Kronos Quartet

I can't believe I've only found this now!:


Sun Rings (2002)
for string quartet, chorus and pre-recorded spacescapes

1. Sun Rings Overture
2. Hero Danger
3. Beebopterismo
4. Planet Elf Sindoori
5. Earth Whistlers
6. Earth/Jupiter Kiss
7. The Electron Cyclotron Frequency Parlour
8. Prayer Central
9. Venus Upstream
10. One Earth


Just need to get my hands on a recording....

Makrokosmos

This week I attempted to learn Spiral Galaxy from George Crumb's 'Makrokosmos'. I have come to the concrete conclusion that this spiral shaped score is just completely illogical. It just won't do! I don't have a head that spins 360 degrees vertically on my neck.




All that aside, this is a very cool piece, which explores the full range of the piano beginning with the depth of the lower piano and introducing some unusual sounds that are cuased by the objects placed on the strings. It quickly jumps to the higher strings where a haunting and displaced melody (akin to Morton Feldman, I can't help feeling) on the upper middle register is introduced before it descends into a series of falling dissonant chords. It ends with a poignant melody on the upper register, fading out to an eerie end. The depth and harmonies featured in Spiral Galaxy demonstrate a richness of sonorities and the profound notes of the lower register hint at the emptiness and vastness of space that even a huge galaxy can find itself in.

Electro(lux)

Today I was doing some shopping and as I reached into a fridge to grab some milk (it was an aisle of large open refrigerators) I heard a pleasant humming sound emanating from the fridge. The one next to it was also humming and the two created a pleasantly wavering interval. I stood there for a while leaning into the fridges and figured out the interval as a minor 6th but it was by no means a pure interval; other electronic humming behind the two louder hums deraged it. I began then to think about frequences, and the physics of music.

I might use these inadvertent sounds in some of my own pieces, such as creaking sounds of a telescope or perhaps i'll record some friends next time we're all lying under the night sky picking out constellations. I'm still in the experimenting stage with electronic music, because at Queens you were either a BMus student or a sonic arts student. There were few who crossed the divide. But I wasn't going to cover my ears and pretend it was another faction, especially not now.

Remember that sound?!

I've been checking out some electronic music recently (a piece by a composer named Pete Stollery), and was listening to this one piece that dealt with capturing the sounds of this old whiskey distillery that was son to close, and so it was important to record these familiar sounds before they became extinct.

This got me thinking about sounds that used to be familiar to me that are no longer around. I thought about the dial telephone my family used to have, or the familiar sound of a tape deck buttong being pushed on my old hi-fi, the tapping of my mother's typewriter, and the sound of waiting for your dial-up internet to connect. All these once familiar technical sounds are also extinct - even though some of them had only been created years earlier. Technology is moving so fast that these once everday sounds are barely given the chance to be redolent through more than one generation (I've lived in four decades, two centuries and two millenia, and the growth in technology that I've witnessed in my lifetime has been exponential).

Just think of all that oversized equipment and slow powered computers used to man the first moon mission.

I bet that someday, we'll come up with smaller pieces of technology to replace those massive radio telescopes and even the hubble telescope. The problem is that radio telescopes just seem to be getting bigger, so that radio astronomers can reach out even further into space.

There is one noise that hasn't really changed - I guess it wasn't really invented, but rather discovered. Still, the technological means of attaining it are still about. Static noise.

Yes, with the implementation of digital tv, that is one way of making this extinct. But we still hear it through radios. 1% of that noise is radiation from the centre of the milky way. So lets hope that digitalisation doesn't block us out of regularly tuning in to the galaxy (whether we know it or not).

Star Music

Apparently this is what Stockhausen came up with to describe Anton Weberns Piano Variations. I had a listen to opus.21 mvt II, and I get it. There's no clear cut pattern to it and you never know what not you're going to hear next.. A bit like what you see when you look up at the stars.

My take on 'Star's End'

So I was thinking of the piece I was talking about in my last blog entry, and thinking just in general about how much I appreciate the lack of light pollution in Dartington. I mean, you can see the milky way. That's pretty impressive, and I do appreciate it. I was thinking of this other composer, David Bedford, and his piece Star Clusters, Nebulae and places in Devon. It's quite easy to be inspired by this place, not only when you have a beautiful clear night sky, but when your surroundings on the ground are equally pleasant.


While I haven't been able to get a recording of this piece, I do have in my possession a copy of Star's End, a piece that he wrote in 1974. I contacted Mr Bedford via email last year when I came across this piece, as the CD sleeve didn't have much information surrounding the ideas behind the music. He wrote:


"The title is actually taken from a novel by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. The piece itself is to do with the idea of 'entropy' which is the idea that everything rus out of energy and becomes the same, so that at the end of the universe everything will be the same average temperature and everything will be smooth. So the piece starts really jaggedly and gets more and more quiet and peaceful towards the end."


I have to say, I'm a little disappointed that I have to quote a well established composer as describing a piece of music as "jaggedly". Did I get him on a bad day or something? Nonetheless it was nice of him to reply to my enthusastic email, but just a pity that he didn't have much else to say about this piece.

Star's End (for large orchestra and guitars) is in two parts and part one opens with a rising string glissando which crescendos into a 4 quaver motif played brashly on all parts. The string glissandi then continue to rise and fall, creating a somewhat placid setting until at 1'07 an unexpected (well I didn't expect it) electric guitar arpeggio is suddenly featuered which, hald a minute later, reappears inverted. An autonomous sounding oboe also stands out over this anticipating environment. The electric guitar is featured before a timpani beat then brings the woodwind and strings into a fluent and rapidly repeating melody which then changes harmony after another timpani roll. These changes continue with a repeated note on guitar. This cluent and fluttering atmosphere continues between strings and woodwind, while lower strings and brass often provide and underlying pedal note, contrasted with crescendo/diminuendo dynamics. Bedford mangages to maintain this atmosphere for quite sometime, gradually increasing the unison crescendo notes.

This section is somewhat striking of Paul McCartney's Standing Stone, with the pedal notes and random interjections from unecpected instruments. Small crescendos and timpani rolls prepare the listenere for something new but the music just seems to digress to a repeated atmosphere with extra input from guitar. From 15 minutes there is a straightforward thumping which is in unision with guitar while strings/brass play a rising and falling theme over what seems like improvisatory guitar playing. This reiteration of theme-crescendo-theme-crescendo quietly dies out into part two.


Part two opens with a very disjointed character before the strings decend into tonal anarchy (oxymoron?) with a rapid and somwhat syncopated rhythmic gesture which encompasses the middle to higher registers. The orchestration builds up and the very odd and out of place electric guitar playing enters. I just can't help shaking off the peculiar and ill-fitting role the guitar plays in this piece, and these anomalous and scale-like interjections continue over an unchanging orchestral atmosphere for a further two minutes before a conventional increasing rhythms throws the pieces back into momentary calm. As well as the somewhat jazz/rock input from the guitar there is also the occasional sound of a drum kit before it creates a modest crescendo marking the rise of a new atmosphere.


In this more mellow section the strings and brass maintain a pedal note as various instruments take their turn to play a faltering theme. The electric guitar plays a melodic riff accompanied by quiet and rapid tremolos on the strings. The rare descending guitar theme persists, sometimes inverted. The timpani signifies another orchestral change before the woodwind descends into a fragmented and crumbling theme which is then imitated by the entire orchestra and eventually the guitar. This gives a real sense of meltdown or total breakdown of something which originally seemed fairly solid and quite together (perhaps the idea of entropy is finally taking hold?). The upper strings then play a slurred ostinato over quiet glissandi on the lower strings, before playing tremolo scales to the higher registers.


The sound of consonant brass signifies a new atmosphere, as a shockingly fervent guitar enters. Upper strings maintain a pedal note while some previously featured themes (perhaps Bedford is treating this like a recapitulation?) before eventually fading out.


To be honest, I'm not completely sold that entropy is being portrayed in this music (each to their own, I know). Entropy is essentially the measure of the dispersion of chaos within a closed system. Within the Universe, the rate of entropy never becomes negative and energy cannot be used or composed without expanding existing energy. Eventually, the Universe may reach a state where all energy is dispersed evenly, cooling to a temperature of absolute zero and no longer being able to sustain life. I suppose this can be applied to Star's End if you point it out. The constant build up and renewal of themes can all be representative of renewable energy - energey produced from energy. It certainly does start 'jaggedly' as David Bedford puts it, and transforms into a drawn out but eventual smooth ending. The chaotic rhythms experiences at the berinning of the piece do point ssomewhat in the direction of the chaotic universe. Bedford is often described as an avant-garde composer and while this piece is (ever so) slightly on the unconventional side, it doesn't seem unconventional within the realm of avant-garde. The electric guitar playing (by Mike Oldfield) is just what makes this piece so bizarre and sordidly eccentric. At no point does it ever appear to fit in; not onlybecause of its timbre but also because of the differing harmonies and over simplistic rhythms. It would be interesting to hear this piece with guitar and drum omitted. Star's End is more often tonal than atonal, and quite often bitonal.

I don't like it very much.

The Geminids under a Devon sky...

The students have left Dartington for Christmas holidays, and the place is eerily quiet. I took advantage of this peace tonight, when I dressed myself in almost every piece of clothing I own, and took myself and an old rug out to the field in between higher close and aller park to watch the Geminids meteor shower. The visibility in this part of Devon is great, and the clouds managed to stay away for most of the twenty minutes that I was out there. But this wasn't just a pleasure venture; I was working on a new piece.

I saw 23 meteors in under 20 minutes, and for each one I recorded its position (simple terms: north, north east, south west, etc.) and it's intensity (brightness, duration, length etc.). It is my intention to use these records for a piece. I've recorded the duration between each meteor that I spotted, but will probably reduce the collective time (therefore instead of 20 minutes, bring the time down to 5 minutes, therefore reducing the duration between each meteor by a quarter). This will leave me with a 5 min long piece, during which I will have 8 string players playing pp microtonal passages with the inclusion of some harmonics. When the duration has passed that a meteor has been seen (in this case, heard), a string player will play a glissando (the dynamics of which will depend on the intensity said meteor had been recorded at). The piece will continue in this series, with each string player (labelled 1- 8) given a chance to play a glissando at some point. Here is as possible audience layout for this piece:

It's good to have an idea in the works. How amazing would it be to do this piece outdoors, under say, the Perseids meteor shower in august? You could have the string players play the music while one string player looks to the sky and plays improvised glissando each time they spot a meteor. I don't think there are any big meteor showers in july (which is when the MA show will be) so I'll have to stick with what I've got for this one!