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To receive this newsletter in your invoice, sign up on my Home page. This month My apologies for the late mail out; I’ve kept it short. In the dogs days of this year, I begin a new job teaching composition at Durham University, which greeted Jesse and I with an astonishingly picturesque blanket of snow. Along with jury duty, this beginning to my gradual move north has occupied much of my time.  Last month
Last month saw the end of my time at the British School at Rome. I alighted on a suitable topic to write on: how microtonal composers conceive of three-dimensional space. Very often, the inclusion of unconventionally tuned notes inspires the use of a metaphor of depth. But this spatialisation is contrary to our usual understanding of pitch space, in which notes ‘ascend’ from low to high. I’ll be writing about what is going on with this confusing metaphor, focusing on Giacinto Scelsi’s music. Coming up I’m busying myself working towards my performance at the Wigmore Hall next month. Please do join me: 1pm, 22nd February. I am also starting to organise concerts with my friends to present some new music for the Hyasynth alongside cool things that they have done. I’ll say more soon.
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To receive this newsletter in your invoice, sign up on my Home page. This month In my remaining two weeks in Rome, I will make the most of it, going to galleries and concerts, and diving into the Scelsi archive. The latter is feeding into the improvised work I’ve been building here. You can read more about it on the British School at Rome blog and, hopefully, hear it in the UK, as I’m trying to organise some performances next year.  Me at Bomarzo in tourist mode Last month I performed at the British School at Rome’s Winter Open Studios earlier this week. Over five improvised performances, I experimented with musical palindromes. In each piece, I improvised, then played a recording of my improvisation backwards while performing over it, creating a complex second half of the piece. I had made a graphic to guide me through this, which I projected in the curved niche of the BSR’s portico. It was a pleasure to perform alongside the beautiful art my friends had made. A short video of the performance will be online soon.  My set. (Winter Open Studios, 2024, Courtesy of the British School at Rome, photo by Silvia Calderoni.) Coming up I buried the lede: next month, I will begin a new job as an Assistant Professor in Composition at the University of Durham. I’m so pleased to be doing this. I love teaching composition, and I have family in the northeast, so it’s a dream opportunity. Moving north (and doing jury duty!) will occupy much of my January.  I don’t have an appropriate picture, so here’s a death mask of a saint. Ideas All my palindroming has made me think about who structure is for. My palindromes are not audible: I obscure the structure by playing on top of the second half. A new Italian friend told me that Berio used palindromic structures to help him write pieces quickly. By changing just the first two bars of the piece, the palindrome would be utterly disguised. I find this a funny example of structural artifice being used in a way that very nakedly serves the composer but not the listener. Of course, we can hear some structures, and structural cohesion allows for different levels of engagement with the same pieces of music. But this train of thought has prompted me to think of structure as a game for the composer: a way to keep yourself interested and inspired while writing. The question then might not be how well we’re able to structure a piece, but how much structure, how much redundancy, can we get away with?  If you make it symmetrical, you only have design half of a hallway.
This MonthFirst, let me apologise for the late email: there are only 18 days left of the month to fill you in on. And that’s all very well because this is a month of composing and improvising rather than one of gigs and releases. I’ll spend the month continuing my work at the Casa Scelsi, thanks to the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi. I’m trying a new approach to symmetry. Scelsi sometimes recorded improvisations, then reversed them, and recorded on top. I am experimenting with this approach live, creating an improvised, layered palindrome.  Last MonthLast month was an intense period of composition and exploration. I finished writing my piece for EXAUDI, based on a passage from Rabelais’s The Fourth Book Of Pantagruel in which Pantagruel and his companions come across frozen words that fall as hail and then melt, releasing their sounds. This seemed like a beautiful subject for a piece for voice and electronics. I’ve recorded melting ice and used that as the basis for a series of vocal effects that freeze and warp the voices of the performers. EXAUDI will perform the piece, Paroles Gelées, at the Wigmore Hall on February 22nd 2025. Tickets are available here.  Of course, I have also spent the month exploring Rome: museums, galleries, concerts, restaurants, and so, so many churches. The experience is still percolating through me, but I have started to write a piano duet inspired by the hands of statues.  Coming UpI have two gigs next month, both of my new improvised set. I will play at the British School at Rome’s open studios on December 4th and 5th and in Foggia, Puglia, as part of REF Resilience Festival 2024 – date TBD, between December 6thand 15th. Neither has details online yet, but I will post them on my website and social media when available! IdeasI have been returning again and again to debates around Weber’s idea of disenchantment: how the secularisation of the world has led to a fundamental change in the way we think about magic and rationality. Perhaps Western microtonality is one of the many Twentieth-Century attempts at re-enchantment. Harry Partch, for example, uses historical narrative, appeals to nature and mathematics, and beautiful charts and diagrams, to cast an aura of authority and even transcendence around his ideas. I’m not sure where I’m going with this idea, but the idea of a ‘re-enchantment of pitch’ seems like a fruitful place to start digging. On my reading list: Marcuse, Berger, Milbank, Latour, Taylor, Storm.  This month Ciao from Rome! This month, I will be diving into the archive of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi as part of my residency at the British School at Rome. Scelsi was one of the first composers who improvised at a synthesiser to compose. In the mid 50s, he bought an ondiola, on which he developed a unique new style based on pitch bends and slides. It’s a pulsing, physical kind of sound I find entrancing.  Scelsi’s Ondiola Of particular importance to Scelsi was the connection of composition and instinct. That’s what I hope to learn from him: to improvise more spontaneously, leaving behind desire for precise harmonic control. The result will be a new improvised set that I hope to start gigging here in Italy, and bring home to the UK in January. I am also working on a new piece for vocals and electronics, for premiere in February. Last month On September 21st, I premiered a Hyasynth set. It was so fun; thank you to everyone who came – especially to those of you who have signed up to this mailing list!  Me at Colourscape This one was more planned out: I mapped out the chords and traced a more-or-less spontaneous path between them on each performance. The sound is dense and overdriven, but also, I hope, has a lot of glint and glimmer in it. You can hear it here: Coming up I am hoping to finally have time in December to start writing a new violin piece that has been on my mind for a long time. This will be the final piece on what I hope will be my debut solo album, which I aim to release next year. Ideas The British School at Rome, where I’m living, is a stimulating place, full of scholars and artists who know about so many things that are new to me. I’ve been very interested in thinking about spolia: the reuse of old, often ornamental, objects in new buildings, of which there is much here in Rome. There is an obvious musical analogy here with the music that raids the storeroom of classical tropes and cobbles together beautiful new things, like Thomas Adès does so often.  Spolia spotting in Rome But there’s also part of me that frets about the connection of spolia to a particular kind of European upper-class aesthetic: an obsession with preservation, an aesthetised opposition to waste, and a suspicion of novelty for its own sake. I can’t deny my own grounding in this aesthetic—I love the dusty elegance of these cobbled-together historicisms—but I am uneasy with their nostalgias.
This month This month is quiet as I will head off to New York on holiday and prepare for concerts in September – see ‘coming up’ below. Last month Well, last month was a write-off. I got tonsillitis and was laid low for two weeks, then went on a family holiday. The result is that I must delay the planned release of Switchback, which I had promised to put out this month. Luckily, I was better just in time for an exciting recording session with the London Symphony Orchestra! I’ll announce more about this project next year; I’ve got to keep it under wraps for now.  Watching the LSO recording with my friends Amy and Fraz! Me at Colourscape in 2019, shortly after my accident.  Coming up I have a very exciting gig on September 21st. I’ll be debuting my Hyasynth solo set at Colourscape, a music festival on Clapham Common inside an inflatable art venue. I’ve been going to Colourscape since childhood, so this concert is particularly meaningful for me. My piece will explore the shifting sonic colours that arise from the combination of tones on the instrument. I’ll post more about it in the build-up to the festival, so do follow me on Instagram to see more of that. The concert will happen multiple times between 11am and 4pm. Tickets are £12 for adults and £6 for children. Ideas This is a new section! From time to time, I’ll share some of the ideas I’m chewing through. I’ve also taken some time to think about marble. I’m caught by the way that the subtle patterns in marble flow over its surface and how architects manipulate these through techniques like book matching. This led me to experiment with traditional paper marbling with my partner and my friend Eva. I remain fascinated by the combinations of chaos and pattern, control and abandon, organic and chemical in these materials, and I will explore these ideas in my music.  Our first attempts at marbling.
To receive this newsletter in your invoice, sign up on my Home page. This month This is a month of exciting recordings. Next week, I’m in the studio, recording an orchestral piece for an upcoming CD! I’ll be able to reveal more soon.  My orchestral piece receiving edits Since that will be a while coming out, I will release a single at the beginning of next month. It is called Switchback, and it’s a total one-off: a hard-driving electronic piece that was part of an EP before I got sidetracked by building the Hyasynth. I’ll be giving away Bandcamp codes in next month’s mailout. The track will be free for you – or anyone else who signs up this month. I’ve made short videos explaining my PhD on my Instagram. I will soon consolidate them into two videos – one long, one short – that sum everything up. I’ll put those on my YouTube channel later this month, subscribe there to catch them. Last month I had great fun at my viva, which I passed, officially bringing my PhD to an end. James Weeks, my external examiner, was a wonderful interlocutor who asked all kinds of interesting questions I will be thinking about for some time to come: why do I like counterpoint so much? What links my work together, stylistically?  Me speaking at York Festival of Ideas Speaking at the York Festival of Ideas with the Micklegate Singers was an absolute pleasure. We’ll be releasing the recording of their superb performance soon! Coming up I’ve busied myself playing my custom synthesiser, the Hyasynth, over the last month, culminating in a first demo performance at my house last Sunday! I played synth, my friends played a string quartet, and we ate pasta. I’ll release more Hyasynth material into the world over the next few months. Last Sunday’s set is this Autumn’s gig.  My friends play the Hyasynth
This month On Saturday, I speak at a performance of my choir piece, Absence, by the marvellous Micklegate Singers. You can hear their rousing performance of it from March here, and book for the event here: This marks the publication of three pieces commissioned by the Micklegate Singers that set the same text by William Penn. This Quaker funerary text is a moving rumination on friendship and eternity that chimes wonderfully with thoughts I explored in an earlier work of mine, Ceasing. I’ll be appearing alongside fellow composers David McGregor and Frederick Viner to discuss the creative process and the works we’ve produced.  Rebecca Burden of terra invisus performs in Clapham Last month terra invisus’s tour of their debut album, Visions, kicked off in Clapham at the beginning of the month, moving on to performances in Devon and Norwich. I’ve been so delighted to see them perform my piece Wound Honey with such flair and commitment. You can hear it on the album linked above. I took the newest version of my synthesiser, the Hyasynth, to Lisbon for the Noise Floor conference. I met wonderful electronic musicians who were kind about the synth – very encouraging, given how new I am to instrument building. I’m looking forward to doing more performing on it in the coming months and releasing lots of improvising and practice videos on my Instagram.  The latest version of the Hyasynth Coming up
I have exciting things I can’t yet announce, including synth performances in the autumn and recording sessions in the summer. Stay subscribed here, or on my Instagram, to hear more… This month On Sunday, in Clapham, terra invisus will perform Wound Honey, the piece they recorded so beautifully for their debut album, Visions. Wound Honey was somewhat of a breakthrough piece for me. It uses a musical illusion, combination tones, to recontextualise tonal and microtonal harmony in dark, glistening chorales. It’s a hard piece to play and I’m perpetually astonished by the virtuosity that terra invisus bring to it. I’ll be there with some friends, so do come and join me. Tickets here.  Me at the Visions launch event. Later in the month, I’ll be at the Noise Floor conference in Lisbon, playing my novel synthesiser, the Hyasynth, and talking about digital minimalism and tuning.
Last month This has been a month of project building, after finishing up my PhD. I’m particularly focused on making work with the Hyasynth. I started work with violinist Amalia Young on a new duo project with the instrument and started developing a new version of the instrument. (That said, it was mainly a month of holidays, recovering from my PhD with family and friends in Seville, Oxfordshire, and Berlin.) Coming up I have been granted a Rome Scholarship to work at the British School at Rome this autumn! I’ll be there from October to December, working in the archive of Giacinto Scelsi and developing my performance practice as an improvisor. 8th June, York: My piece Absence will be performed by the Micklegate Singers, as part of a discussion of the creation of the work, alongside composers Frederick Viner and David McGregor. Details available here. Last week, I gave a pair of seminars at Purcell School on tuning and microtonality. I had a huge amount of fun, facilitated both by the excellent guidance of Mira Benjamin and some fun, silly new inventions: the Hyasynths. 
I had a brilliant time last year recording three of my solo works with recordist Alex Mackay. I was lucky to be working with some of the best players I know: guitarist Sam Cave, bassist Marianne Schofield, and harpist Oliver Wass. I'll be posting score follower videos with excerpts from the recordings, but in the long term I'm hoping to collect them together as a release.
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