Joe Bates Newsletter: November

To receive this newsletter in your invoice, sign up on my Home page.
​

This Month

First, 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 Month

Last 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 Up

I 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!
​

Ideas

​I 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.