-verse in London, March 26th

-verse, a piece I wrote for Aisha Orazbayeva, will be played by her and Roderick Chadwick at City University later in the month. There are more details about the concert here. They've also recorded the piece, and here's another little trailer. It is a kind of cover once again, this time of The Velvet Underground's amazing 'A Murder Mystery', which Aisha introduced me to and has fascinated me ever since:

Recording Project

I've had a fantastic time over the last few months putting together a CD of my music, that will hopefully appear properly later in the year. In the meantime, I've made a few little clips to give people an idea what it sounds like. I'm enormously grateful to the quite amazing performers, who really gave an incredible amount to the project, and also to Erik Nystrom, without whose brilliant work as an engineer I couldn't have done this.

Here's all of Alles, a little piece that superimposes, quite inappropriately, California Über Alles by the Dead Kennedys and Nico's very dark and peculiar version of Deutschland Über Alles: With Mayah Kadish, Lucy Railton, Serge Vuille, Roderick Chadwick and Mark Knoop, recorded at The Forge in London, January 2013. Engineering by Erik Nystrom. And this a section from After and Before, the piece I wrote as part of my spectral piano project with Roderick Chadwick, who sounds quite amazing here: Roderick Chadwick, piano, with Ensemble Plus-Minus: Marcus Barcham-Stevens - violin, Vicky Wright - clarinet, Lucy Railton - cello, Tom Pauwels - electric guitar, Newton Armstrong - electronics, conducted by Mark Knoop. Thanks also to the ensemble's directors, Joanna Bailie and Matthew Shlomowitz.

Cafe OTO, January 14th

I'm really excited to have had the chance to get a lot of the performers I've been working with over the past few years together to put on a concert largely of my music, and to be able to hold it at the wonderful Cafe OTO, a venue which offers a wonderful alternatively to the 'sitting in orderly rows looking at the stage' model of concert-going and -giving.

The programme includes Ostranenie (above, and hear-able alongside), the vocal piece that forms the end of Everything in Life Can Be Montaged, and a series of smaller chamber pieces - 3 duos and a quartet. There will also be some other music old and new, including some 'en-stranged' (my favourite translation of Shklovsky's inspirational neologism Ostranenie) Mozart.

It starts at 8pm, tickets on the door and more details on OTO's website here.

Resonance Studies in Galicia!

5 Resonance Studies will be played in Santiago de Compostela very soon - delighted to have a chance to have my music played in one of my favorite parts of the world to visit:

 

After and Before, London, October 15th

The big piece that has been the last year or so of my life will be getting its first performance at Kings Place (London) on October 15th, so the time has come to advertise it a little. It's for piano and ensemble - the Resonance Studies below are part of it - and tentatively called After and Before (it may not be come time for the concert).

Kings Place sell advance tickets cheaply, so you can get them here: Sound Source.

Here's a draft of the piece sitting on the floor for me to edit a couple of months ago, although this doesn't give you as much of an idea of what it might sound like as the video of Roderick playing below would!

Resonance Studies

I've already posted about a couple of aspects of my current project - exploring the resonance, spectral and microtonal aspects of the piano. I'm fascinated by the basic tension that exists between 88 keys at least nominally - they aren't really - all the same distance apart from each other, and resonances that aren't part of the equal-temperment compromise. In turn, this seems to have really interesting consequences for ideas like cause and effect - the cause (what's played) is in one harmonic place, the effect (the resonance) is in another.

The 5 short solo piano pieces that I wrote last year were a kind of preparation for a big piano and ensemble piece that will be played by Roderick Chadwick and Ensemble Plus-Minus at King's Place on October 15th. Here are 3 of them from their, first performance:




They don't all withstand recording, at least like this, very well, so lots of things disappear... A somewhat better quality recording of all 5 (uncompressed so a very large file), and the score are both available from the sidebar.

Spectral Piano Day

on February 3rd, Roderick Chadwick and I are organising an event about the piano and spectralism, resonance, and the overtone series, at the Royal Academy. This work has been the basis for my Resonance Studies, which will get their second outing, and is getting its next incarnation in an expansion of those pieces with an ensemble as well that will be played by +- this October.

There will be a couple of talking sessions, also including the composer Newton Armstrong. we'll talk about both our own pieces and some of the precedents for them, from Chopin and Liszt to Stockhausen and Lachenmann. In the evening there will be a concert including 3 wonderful student pianists at the RAM - Florian Mitrea, Chris Ma and Karim Said - as well as Roderick, and the programme will be:

Horatio Radelescu - Piano Sonata No.4
Newton Armstrong - Too Slow
Alex Hills - 5 Resonance Studies

Liszt - Funerailles
Helmut Lachenmann - Serynade

Full details are on the RAM website here.