Joe Bates Newsletter: October

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. 
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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.
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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.