The Behavior of Clouds

New piece for violin and viola. Check it out:

Sorry I don't know how to post .pdfs on here. But there'll be a website soon enough.

Ionian Singers

I joined a choir that rehearses near Waterloo and does a lot of awesome music. They're called The Ionian Singers, and their website is here:

www.ioniansingers.co.uk

We have a show in Dulwich on 22 November, and you should come. Here's the program:

Sibelius - Rakastava, Op. 14

Holst - The Evening Watch, Op. 43 No. 1

Salter - Nocturne

Ravel - Trois Chansons

Debussy - Deux Arabesques (solo harp)

Vaughn Williams - Three Shakespeare Songs

Holst - Choral Hymns from The Rig Veda, Op. 26

Tournier - Etude de concert and Lolita la danseuse (solo harp)

Faure - Madrigal, Op. 35

Salter - English Folk Song arrangements: Cold Blows the Wind and O Soldier, Soldier

Really fun stuff, and it'll be my first time singing tenor.

Concepts

I just attended a god-awful concert, with great players, a supportive audience, and a cool venue. These things do not make up for bad music. So I am going to rant.

HAVING A CLEVER IDEA DOES NOT MEAN YOU'VE WRITTEN SOMETHING GOOD

All of the pieces performed tonight were driven (I use the term lightly) by single ideas. The first was to combine piano in unison with recorded speech. Maybe this would make for an interesting part of a larger piece, but on its own it gets tedious quickly, and points to a lack of ability, creativity, or follow through on the composer's part.

The "concept" of the next piece was to play some white noise over pianissimo (very quiet) instruments, with silence in between. Again, maybe this is a "cool sound," but after the third or fourth silence, as the next bout of static with quietly useless melodies an audience member has either a) figured out that this is the whole piece, b) is hoping something else is going to happen soon, or c) both. In the case of A, if you're the composer you've failed, and quit immediately. With B, if something else doesn't eventually happen, you have an unhappy audience member. You can figure C out for yourself.

The next of the evening continued this way. One of the pieces was a descending chromatic scale (over and over again, at various speeds, for about five minutes), for cello, electric guitar, and keyboard synth. Just because you've added electronics doesn't mean you've written something good. How the hell is "contemporary music," which is supposed to push boundaries, so far behind? This stuff was okay when it was being invented, but let's get real here. Listen to some Aphex Twin (or Phillipe Manoury, or Matt Burtner, or any good rock, for god's sake) and keep your experiments to yourself (unless that's the point AND you know what you're doing). Give me something compelling. Here's an idea:

Get an idea, then compose to completely destroy that idea, to force people to figure out for themselves what it is you're doing.

Here's another:

Write something that sounds good.

Maybe if you combine those two ideas you'll make some art. Or maybe this is wrong and you'll totally fail. If you do, hopefully it will be a complete enough failure to elicit some booing and shouting from the audience, maybe even to have a performer get punched if you've done things right. Anything would be better than sitting quietly through an evening of this to watch another composer's undeserved bow. Please excuse me, I've got music to write.

Parallels

Some people have said that composition is a lot like cooking. Maybe they're right, or maybe not. I'm not too concerned with it, I just wanted an excuse to share how awesome the garlic/spicy asian chile pepper/regular pepper/olive oil/onion sauce my roommate and I invented yesterday is. There's a big bowl of it marinating some meat in my fridge, and I am getting more and more excited the closer dinnertime gets.

Also, check out this website:

www.bugbrand.co.uk

Any ideas for a quintet?

London Contemporary Orchestra doing Messiaen, Jonny Greenwood, other good ones

I kind of can't believe the quality of musicianship in this town. I saw the London Contemporary Orchestra this past Friday, and I'd be surprised to find out if anyone in the ensemble is over the age of 25. The conductor, Hugh Brunt, graduated college just last year and already leads with a sort of balance of care and Boulez-esque precision that makes for killer shows in modern music. Brad Lubman has that too, and he's one of my favorites.

Anyway it was a sold out show, in St. Luke's church, which is a really cool venue with a kind of glass and wood box inside of the old church building, and featured the premiere of a new work by Emily Hall, called Put Flesh On! which was for orchestra, solo cello, and mixed electronics. On first listen I thought it sounded cool and that was about it, but the more I think about it the more I like it. The interplay between the soloist, orchestra, and recorded sounds is really interesting, and I think it takes hearing the whole piece to figure out what is going on.

Previous to that in the evening were Xenakis's Le Sacrifice and Britten's Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings. Sensitive performances were given to both, and I'm waking up to just how important Britten is as a composer over here. He doesn't get performed too much at home, but I've only been here a month and have already heard three of his pieces live and been assigned three more large scale ones to listen to an analyze a bit of. There's a really well balanced mix of all sorts of things going on with him, and the more I listen to the more I realize it. Xenakis was awesome as expected, short as it was.

After these three came the expected highlight of the evening, Jonny Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver. Hearing this live, especially the pizzicato section, was something I'd been looking forward to since first hearing it, so my view is probably a bit biased...but it was gorgeous, and I was just plain excited to be there, and felt like I did at a lot of rock shows as a kid through it. If you get the chance, see this piece live.

The evening's closer was Messiaen's Les Offrandes Oubliees. It's impossible to put Messiaen into words, especially considering how many people have tried and failed. Just listen to it. I haven't been that moved at a concert in quite some time. Between those two I'd put this on my list of all time favorite shows right alongside Radiohead this summer, Music for Eighteen Musicians two years ago, and Bright Eyes at the Disney Hall a while back too. It put me in a good mood all weekend, which got me working a lot on the violin/viola duo. Which is what I'm off to work on now. Tomorrow night George Benjamin conducts the London Sinfonietta in the first UK performance of Grisey's Les Espaces Acoustiques, at Queen Elizabeth Hall, so I'm looking forward to that too. Cheers.

London

To say that this city has a lot going on would be an understatement. Wednesday night, after hearing one of the producers for the BBC talk about a music/film series she curated, some friends and I went to go hear the Budapest Festival Orchestra perform Schoenberg's Transfigured Night and Mahler's Song of the Earth. They weren't on their A game for Transfigured Night, but the Mahler was killer. Afterwards we walked along the river to a bar called The Rake, which is very quickly becoming my favorite, mostly for their selection.

Thursday morning I met my friend Lee, from home, at Waterloo station. He's in town visiting family but had a day to hang out, so we had an extremely fresh lunch at Borough Market, by my flat, followed by tea in the courtyard of Southwark Cathedral. From there we went to see the Rothko exhibit at the Tate Modern, then to a lecture on campus by George Benjamin, about French musical life in the 70's and to introduce Grisey's Espaces Acoustique, which will have it's first performance in the UK next week. For the evening we went to go see a play called Riflemind, mostly because Philip Seymour Hoffman was directing it. Good stuff, although the lead actress was pretty weak.

And today was a whole bunch of studying and composing and running a few errands. I think I'm a bit saturated for going out and doing things anyway. Gotta go keep writing/listen to Benjamin Britten's Church Parables.