Festival
Programme noteThe musical materials used in quintet come from several different sources. They are mainly from unused sketches and drafts of my older pieces, but there are also newly devised materials. I worked by surrounding myself with these scraps and slowly bringing them together as layers which roll over loosely, attaching to and detaching from one another, some solidifying and others fading away.
With many thanks to Mark Knoop and Plus-Minus Ensemble.
Performances21-06-2024: Plus-Minus Ensemble cond. Mark Knoop, Milton Court Concert Hall (UK) as part of a Guildhall MMus composers' showcase and Making It Festival
An extract of a piece of writing about quintet
...
I think that, due to my aesthetic preoccupations of recent years, I had been hesitant to engage with percussion due to an aversion to any sort of clearly defined rhythmic element in my music, particularly one which might be heard as a ‘motif’. To face my discomfort head-on I decided to write a non-pitched percussion solo, and the very first idea I had was the minute-long tam-tam roll. In terms of form, I find the continuation of one simple action for an especially relatively long duration to be a very powerful effect. I first noticed it in Jürg Frey’s Extended Circular Music 9 for solo piano, where a constantly expanding cyclical pattern in the first section evaporates into a simple repeated dyad which continues for roughly 2:30 of a 21-minute work.
...
Towards the end of the process, perhaps in an effort to further focus on the percussion, I made the decision for the snare and tom-tom material which appears before letter E to be uncoordinated with the rest of the ensemble, which gave me a further opportunity to employ simultaneous yet disconnected layers of material.
...
What did become very important for me in laying out the materials with which I wanted to work, however, was access to a guitar, which I first used simply to check fingerings but on which I eventually composed much of the material found in the piece. The walking bassline at A, for example, is clearly the work of a guitarist noodling on the bottom two strings. The material in the piece is part devised and part found. The guitar chords in the first section were taken from an unused sketch for a piece for EXAUDI (a vocal ensemble) in 2021 which I condensed to fit betetr under the fingers. The chords in the ensemble during the last section were written by me, but I later discovered that they bear a resemblance to Bernard Hermann’s score for Taxi Driver, which I had seen in the cinema during the time I was writing quintet and whose low woodwind chords stayed with me for days afterward.
Figure 13: sketches for 'quintet' showing guitar material for the first half
Working on this piece also opened an aspect of my process I had not yet explored: composing using a DAW, in my case Logic Pro X. I had only previously used it to test out music I had written which was indeterminate with respect to speed and coordination, but never in the process of actually creating material. I used Logic to improvise layers one over the other while reading my preliminary sketches as a sort of open score of possible options, thereby keeping my range of material suitably restricted. I found this process very rewarding as I was able to try things very quickly, such as playing various speeds of walking bass and quickly swapping out one layer for another for comparison.