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AbstractThis article considers the recent music of the British composer Richard Emsley. It takes as a framework Tim Ingold's reflections on the creation of knowledge, not as the study of fixed objects but as a study with them, expressed in his 2013 book Making. The article examines the forces of resistance and opportunity that have shaped Emsley's creation of an algorithmic compositional method, and its use and adaptation in two groups of works: the series for piano (1997–) and the cycle Still/s (2002–19). The origins of for piano lie in a creative block that Emsley suffered between 1987 and 1996, during which time he began experimenting with using simple computer programs to create algorithmic compositions. Still/s extends this practice into a cycle of 24 pieces for instrumental quintet, originally inspired by a collaboration with the painter Joan Key. What emerges from both collections of pieces is not a form-based way of making but a practice, out of which forms might be discovered, and which requires skills of attentiveness, or what Ingold calls ‘correspondence’. The origins and subsequent elaborations of both for piano and Still/s show how the music itself has altered Emsley and his ways of working.
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The Indistinguishables (2014) for string quartet and pre-recorded voices offers a soundtrack to a list of 70 species of moth sighted in Britain;Freezywater (2016) for ensemble does something similar for the names of 50 topographical features encircling London;Affix Stamp Here (2016) is a song cycle based on messages found on picture postcards (Favourite track: ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Fountain’, from 2008\u0027s Everything/Everything, a simple leaving home story whose arrangement hides a reversed history of American minimalism from New Wave to Terry Riley ) Chadburn\u0027s first solo record in five years (since the Bookish EP Red and Blue, based on the Cold War correspondence between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) is recorded under his own name, but it sits more or less equidistant between those earlier albums and his more recent notated work [ ]the gap between releases is deceptive;Chadburn says he has been working on the idea ‘for years’, but only with the Covid-19 lockdown did he find time to record it ) The Subject/The Object comprises two tracks, both exactly 20 minutes in length, each monolothic in form
more metallic. Because of the high air resistance caused by the mute’s small opening, the high range and the low range are more difficult to control than with other mutes. The great dynamic reduction means that air noises, especially short impulses (slaps etc.) are less audible (p. 103). Grounding knowledge in broadly applicable physical principles in this way (smaller opening requires high air resistance, which makes control in extreme registers difficult; metallic timbre results from filtering out low overtones) will be especially useful for composers, not only to deepen their familiarity with the trumpet and brass family but to spark their imagination for further explorations on brass and, occasionally, other instruments as well. The authors make this connection between theory and experimentation explicit early on in Chapter 2:
AbstractBased on email interviews and the recently published book Music of Possibility, this article considers the work of the Welsh composer Richard Barrett, who turned 60 in 2019. A brief overview of Barrett's work since the late 1980s is offered, alongside discussion of the work-cycle currently in progress: natural causes, based on texts by the late Simon Howard. Among the themes considered are Barrett's interest in working in cycles such as these; aspects of his compositional technique, in particular serialism and heterophony; the influence of popular music; environmental art; and the shadow of Schubert.
AbstractAaron Einbond was born in New York in 1978. He received his compositional education in the US (Harvard, University of California, Berkeley), the UK (Cambridge, Royal College of Music) and France (IRCAM), and his teachers have included Mario Davidovsky, Julian Anderson, Edmund Campion and Philippe Leroux. He currently teaches music composition, sound and technology at City University, London. He is interested in applications of technology within instrumental music, and almost all of his works combine electronics and acoustic instruments. Since 2007 – beginning with his piece Beside Oneself for viola and electronics (first performed by Ellen Ruth Rose), composed while studying at the University of California, Berkeley – he has also used audio analysis and retrieval software to transcribe recorded sounds into instrumental notation.Einbond's interest in phonographic transcription connects his work to that of other composers of his generation, including Patricia Alessandrini, Joanna Bailie, Richard Beaudoin and Cassandra Miller. (It also finds precedents in a wider musical interest in forms of transcription that one can find in the music of composers as diverse as Peter Ablinger, Luciano Berio and Michael Finnissy.) What makes Einbond's work distinctive is his focus on timbre as a musical parameter, rather than more abstract or easily quantifiable values such as pitch.
AbstractThe British composer Gwyn Pritchard turned 70 in 2018. The present article offers the first substantial overview of Pritchard's life and work from his earliest public compositions of the late 1960s to some of his most recent music. His early life, training and periods of self-study are covered, as well as his time as founder-director of the Uroboros Ensemble. The second half of the article offers some insights into Pritchard's methods – particularly his use of permutating six-number series to generate pitch material – revealed in conversation with the composer and supported by unpublished pre-compositional materials.
pendently – their occasional alignment occurr by chance, and the listener is given the responsibility to synthesize all events at once to create the overall experience of the work for themselves. This work blurs the lines between composer, performer and audience, and brings forward a sense of wryly superimposed temporal circularity: the connection of two composers, between Bach and Nemstov across the history of time; the pre-recorded flute sounds that documents the flutist’s own past that overlays over the materials that is being played live; the urban noises that reminds one of the daily lives outside of the performance space; and the live electronics transforming all events in real-time to reinforce the nowness of the performance. This is a work that perhaps best captures Nemstov’s compositional voice – it is of layers, of rigorous and jarring extremes and, of compressing a past, present and future into an unbreakable cyclic cannon in multiple stratum, a continuously self-renewing process of searching and discovering.
