It’s been a bit more than two years since we made our commitment to reach a 50/50 gender balance across all the composers represented on the Huddersfield Contemporary Records (HCR) label by 2022. The background for that original commitment from June 2017 can be found here, and an update from 18 months ago can be …
Read more “HCR gender balance update, and a CeReNeM Keychange pledge”
Last June, as my first act as the newly appointed Director of CeReNeM, I made a commitment to attain a 50/50 gender balance across the composers represented on CeReNeM’s HCR record label by 2022. With the wonderful visibility of the PRS Foundation #keychange initiative over the past week or so, this seemed an appropriate moment …
Read more “CeReNeM, Gender, Diversity, Equality, and Quotas (an update)”
I was recently working on an application that centred on the Huddersfield Contemporary Records (HCR) CD label as part of my new role as Director of the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM) at Huddersfield, which I formally take on starting in August. One of the pages in the application was a list of …
Over the course of the last week or so I’ve made a fairly significant upgrade to the website to be able to better handle the purchase of scores. The new site structure streamlines purchases by integrating an e-commerce platform (the excellent and free WooCommerce WordPress plug-in, supplemented by several additional plug-ins and a bit of tweaking …
Last autumn, the filmmaker Angela Guyton approached me to make some videos about/around my work The wreck of former boundaries. In her initial proposal, she was interested in probing some of the issues around creativity, creative blockages, and some of the practicalities of ‘making’ that I’d been talking about in various settings over the last few years. We’ve …
Read more “The wreck of former boundaries — Music Video by Angela Guyton”
My current project—indeed the project that has been at the center of my compositional thinking for most of the last two years—is a piece entitled The wreck of former boundaries, a conglomerate of works—each sharing the same title—that includes a range of solo works, small chamber works, works for electronics, and a 35-minute ensemble work for …
Video documentation of my Inaugural Professorial Lecture (23 March 2015) at the University of Huddersfield has been posted on YouTube. The full text can be downloaded here. Video Abstract Rhythm in Western music—particularly in notated music—operates under two basic and fundamental principles: subdivision and proportion. Notions of speed, duration, and pulse are all dependent upon …
The premiere of The Pleats of Matter is now just under two weeks away. Diego Castro and I have been meeting regularly — generally once a week or so — for the last few months, sometimes working through small practical details, sometimes working to focus and streamline the electronics, sometimes making decisions about gear (we’ve been through …
Read more “The Pleats of Matter – two weeks to the premiere”
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working with the brilliant Chilean guitarist Diego Castro towards the premiere of my piece The Pleats of Matter, for electric guitar. The premiere is scheduled for mid-February 2015 at the Electric Spring Festival in Huddersfield, almost exactly 10 years to the day from the point at which I started …
A little over 10 years ago, I wrote a piano piece in large part because I couldn’t fathom writing a piano piece. My work at the time—and I suppose this continues to be the case—was primarily about transitional states, about instability of pitch and timbre, about sliding between various unstable points (from one ambiguous state …