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Anyway, it didn't win the competition - a piece by some lecturer from Belfast won; it was a good sounding piece, but to my mind more of an improvisation than a piece of written music, but hey! no sour grapes.The performance given by Tim Brady was pretty cool - his fingers adapted to the wide intervals and changing positions amazingly fast.
At the time, the formulation at, say, bar eight (page one), was seen as quirky, but in fact this has its roots in Mozart: listen to the Kyrie from the Requiem - those little sequential figures are actually quite chromatic - the notes are adjusted tonally with each iteration.That's the way my little formulations work too.A tonal subtlety.
I think Tim liked the piece - it was something different for him other than all those (in my opinion bourgeois) pieces written to demonstrate some new performance technique or piece of equipment.
The judges, however, on the whole hated it - the arch-villain of tape music was there (no names but his tongue was certainly on fire that day), spitting his pro-impressionist vitriol as per usual, and his mate the minimalist seemed more amused by someone writing tonal/serial music 'in this day and age' than anything else!
Oh how old-fashioned!
If any axe-murderers out there want to play this piece publicly or privately, then you are entirely welcome, free of charge of course - everything here is.
Once you get used to not forming the rock'n'roll or jazz shapes with your hand, it's actually pretty playable - I can play it at half speed and I'm no geetarist I assure you.
The idea with this, as with all my stuff, is to produce a tonal counterpoint from basically coherent, formulaic material.Take bars 15/16 for example - the first chord of 16 sounds like D-sharp+B rather than what's written(same pitches), but the tonal line dictates the E-flat.I like those little ambiguities.
And the middle section with the full ninth-chords - this is a mickey-take of all those bluesy people with their chunky virtuosity - the chord is formed by simply detuning the D string down a semitone to C Sharp.This makes an open-string chord of A9, ready to bar to whatever pitch you want, and for the big jumps I simply interspersed high bars with open-string chords.It works quite well.
The old ternary form is taken as a wee-wee-take model, with a sad coda at the end, and in the poetic sense one can interpret the piece as an allegory for the state of culture, swamped by a false sense of mass consensus.
I'm quite proud of the minor-to-major chords in bars 43/44; these I think are very musical.I'm hoping to write more of those kinds of moments in future pieces.
There's a call for pieces for the millennium from an ensemble called Ensemble DeCaDanse in France.They have an email address:
DeCaDanse at Hotmail
The deadline is 31st August 1999, and each composer should send between five and fifteen pieces, each with a total duration of ten seconds.
That's right - ten seconds.Now I know I've written some short pieces over the years, and my friend James Saunders, who lectures at Huddersfield and is a marvellous Nancarrow-esque 'complex' composer, has written much shorter, but this project has to be pretty-much the ultimate.
The postal address for submissions is as follows:
Ensemble DeCaDanse
82 rue des Colverts
34400, LUNEL
France
They need 2000 pieces by the end of August, so don't be shy - whoever you are, whatever so-called 'genre', send loads of stuff along.I'll be going for the whole fifteen, and posting them to this site as MIDIs and scores, then, if they get played, as MP3s at one of the other sites.
This is a fantastic project.
