Joe Bates Newsletter: December

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​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.​