Xenakis and Messiaen: Because I couldn't find a picture of Messiaen and Varèse (it was always going to be a long shot). Taken from a 'Q & A' with James Dillon on The Arts Desk.
Varèse, whom I heard him [Messiaen] describe as 'my brother, who does for the urban landscape what I try to do with nature'.
Also do check out thisVarèse documentary extract on YouTube. Best thing I've seen on him so far but I can't find out where to get the full length film. Don't think it's the new Frank Schaeffer film Varese: The One All Alone (which I haven't seen, yet). Looks too dated but it's hard to tell with all the stock footage and YouTube compression etc.
Lutoslawski (R): Garden party guests never tired of Witold's jokes about limited aletoricism and Soviet repression.
Alright so this post isn't actually about Lutoslawski's piece Mi Parti but I had to make use of that pun at some point - it was rapidly burning a hole in my blog-post-pun-title-pocket.
Instead you can watch a documentary imaginatively entitled 'Open Rehearsals With Witold Lutoslawski'. It was produced in 1984 for the USC School of Music.
I wasn't aware this existed until I spotted it in Ádám Kondor's FB news feed today (thanks to him then). Interesting to see him rehearse and conduct various bits and pieces of his repertoire and to hear him discuss some of his ideas (no new insights really, you'll find the same arguments in Conversations With Witold Lutoslawski and The Music of Lutoslawski for instance. Nice to hear it from him directly though, perhaps).
Below is the first part, you'll need to find the other three yourself. Good luck, we're all counting on you (ad libitum, natürlich).
Recent piece of mine above. It's the third of four 'framed pieces' I've just finished writing. It's super-brief as the score has to fit into an A3 frame and include the various matrices, arrays and geometric gubbins used in its manufacture.
As usual the harmony is a cryptogram of the title, St Mary's (all my pieces begin life like this so it seems, for various reasons, not sure if any other composers use this specific method as my cursory research hasn't turned up anything so far, I'm claming it anyway). In this case the main gesture - or melody if that isn't too unfashionable a term to use - is a direct mapping of the title: 6, 7, 0, 0, 5, 0, 6. That appears in the first section and again transposed in the second (T-1). The vertical harmony was generated via a rotational array.
I could be more specific with the registrations but I'm reasonably happy to leave that to the performer. Also it's the first piece I've written for organ so I'm at least a few country miles away from being any sort of expert in that regard.
These four pieces are all based on Birminghamthings* as I intend to sell them in the new and most spiffing We Are Birmingham shop. (*places, buildings, mottos, all sorts).
St Mary's is a medieval church conveniently located behind my house in Moseley. The piece was written for their organ and the above recording was made there, performed by Michael Perrier (my old piano teacher as it happens, I hadn't seen him since I was 6, that was 1984. I'm taller than him now but he has more hair).
Mick at the organ.
I intend to make a longer piece out of it when I've finished designing the framed scores (taken quite a while to get used to using Illustrator and InDesign also I need to finalise a design that looks nice but is still functional, and even didactic if I can be so bold).
The idea is to make recordings of each piece so people who buy the scores can go online and hear them, and/or I might produce a CDR that comes with each score. This is all something of an experiment at this stage, whether there is much of a market for contemporary scores in this form remains to be seen (I'm not expecting a deluge of commercial action obviously, just a vaguely modest turnover, perhaps).
Thanks loads to Mick for performing the piece and to those at St Mary's for their generosity. Finally an equally gigantic thankyou to Alan Dolhasz for engineering the recording. P.S. the hiss you can hear is the sound of the air going through the organ, it's not tape noise or some other recording artifact. It wasn't that easy to record given the wide dynamic range.
Click image to enlarge (you'll be able to see it more clearly then, funny that).
Right, no clues at all this time as surprisingly the previous two scores have been guessed almost straight away (credit to Dan in both cases). It's a great piece, I can say that much. I'll post a YouTube link to it when/if it's correctly identified.
Good luck.
TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/2vr7djc
UPDATE: Correctly guessed really rather quickly by Mr Jacob Sudol. Good work sir!
Yes, new article of mine just posted over on Sequenza21 featuring The Guerilla Orchestra who'll be performing 'flashmob' style in various UK cities next week to protest about cuts in education funding. Have a read (will repost the article here in a couple of weeks).
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