Alex Hills - Composer

Spectral Piano Day

2012-01-18T14:04:00.000-08:00

on February 3rd, Roderick Chadwick and me 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.

1958-1961 in San Francisco

2012-01-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

A concert coming up in San Francisco - a new quintet, 1958-1961, will be played by EARPLAY on February 6th. The piece is a sort of conceptual cover of various aspect of Ornette Coleman's seminal albums from that period - especially the great great Lonely Woman, and the equally stunning but more epic Free Jazz. Here's Lonely Woman:

And more details of the concert are here.

5 Resonance Studies - London Nov 29th

2011-11-05T05:52:00.000-07:00

A new work - 5 short pieces exploring different aspects of the piano's resonance - will get their premiere on Nov.29th, by the wonderful Roderick Chadwick as part of an Ensemble +- concert at City University. More details about the concert are available here:

http://www.city.ac.uk/events/2011/nov/plus-minus

These are sort of preparatory pieces for a much larger work, including ensemble and electronics as well, that will get its first performance with Roderick and +- in October next year at Kings Place.

Some States Can Be Resolved Rhythmically

2011-06-12T13:35:00.000-07:00

Here's a video (with a few missing second very near the beginning for the keen eared!!) of this little duo from Kammer Klang last month. Many many thanks to Lucy and Aisha for the wonderful playing.

Past and Future Politics in Pop

2011-05-14T05:46:00.000-07:00

I'm about to slightly repeat myself here, with respect to the analysis of Ghost Town that I wrote about a few weeks ago, but the example I've found to pair with it is so good that I don't care...! These two songs are both political protest songs - Ghost Town (1981) about race relations in the depressed, early-Thatcher UK, and California Uber Alles about what the Dead Kennedys saw (rather hyperbolically!!) as the hippy fascist Jerry Brown, who was about to be re-elected as Governor of California in 1979 and had Presidental ambitions. What goes around comes around, literally in the case of Jerry Brown, who is Governor again!!

This is all well and good, but what I'm interested in is the way both songs project outside their focus on current events, and how this fits with the music. Ghost Town steps back into the past, for a middle 8 that reflects on how the Coventry dance clubs - now empty, like a Ghost Town - used to be thriving and multi-racial:

Do you remember the good old days
Before the ghost town?
We danced and sang,
And the music played inna da Boomtown

What is remarkable about this temporal digression is that it is mirrored in by the music. The beginning of the song prepares C minor - its tonic - through a series of diminished chords. The same sequence - starting at 1.17 in the video - prepares the middle eight, but instead of C minor, it leaps to F# major, over a C# pedal, as great a harmonic displacement as one can have. This moment is very brief however, and it leaps back, via a G7 chord, into C min again.

So, here, 'alien' harmony serves to represent a utopic past tense as a critique of the present. A very similar critique is made by opposite means in California Uber Alles. The jump here is into the future, and a dystopic one at that. This begins in the present (1979), and the first person. Jerry Brown is telling us what will happen if he is reelected as Governor, as a launchpad for the Presidency - basically California as a proto-fascist state and model for the rest of America, albeit one with hippies as the master-race. At 1.58, though, the song slows down radically, without changing the riff, and the lyrics move forward to 1984, which would have been both the end of Brown's term as Governer, hypothetically the beginning of his as President, and conveniently Orwellian :

Now it is 1984
Knock-knock at your front door
It's the suede/denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece

Come quietly to the camp
You'd look nice as a drawstring lamp
Don't you worry, it's only a shower
For your clothes here's a pretty flower.

This whole, double length, verse becomes a massive accelerando, returning us to the originial tempo - although not the original timeframe, for the final verse. So this is a slightly less 'pure' digression than Ghost Town, which returns to it's original temporal place as it returns to the tonic. However, the relationship between them are really fascinating to me - the similarities of intent and attitude, the differences of means.

Both are using time to be political, and written only 2 years apart. Ghost Town uses harmonic displacement to contrast a happy past with the bad present, whereas California Uber Alles temporal distortion (interestingly, slowing down to move forward) to suggest that the present could entail a catastrophic future.

I'm often banging on, when talking about the relationship between music and narrative, about the inability of music to do tense, that musical time is always operating in a - albeit radically intensified and constantly linked to what has been and will be - present, and I still believe that music on its own can't tell us 'it is happening in another time'. But these songs show how music and lyrics can work together to create time structure in ways that are really fascinating. Any other good examples anyone?

Shklovsky, Digression and Coin-Operated Boy

2011-04-23T10:46:00.000-07:00

Last month I gave a rather dense paper called 'Enstrangement and the Narrative Frame', about, loosely, the shared nature of musical and literary digression, and how the theories of Viktor Shklovsky - the same thinker who inspired Everything in Life Can Be Montaged - helps us to understand this. A pdf of the full paper can be downloaded from the sidebar. Part of it, however, is about popular music, and works better with video, so I thought I'd put that up here directly. It's a little long, so click on the title above for the continuation.

Knight's Move - New York Performance

2011-04-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

Rather belatedly, I discovered there was a very high quality video of the - even higher quality - performance of Knight's Move that Either/Or gave in New York a year ago. Many thanks to David Shively and Alex Waterman for their superb playing, and also to Rick Carrick, along with David the ensemble's director.

Some Performances

2011-04-23T10:04:00.000-07:00

A performance coming up soon - Some States Can Be Resolved Rhythmically, with Lucy and Aisha again at Cafe Oto on May 10th, 8pm on - more details here.

And - much - further in the future, a new piece for Earplay, 1958-1961, will get its first performance at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco in February next year, and a piano concerto for Roderick Chadwick and Ensemble +- in London at King's Place in May next year.

Knight's Move in New York

2010-03-11T04:08:00.000-08:00

Knight's Move - the cello and percussion piece from Everything in Life, which there's a video of a bit further down - is being played in New York later this month, as part of the Either/Or ensemble's Spring Festival.

The concert is 8pm March 27th, at the Tenri Cultural Institute on 13th St. between 5th and 6th Aves. - more details here.

November Events

2009-10-29T04:19:00.000-07:00

Two things happening very close together in November. On the 18th, my new duo for Violin and Cello Some States Can Be Resolved Rhythmically will be played at the ICA by Lucy Railton and Aisha Orazbayeva, as part of its Calling Out Of Context Festival - more details are available here.

Then, on November 20th, I'm organizing an academic research event at the RAM, where I'll give a paper on some of the thinking behind Everything In Life Can Be Montaged, especially dealing with the issues raised by the rather extreme approach I take to the voice in the piece. Here's a more formal description of the event:

Narrative and the Female Voice

An afternoon event at the Royal Academy of Music exploring the ways in which composers have, over the past 100 years, used the female voice to construct narrative, and, through that, engage with notions of gender and its musical representation. The repertoire discussed will range from Lili Boulanger’s cantata Faust et Helene via Schoenberg and Berio to Alex Hills’s Everything in Life Can Be Montaged, first performed last year.

Speakers and papers will be:

Briony Williams (Royal Academy of Music): Voice Pitch as Narrative Structure in Lili Boulanger's Faust et Helene.

Jessica Payette (Oakland University, Michigan): Cinematic Narrativity in Early Twentieth-Century Psychoanalytic Music.

Mireya Obregón (Stanford University): Berio’s radiophonic art - The Dramatic Juxtaposition of Body and Technology in Visage.

Alex Hills (Royal Academy of Music): Ostranenine - Models for Enstrangement in Everything in Life Can Be Montaged.

The papers will be followed by a round table discussion of issues raised during the day.

Piano Gallery, York Gate, Royal Academy of Music, Marylebone Rd., London NW1 5HT, 20th November 2009, 2-6 pm.

Knight's Move at Kammer Klang

2009-10-02T11:57:00.000-07:00

Here is a video of the performance of Knight's Move from Kammer Klang on Sept. 29th. many thanks to Lucy and Sarah for all their hard work and some lovely playing:

Lucy Railton, cello, Sarah Cresswell, percussion, at Cafe Oto in Dalston.

Upcoming Concerts

2009-09-17T02:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of London performances coming up:

Knight's Move - the first part of Everything in Life... - will be played at the wonderful Kammer Klang on September 29th, info here.

A little further ahead, Some States can be Resolved Rhythmically, a new piece for Violin and Cello, will be premiered by Aisha Orazbayeva and Lucy Railton at the ICA on November 18th, as part of an evening long event in their experimental music festival, more details to follow...

Everything in Life can be Montaged

2009-06-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

Everything in Life can be Montaged is by far my biggest piece to date, and received its first performance on the 12th of June, at the Royal Academy of Music. I'd like to thank all the performers for their incredible efforts here, but especially the amazing soloists - Natalie Raybould, soprano, Lucy Railton and Severine Ballon, cellos, Sarah Cresswell, percussion - and the conductor, Matthew Coorey.

Because the piece is a full hour of music, I've created a little highlights selection, which you can hear below. It begins with the last of the 4 Mossolov arrangements which are a kind of Prelude, and leads directly into the beginning of Knight's Move, a movement mostly for percussion and cello. 5 minutes into the sampler, there is the end of 'Energy of Delusion', the central part of the whole thing, and then at 10mins I've put the complete last part of the piece, my 'setting' of Shklovsky's text on Ostranenie for 2 cellos and soprano.

Everything in Life - Selection (c.20 mins)

If you want to hear the piece complete, or any particular movement, I've put them up as separate downloads on the sidebar. The movements all run into each other, so sometimes the file breaks don't coincide with those between movements, but the whole piece is there, in order. A score sample of the ending is also available there.

This is my programme note for the piece:

Prelude - On Mosolov's 4 Newspaper Ads, Op.21
I. Knight's Move
II. A Sentimental Journey
III. The Energy of Delusion - Montage
IV. The Dissimilarity of the Similar
V. Ostranenie

This piece grew very gradually from a notion of the power and purpose of art proposed by the Russian thinker Viktor Shklovsky. Every since I first read it, at least ten years ago, I’ve had this passage, which is set in fragmented Russian at the end of the piece, stuck in my head, and sometimes above my composition desk:

And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war…. And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the order of sight instead of recognition. By ‘enstranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious’. The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant.
Theory of Prose, 5-6

The notion of art allowing us to see the familiar with new eyes, to re-experience things we think we know well differently is an enormously appealing one to me. Shklovsky’s wonderfully diverse and unique literary output, from that text written in the early 20s through to the Energy of Delusion, written in the 70s, is concerned with showing us how art ‘makes strange’, and these ideas form the backbone of this piece.

One of the most important mechanisms for this enstrangement – Shklovsky’s neologism ostranenie alludes both to strangeness and distancing – is montage, the combination of fragments to create a narrative through their juxtaposition, rather than content. Although Shklovsky shows us many examples of literary montage, its obvious expression is of course in cinema, and its pioneer, Eisenstein, was a friend and collaborator of Shklovsky’s. The third part of this piece grew from watching Battleship Potemkin many, many, times, where I was captivated by the way repeating images are always acquiring new meanings and implications from their changing context.

Another level on which montage is important is the pre-recorded electronic component of the piece. This is made of two strands: processed instrumental sound from the piece itself, and a collection of samples of materials from outside the work. The making strange and montaging in these moments uses music that has been important to me while I was writing this piece, and whose influences are felt in less obvious ways elsewhere. Some of these sources are ‘classical’ – 3 massive pieces I’ve been lucky enough to hear live over the last few years: Gerard Grisey’s Espace Acostiques, Helmut Lachenmann’s Concertini and Luigi Nono’s Prometeo. Equally part of the montage, and of my thinking in writing the piece, are musics from quite different worlds – Bjork, The Yellow Magic Orchestra (a sort of Japanese Kraftwerk from the late 70s), the accidentally experimental pop of The Shaggs, and shamanic chanting from the Selk’nam people of Tierra del Fuego, which could be argued to be the most culturally ‘ancient’ music we have on record. Another part of the ‘everything’ I am montaging is Mosolov’s settings of newspaper advertisements, which belong to the same brief period of wonderful experimentation and freedom that Shklovsky and Eisenstein inhabited in the early 20s, before the Stalinist clampdowns on artistic expression.

Other means of enstrangement – and ideas of Shklovsky’s – inform the piece on many levels. ‘Knight’s Move’ refers to a narrative which, like the chess piece, moves in non-linear jumps, rather than along straight, undeviating, paths. ‘A Sentimental Journey’ is Shklovsky’s autobiographical account of the Russian Revolution, which paraphrases Laurence Sterne, one of his literary models in the strange digressive blur he creates between art and life. This movement was the first part of the piece I wrote, indeed before the rest of it was really conceived, and is a kind of autobiography itself, trying to encapsulate a moment where the watching the natural chaos of water at the top of a fountain forced me into a fundamental reassessment of my own work, the beginning of the journey which has led me to this piece. The Dissimilarity of the Similar is another enstranging notion – art stops us from experiencing the same thing the same way, it lets us see rather than recognize. The final strangeness, though, comes from the voice and word, which should be the most familiar things of all but become transformed, not least through the influence of The Shaggs and the Selk’nam, into something quite other.

I’d like to thank all tonight’s performers for their help and ideas during the writing of this piece, Kwesi Edman for letting me try out and develop my approach to the cello, giving the first performance of what is now A Sentimental Journey and playing for the electronic music, Olga Stezkho for her help with Russian written and sung, Matthew Shlomowitz for our 10 years of endlessly talking about composing, and especially my parents, to whom the piece is dedicated.

- Alex Hills

Line Study in San Francisco

2009-02-26T23:31:00.000-08:00

Line Study, a little piece for Vibraphone, Bass Clarinet and Piano, is being played by the San Francisco group Earplay on March 2nd. More details about the concert are here.

Injera

2008-10-04T06:56:00.000-07:00

This piece, written in 2005, finally got its first performance a couple of months ago, from the outstanding young Australian pianist Zubin Kanga, at the York Late Music Festival. This is a recording of that performance, and the piece is a little less than 12 minutes long.

The piece is the only one I've written that is directly influenced by one of my great non-musical passions - food. Injera is a kind of Ethiopian bread, rather like a spongy pancake. It’s used both in place of cutlery and to line the plates on which the food is served. Not strong tasting itself, it gradually takes on the flavors of the highly spiced and distinctive stews served on top of it over the course of the meal. The form of this piece is taken from that process. A rather grey, bland, background begins the piece, and very highly characterized musics occur ‘on top’ of this fixed layer. Their characters seep into the chords, and the music becomes more and more mixed, merging identities in the same way the flavors of the food come together in the bread. The form can also be seen as a more abstract narrative, moving from sectional, block-like, structures towards a linear continuum. The idea of underlying structural stories linking two seemingly totally unrelated experiences seems to me one of the most interesting and exciting properties of all art.

The Shaggs

2008-08-03T13:29:00.000-07:00

Low-Tech music

2008-06-09T05:43:00.000-07:00

I've always had a problem with electronic music that sounds like it is trying to demonstrate how fancy the technology is. My own - so far minimal - efforts in writing pieces using some kind of electronic element haven't ventured far from the analog synthesizer, with a little pro-tools thrown in. Here are a few different things, all more or less pop music, that make me want to take this a lot further (or backwards, from a technological standpoint). Firstly, the Yellow Magic Orchestra, a kind of Japanese Kraftwerk, astonishingly from 1978:

I like the mix of 'musical' and 'non-musical' sounds here, the random lapses into kitsch piano concertos, the kind of surreal joy of it all.

Next, two 'technological' cover versions. 386DX is the 'band' of a Russian digital artist called Alexi Shulgin, who recreates rock classics using a 1st generation PC, with just a soundcard and speech program:

A bunch more of his stuff is available here.

Finally, a really really amazing version of Radiohead's Nude:

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

In both these cases, the original song doesn't interest me much at all, but something about the collision with the technology - especially in the Radiohead song - fascinates me, not just on a conceptual level, but in the music that results from it. I think the complete depersonalization of both songs, taking any sense of emotion or performance out of the song, and robbing it of its normal cultural codes, actually makes them more accesible to me as musical objects.

Chords For Anders

2008-04-08T14:31:00.000-07:00

This is another piece I wrote for Rational Rec, this time for an evening at the Whitechapel Gallery in March 2006. The idea was to write a very short piece that would be performed, along with a little talk, 5 times in the evening, each time just for an audience of 5 or 6.

The piece is really just a page of chords, with various ways of moving between them that create harmonic progressions of varying degrees of complexity and variety.

Iannis Xenakis

2008-03-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

For me Xenakis is one of the absolutely great composers of the last century, and in the last week or two I've come across a couple of very exciting things related to him, along with hearing a really good performance of Jalons by the Manson Ensemble at the Royal Academy.

One is this simply amazing performance of Psappha, the solo percussion piece, by Steve Schick in San Diego, just a week or two after Xenakis died:

Even more exciting was to find a graph of Evryali, made by another San Diego musician, and very old friend, John Mark Harris. He represents the piece's wonderful, hydra-like, dividing lines in a way which actually looks a lot like the score of Psappha, and best of all, you can follow the graph while listening to his astonishing recording of the piece - here.

Score Excerpts

2008-02-24T13:36:00.000-08:00

I've just put up some bits of a few scores, which you can download from the sidebar. If any of these look interesting to you, please do let me know and I'll be happy to send you a copy of the whole thing, either electronically or the old-fashioned way!

The Principle of Terrestrial Mediocrity

2008-01-22T07:19:00.000-08:00

The title of this piece comes from Martin Amis's The Information:

“The history of astronomy is the history of increasing humiliation. First the geocentric universe, then the heliocentric universe. Then the eccentric universe – the one we’re living in. Every century we get smaller. Kant figured it all out, sitting in his armchair. What’s the phrase? The principle of terrestrial mediocrity.”

This provides a kind of programme for the piece - not a literal story, but a narrative of ideas perhaps. Essentially the piece is based around the Copernican realization that we are not in the center of the universe. The beginning of the piece attempts to build a harmonic world centered around D, which gradually becomes untenably complex despite desperate (and almost religious) assertions to the contrary. By pulling away this complexity a much simpler and more stable system is revealed underneath, as Copernican cosmolgy was in fact already contained with in the old, heliocentric Ptolemaic model. A flat, which has been present from the start, becomes a much more viable center of the work's universe. However, by the end, shifts of perspective and scale start to undermine that too and the Earth's D has moved even further to the margins.

I was fortunate enough to get to spend a great deal of time working with the fantastic San Francisco based pianist and composer Christopher Jones on this piece, and this is a studio recording he made of it in 2004. It is also available on CD Innova 635.

Ficta

2008-01-13T06:02:00.000-08:00

Ficta means 'false', and in a musical context is usually applied to the addition of accidentals to the fixed modal 'gamut' of much medieval and renaissance music (notes which are false within the mode). On one level, that is what this piece does - moving from modes to chromatic and micro-tonal saturation. However, the 'falsification' runs much deeper here, and the whole piece is really a ficticious version of all sorts of aspects of music from between about 1100 and 1500. The games with style and parody - although never quotation, all the music is mine, and often created using methods that would be completely alien to a C14th composer - are something I've never returned to quite as obviously, but the practices of early music are things which continue to fascinate me and have informed my way of writing enormously.

For 9 players divided up into 3 trios, this is a rather long piece, in 5 movements, with the 4th being the longest, and the only one which uses all the trios at the same time. Here, however, you can hear the 2nd and 3rd movements, which are interconnected and the most playful and strange. This performance was at Stanford in 2002, with the ALEA III ensemble conducted by J.Karla Lemon.

Line Study

2008-01-12T13:56:00.000-08:00

This piece was something of a departure for me. Much of my music has been concerned with the superimposition of many elements, both on top of each other as layers and in strings of very intricate objects. Here, instead, I wanted to explore a single thing - basically just a melodic line. The piece becomes a study in moving in and out of melodic and rhythmic unison, something which has often made up one layer of my work, but here instead heard on its own.

This performance is from the BMIC's Cutting Edge series, in September 2004, with Claire Edwardes playing the vibraphone, Sarah Nicholls the piano and Carlos Galvez the bass clarinet.

Broken Frames

2008-01-12T13:09:00.000-08:00

When writing pieces for duos, I tend to find myself thinking about what kinds of relationships the two instruments can have. Here I started by reducing them to the most basic categories I could think of - they can play the same thing, they can play something different to each other, or they can play on their own. These almost sterotypical interactions provide 8 brief fragments (3 the same, 3 different, a little solo for each) that are repeated cyclically. As these cycles develop the walls separating the various fragments gradually dissolve and much richer, more fluid, relationships start to evolve.

I hope that this kind of form can mirror and model human social interaction - in this case, we dance around each other in rigid socially conditioned ways but as these rituals continue we establish something more unique and personal. My music is rarely straightforwardly optimistic in these things, though, and the ending re-casts the initial materials in a collapsed, limited, way.

The performance is by Dirk Beisse and Ernst Surberg, from Ensemble Mosaik, at an SWR Ars Nova concert in Ravensburg (the home of the jigsaw puzzle!!), June 2007.

A cello piece at Rational Rec

2008-01-12T10:47:00.000-08:00

Last year, I was lucky enough to write a piece for the wonderful Rational Rec, a monthly event devoted to new arts in all mediums, and held at the bizarre yet perfect Bethnal Green Working Mens' Club. The whoel event was filmed by the BBC for the series Classic Britannia, and some of my piece found its way - in 5 second segments - into the programme. The bits for cello are by me, from The Fountain and the Garden, played by Kwesi Edman.....

Welcome

2008-01-12T10:10:00.000-08:00

I am a composer, pianist and teacher, based in London. My music has been played at events such as the Cheltenham Festival, the London Sinfonietta State of the Nation Weekend and the Cutting Edge series, at venues ranging from Carnegie Hall and the South Bank Center to the Bethnal Green Working Mens' Club, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and the German SWR, and recorded on the American Innova label. Recent collaborators have included the Berlin-based Ensemble Mosaik, San Francisco group Earplay, pianist Zubin Kanga, soprano Natalie Raybould and the cellists Lucy Railton, Kwesi Edman and Severine Ballon. Upcoming projects are a duo for Lucy and the violinist Aisha Orazbayeva, a new piece for Earplay's 2010-11 season and a work for the Dutch Ruysdael Quartet.

From 1998 to 2004 I lived in California, where I studied and taught and the University of California, San Diego, and Stanford, completing a doctorate supervised by Brian Ferneyhough. Before that I was a student at the Royal Academy of Music, where my teacher was Michael Finnissy, and an undergraduate at the University of Exeter.

I'm a now a full-time lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music, where I teach analysis and music theory. I also teach piano and, rather improbably, write a monthly review column on rock and pop music for Clash Magazine.

Outside music, I enjoy reading both classic and modern fiction - Middlemarch, Anna Karenina and Gravity's Rainbow are particular favorites - support Arsenal and the England cricket team, and pursue a near-obsessive interest in (mostly French) food and wine.

The Shaggs

2008-01-03T09:25:00.000-08:00

I'm surprising myself by wanting to write about pop music again on what is supposed to be a site about my compositional work, but The Shaggs, a truly bizarre and unique band, are having a curious and inescapable effect on my writing that has left me needing to say more about them.

Regularly called - quite wrongly in my view - the worst band of all time, what is most often talked about is their strange and sad story, centered around a small town in rural Massachusetts, and culminating in their only album, 'The Philosophy of the World'. This was retroactively discovered by, amongst others, Frank Zappa, who compared them with Ornette Colman and included it in his 5 greatest records of the century. More about their lives and history can be found in this lovely article by Susan Orlean: Meet The Shaggs .

I'm a bit more interested in talking about the music itself, however. To that end, here is perhaps my favorite song of theirs, "I'm so happy when you are near":

Now, by any rational, objective, standard this is surely astonishingly poor music. The guitars are out of tune, the vocals don't really belong in a key at all, on the rare occasions the drums are in time with the guitars the pulse is wildly unstable (check out the jump at the end of the guitar solo), and the links between the verses sound like an - unsuccessful - attempt to retune the guitars. And that's without even mentioning the lyrics, which sit in a strange grey area between inane and insane. All these things are undeniable, but I think there are aspects of absolutely genuine musical quality and creative originality that far surpass the superficial incompetence.

Firstly, the singing is quite extraordinary. The two girls may be singing out of time and tune in terms of equal temperament and 4-on-the-floor rhythm, but they are consistently together and in tune with each other. The odd intervals that make up the vocals, sitting uncomfortably between a diatonic and a whole-tone scale a lot of the time, seem shared between them; an entirely internalized, if untheoretical, tuning system of their own. There are also nods to more conventional harmonic practice that break out in a wonderfully surreal way - especially the (exquisitely flat) leading tone that's left hanging at the end of the last verse, and whose expected resolution to G is evaded by the unaccompanied E minor chord that follows. I love the way that opening and closing progression - E min, C maj, G maj - is simultaneously obvious and entirely non-functional: does the last chord feel like a tonic? Realistically, those chords are probably there only there because they are amongst the very few she could actually play, but to me they are damaged, broken, pillars, trying to tell us where we are but undermining it at the same time.

I also love the structure and pacing of the song, which is almost a cliche of the 2 minute pop song. But everything seems to happen exactly where I want it to, they know exactly what they want to say and just get on with it, there is no excess or unnecessary complication. The way the guitar solo more or less replicates the vocal melody reinforces this beautifully - give me this material relationship over 3 minutes of screaming irrelevant shredding any day...

What I'm doing here, obviously, is hearing this music with ears that have been conditioned by something quite alien to The Shaggs own experience, and I'm sure my analysis would be as foreign to them as their music is from their own imagined influences - The Monkees, Hermann's Hermits (although they found that a little racy). That's what really fascinates me about the whole issue of 'incompetent' art, though - if they'd 'succeeded' and managed to accurately emulate their late 60s low-brow pop models, it would have been totally uninteresting and formulaic. Instead, through the prism of naivety and lack of technique, comes the fresh and remarkable.

Another question is what does this have to do with my own music? The simple answer to this is that I don't know. However, there are certain things I find in their sound that I've been interested in and drawn to for far longer than I've known their music. The most obvious of these is the distorted unison, both in pitch and rhythm, which is obvious in pieces like Line Study and Broken Frames. Another is the combination of tonal materials with intervals which aren't equal tempered and their 'wrong' usages. In Ficta, for instance, that flat leading tone and the delayed resolution is everywhere! Now, though, I'm perhaps finding ways to engage with this sound world more directly.

So, despite the glaring aesthetic and cultural gulfs between the Wiggin sisters and myself, I really feel this music is both authentically valuable and has much that relates to what I'd like to do as a composer.