Violinist Conway Kuo (pictured) is to play my Étude in Glissandi at a concert in New York on the 15 May, part of the Vox Novus Fifteen Minutes of Fame concert series. Conway, the Associate Principal Second Violin of the New York City Ballet Orchestra and a First Violinist with the New York City Opera Orchestra, will perform 15 solo violin works consecutively, all under 60 seconds in length. You can read more about Conway, the concert and the other composers here.

Incidentally, if you want to listen to some of my music (and can’t get yourself to New York for 60 seconds of it), I’ve set up a new Audio page. This page hosts six recordings at a time so you can get straight to what I most want you to hear (and avoid wading through the rest)…a kind of ‘greatest hits’ compilation if you like. Of course, if you fancy hearing other things, recordings of many other pieces are still available at the Works List. To celebrate, here’s a brand new recording of Agape Aria, played by Manchester University’s Vaganza and York University’s Chimera Ensemble last month:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I have been selected to participate in The Opera Group‘s ‘Emerging Composers and Writers Mentoring Project’. The two-day session will see 15 composers and 15 writers develop ideas and skills relating to the writing of opera, at Guildhall School of Music and Drama on the 9th and 10th of April.

Glyndebourne Opera composer-in-residence Julian Philips (pictured) will lead the Masterclass for composers, while Simon Christmas will explain the mysterious art of libretto writing to young writers. Following the event, a composer-writer duo will be commissioned to write a mini-opera for The Opera Group on a similar theme to their forthcoming production of Luke Bedford‘s new opera ‘Seven Angels‘.

The Opera Group, if you’ll excuse me quoting their website, is an award-winning, nationally and internationally renowned opera company, specialising in commissioning and producing new operas, whose aim is to merge the best of contemporary theatre and music. What a lovely thing, then, to go and get some of their expertise…

This Tuesday sees the premiere of a new piece of mine, Ludovico’s Harp. The piece is written for performance at Manchester’s International Anthony Burgess Foundation, in response to the author’s novel A Clockwork Orange, in the 50th anniversary of its completion.

The piece is rather unusually scored for 6 male voices with 12 tremolo harmonicas (they’re equipped with two each). Here’s the programme note:

‘I had to have a smeck, though, thinking of what I’d viddied once in one of these like articles on Modern Youth, about how Modern Youth would be better off if A Lively Appreciation Of The Arts could be like encouraged. Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised garbles. Music always sort of sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me like feel like old Bog himself’

The viewpoint that Alex laughs off in this passage from Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange seems to come straight out of the tradition of F. R. Leavis and his mid-century literary periodical Scrutiny. The idea of art and literature as ‘universal’, morally elevating pursuits – so devastatingly disproved by concentration camp guards reading Goethe and listening to Beethoven – is heavily satirised in Burgess’ novel.

The disparity between Alex’s callous, ruthlessly amoral actions and the humanist call-to-arms of the Ninth Symphony of his beloved Beethoven is a key theme in the novel, and provides the conceptual material for ‘Ludovico’s Harp’. Here, Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ is translated into Clockwork-Orange speak – made more violent, more sinister and more hollow, seizing on Alex’s favourite term of approval, ‘horrorshow’. The harmonicas, a favourite instrument of Burgess’, gradually oppress and submerge the voices and their lauding of brotherhood. ‘Ludovico’s Harp’ is about that most sinister phenomenon of a noble ideal being used for sinister ends – Alex was certainly not the first in the 20th century to pervert Beethoven in this way

The performance will feature members of Ad Solem (Manchester University’s chamber choir), and the 12 harmonicas have been generously loaned to me by composer Christian Mason, whose ‘In Time Entwined, In Space Enlaced‘ featured a colossal 36 of them.

The evening will also feature four other responses to Anthony Burgess’ work – Hannah Taylor’s ‘Rasoodock’, Jasmin Rodgman‘s ‘Orang Squash‘, and electro-acoustic music by Ignacio Rodriguez & Michael Lau.

Two performances this week to tell you about this week…first The Snows they Melt the Soonest then on Friday the premiere of Agape Aria.

First the latter – on Friday Agape Aria is being performed as part of a Vaganza‘s ‘Next Generation’ concert, a collaboration with the University of York’s new music ensemble Chimera. My piece is for an oboe and three percussionists (from Manchester), and a string sextet (from York). Here’s the programme note:

Agape Aria was written as a piece for two ensembles that would meet on the day of the concert. It features an oboe and three percussionists that present most of the musical material, with a string sextet positioned around the edge of the stage acting first as a resonating chamber, then increasingly taking a more active role.

The character of the piece is loosely inspired by the ancient Greek notion of agape, as set out particularly in the New Testament. Its generally used translation is ‘love’, but is distinct from the love one might have for family, friends or partners. It is unearned, unconditional, unrewarded and unending – philosopher Slavoj Žižek describes it as ‘political love’, for it requires the renunciation of any favour towards family, friends and loved ones (as Christ says in Luke’s Gospel, ‘If anyone come to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple’).

This notion of an eternal, unchanging quality laced with a concomitant undertone of violence has for a while fascinated me, and this piece tries to exhibit these characteristics. There’s something quite claustrophobic and savage about this most beautiful of notions – like a good piece of music, agape as a concept is compelling and beautiful yet unsettling and ambiguous.

It’s the final item in the evening concert at the Cosmo Rodewald Hall, Manchester – the evening also features compositions by York composers Manos Panayiotakis, Benjamin Gait and Azlee Babar, Manchester composers Steven Calver, Rebecca Luck, Soojung Park, Simon Joyner, Francesca Le Lohé and Jasmin Rodgman, plus another work for the two ensembles by York composer Desmond Clarke. Incidentally, on Thursday there will be a Composers Forum at 4.15 at the Martin Harris Centre where Desmond and myself will each give talks on our experience writing for this collaboration, and there will be a roundtable discussion on the possibilities of cross-collaboration in the 21st century.

Before that, on Thursday Eduardo Portal conducts the Manchester Camerata and Bella Hardy in my arrangement of The Snows they Melt the Soonest at Manchester’s Band On The Wall. The night will also feature arrangements by Stephen Hyde, John Conway, Michael Cutting, Pichpiran Supatravanij and David Futers, as well as a performance of Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs by the Camerata and Rebecca Lea, and a straight folk set by Bella Hardy. Details are here.

Finally, as a treat for making it to the end of this post, please enjoy some audio of Atavice, as workshopped by the Quatuor Danel last month:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The brilliant Quatuor Danel are workshopping three pieces by University of Manchester Masters composers on Thursday. My piece is called ‘Atavice‘, and is a short piece for string quartet conceived as a study for a larger work. Its six sections are related by a four-note chord and an isorhythm that is explored in various ways, before ending in a continuous downwards glissando that imitates the auditory illusion of Shepard Tones.

The workshop is at Manchester’s Cosmo Rodewald Hall at 2.30, where the Danels will also be workshopping Jasmin Rodgman’s String Quartet No. 2 and Hannah Taylor’s ‘Mutatio’. Before that, the Danels are doing a lunchtime concert featuring Lachenmann’s second quartet, ‘Reigen seliger Geister’, and the premiere of Nina Whiteman‘s ‘Waggle Dances’ for viola, cello and electronics. Incidentally, the Danels are also appearing on Friday night at Manchester Grammar school, playing amongst other things the second quartet by one of my composition tutors, Camden Reeves. The piece is called ‘Dactylozooid Complex’, and I may have had a hand in proofreading the parts…let’s hope everything’s in order…details here.

The University of Manchester Chamber Orchestra with soloists Keith McAlister and Hanne Ely premiered my Ex Machinis ten days ago, under the baton of Tom Jarvis. Here’s the recording:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The University of Manchester Chamber Orchestra are premiering a new piece of mine on Saturday night at 7.30 at the Cosmo Rodewald Hall, Manchester. The piece is entitled Ex Machinis, and features pianists Keith McAlister and Hanne Ely, and will be conducted by Tom Jarvis (a picture from the rehearsals is below). Here’s the programme note:

Ex Machinis is a concerto for two virtuosic pianos, with a subsidiary concertino duo of pitched percussion supporting and shadowing the two soloists. From a bleak and static opening gradually emerges a quick perpetuum mobile, with the pianos presenting monophonic material in semiquavers. Repeated notes and staircases of ascending and descending lines form the bulk of this section. A desolate central section of the piece sees more gestural material in the pianos, punctuated by violent trombone glissandi. The toccata material returns, now accompanied by a cantus firmus beginning in the lower instruments, building to a climax and a short coda for the two pianos.

Ex Machinis means ‘from the machines’, and is a reference to both the machine-like aspect of the pianos’ mechanism, but also to the use of repetitive and generative rhythmic procedures that govern a lot of the piece’s material.

The concert will also feature Stravinsky’s Octet and Sextet, Varese’s Octandre, the Yoshimatsu piano concerto with Rachel How as soloist, and La création du monde by Darius Milhaud. Details and tickets here

Firstly, the Manchester Camerata workshopped my arrangement of the folk song The Snows they Melt the Soonest yesterday with folksinger Bella Hardy at the RNCM. The workshop was conducted by Eduardo Portal, and judged by composer Howard Skempton (that’s him in the picture perusing my score).

Bella and the Camerata will now play my piece in public on the 17th March at Manchester’s Band On The Wall venue, alongside other folk song arrangements by Stephen Hyde, John Conway, Michael Cutting, Pichpiran Supatravanij and David Futers. The night will also feature a performance of Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs by the Camerata and Rebecca Lea, and a straight folk set by Bella Hardy.

Secondly, a few weeks ago Trio Atem workshopped Seven Face Pictures on the poetry of Caroline Bird. You can now hear a recording of this workshop:

Tongue:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Ear:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Eye:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Chin:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Lips:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Nose:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Forehead:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This week sees the premiere of ‘Seven Face Pictures‘ in Manchester by Trio Atem (that’s them on the right). Scored for mezzo-soprano, flute and cello, it’s a breakneck song cycle of seven songs in ten minutes, setting the poetry of Caroline Bird. One hitch though – due to time restrictions, at Friday’s performance we might have to only do six of the seven movements (making the title rather ironic). All seven will be workshopped on Thursday however. I’ll try and stitch together audio of all seven to put up here.

They’ll be performing the piece at a lunchtime concert in the Cosmo Rodewald Hall, alongside Marcello Messina’s Melior de cinere surgo, RPS Composition Prize-winner Tristan Rhys Williams’ I AM TRIO, Un Inverosímil Archipiélago by José Puello, and Doodle by Mark Pilkington. In addition, all five pieces will be publicly workshopped the day before, at 2.30. The concert forms part of the Royal Musicological Association‘s annual Postgraduate Conference, held in Manchester this year.