Newsletter: April

This Month

​On April 10th, I am putting on a gig at The Horse Hospital in London! I will be playing the Hyasynth, both solo and with violinist Amalia Young. This is the first performance of a duo project we have been working on since last year. It’s a collaboratively written piece that mainly drones and glistens, but sometimes surges and sinks. We don’t know what it’s called yet, but it’s been fun making it. Here’s a clip:

​We will be joined by my friend Laura Phillips, who I met at the British School at Rome. Laura works in expanded film, drawing noise and beauty from 16mm film strip. She is just a brilliant artistic mind, one that is always finding nice sounds in unexpected places. Kicking the evening off is a composer friend of mine, Lara Agar. Lara is working with mezzo-soprano Rosalie Warner on a new EP: we’ll hear the first fruits of this collaboration.
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It's fun to put on a gig with a couple of good friends, and it would be lovely to see you there! Tickets here.

Last (Two) Months

​You can tell I’ve been hard at work because I missed a whole newsletter, and so have to sum up two months of music making: As well as settling properly into my teaching role at Durham University, I had my Wigmore Hall debut with GBSR Duo and EXAUDI. It was such a pleasure to play with these amazing musicians, particularly in Alex Tay’s extravagant, intimate picture of a wealthy man falling apart, money & yes. 
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I was so pleased to hear EXAUDI play Paroles Gelées, my piece for voices and electronics setting an excerpt of Rabelais. It’s a frozen, slidey bit of voice writing that draws on Palestrina, Josquin, and Linda Catlin Smith (who was also performed in this programme). I’ll have a recording of it available soon!

​Talking of recordings, I have also been in the studio with Sansara, a vocal group I have been working with for many years now. I’ve been so glad of their commitment to my piece Ceasing over the years and am delighted that they will now release it on an album alongside other exciting new recordings.

Next Month

​I’ll be performing electronic music in London again in the summer, but at the moment I’m hunkering down to write some scores. I owe a friend a violin piece, which I hope to be the last element of a debut solo album.

Thoughts

​I recently delivered a lecture to the Masters composition students at Durham, which was a good moment for me to try to nail down the ideas behind a journal article I’ve had brewing for a while.

The key, it turned out, was Anna Kornbluh’s new book, Immediacy, Or, The Style Of Too-Late Capitalism. It’s been making waves for good reason: it draws a line through a cloud of connected aesthetics, suddenly revealing the latent shape.

For me, her work clarifies my thoughts about referentiality, tonality, and microtonality in recent music. What makes music that is almost collage-like in its blurry accumulation of references feel so intimate? How do the distortions of microtonality serve this aesthetic? Behind these aesthetic choices, I think, is the lurking hulk of The Internet, whose constant promise of mediation frames all contemporary culture. At some point, this essay will get written: I’m putting it here as a kind of promise to myself to see this one through.