Postcards from Write-Up Land

The violin part for Landscape, written for The Keeling Curve

Well, a whirlwind few years have passed since my one previous blog post! Circadian, as mentioned in the previous post, blew my compositional world wide open, and I have thoroughly embraced the world of performer freedoms and graphic scores. I’ve written pieces with different scores for each part that interact with each other’s freedoms to form the structure of the piece, I’ve written graphic parts for orchestra with loose game mechanics, I’ve even recently finished a graphic score four seasons (From Ancient Rocks).

This blog post finds us all thirteen months into a pandemic, which threw many well-laid plans out of the window. For this post though, I am going to be looking at the positives that have come of this rough patch. Firstly, it came after I had finished most of the composing required for the completion of my PhD, and in the last six months I have been transitioning into writing up about it all. Secondly, shortly before lockdown hit I wrote my first text score, Breathing, after attending a CoMA Glasgow event, and it saw performance about two weeks before we locked down. The relationship I developed with CoMA Glasgow turned from good to incredible as the ensemble proceeded to develop online projects, and I am now on their committee and handling social media responsibilities with them. Plus the online projects reach so far beyond Glasgow, with attendees from Belarus to Brazil!

One of these projects involved sending postcard pieces to other members of the group. I have meant to attempt writing a postcard piece (or several) ever since I was sent one by composer James Whittle some years back now, but never got around to it. The moment CoMA mentioned them, I started and caught the bug.

The moment I had written Trajectories, which was mailed to Germany, I put out a call for any friends who would like to receive a postcard piece. I got an excellent response from friends and acquaintances, and have completed postcard pieces for voice, violin & electronics, trumpet… I even turned the final movement of my four seasons into three postcards that form a complete piece together!

I’ve loved this for a number of reasons. Firstly, in the current time of isolation and lockdown has felt very powerful to send something physical in the post, something hand-drawn from one person to another. For that thing to be a postcard, something normally sent from holiday destinations and exciting places, at a time when we are largely grounded in our local areas is particularly poignant. It is also an excellent compositional challenge, to create a piece and put a musical idea across in such a small space. It demands inventiveness and efficiency. Finally, and from a particularly practical perspective, it is also a small and personal project. A postcard piece as a musical thought sent to a person feels more free and ephemeral than a larger scale piece, which is created with the intention that it will be on the list of Things That I Have Done. Ideal for a small creative project at a time when I want to create but also need to focus primarily on sitting down and writing!

I’m only about halfway through the list of postcards that I mean to write and send off to people, but if you reading this would like to be sent one, get in touch!

First post & Composers Plus

Right. It is time.

I created this blog page some time ago with every intention of keeping and up to date blog and naturally completely failed to actually be proactive about using and updating it, so this is now long overdue.

This post catches me at a good time! I have just been passed for continuation of the probationary period of my PhD, I just moved flat into a room with far more desk space, which can be used as a better working area, I'm at the European Art-Science-Technology Network Festival of Digital Creativity here at the University of Manchester, and I just got back from an amazing trip to Lithuania to attend the International Composers+ Summer Academy.

Big couple of weeks.

I'm mostly going to talk about Lithuania here though. The International Composers+ Summer Academy lasted from the 15th to the 24th of June in Druskininkai, Lithuania. It's a course set up to foster the creation of new work for accordion, which it achieves by gathering together a group of composers, a group of accordionists, and some other instrumentalists then making them collaborate. Us composers had about a week in which to compose two pieces of music (one for solo accordion and one for accordion and string quartet) and prepare the scores to a publishable standard. The instrumentalists, meanwhile, have to prepare these pieces to a performable standard for a concert and recording at the end of the event. Cue a lot of discussion. Us composers are assigned accordionists to play our pieces. They work with us, discussing what their instruments can and can't do or how we might notate certain techniques, and this gives them a sneak preview of what they can expect when they are met with a complete piece to learn.

The level of collaboration was incredible. The situation any composer longs for is to have time working with a group of instrumentalists who love new music and want new, exciting, and challenging ideas and who manage to engage with the music on the level of the composer. These experiences can be rare. I felt it when working with Distractfold ensemble early this year for my piece Interference and I felt it again at Composers+ but for an entire week. I feel it shows as well. The performance and recording sessions at the end of the week were easily among the best playings of my work I have ever had, with musicians mostly within a few years of my own age. It was truly exciting and I am so happy to call so many talented people my new friends. I worked more intensely than I have ever done before, and there is nothing that I would rather have been doing with my last two weeks.

And I guess with that brings the announcement that my new pieces, Circadian for Solo Accordion and Tide for Accordion with String Quartet will be officially published as part of a full catalogue of new works for Accordion that you can actually buy. This is an exciting first for me as a composer, as previously all scores of my music are self-published. I'll be sure to update here with more details in time! There will also be recordings which will appear in due course. Big thanks go to Rūta Vitkauskaitė, Daniel Nelson, Micołaj Majkusiak, and Martynas Levickis for the opportunity, their input, and some excellent discussions bringing food for thought regarding both music and career. Another special mention of Sinisa Ljubojevic, my solo accordionist who took a graphic score in stride, had patience while I finalised the details of the work and brought my piece to life brilliantly.

Now it's back to the day to day life of the PhD student, narrowing down my research questions, chipping away at larger projects, and, it would seem, attending seminars and other interesting research events! No regrets, and I hope to be back here with some announcements and updates before too long!

Simon