The sound of two violins, half buried on Howick beach, Northumberland, played by allowing fine trickles of dry sand to fall over the strings. Part of the "Recorded Landscapes" project led by Sabine Vogel which premiered in Potsdam October 2019. These sounds were diffused through the audience using discretely positioned vibration speakers playing through violins positioned within the audience space.

violins played with sand . . .

Music to accompany large silk-screen prints by Mike Collier - one of which is included here, but bear in mind they're a metre square and LUMINOUS colours! - first exhibited at Cheeseburn Grange Sculpture Garden, Northumberland in August and September 2017, and then at Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Platform A Gallery Middlesbrough, Drawing Projects UK in Trowbridge, and at the Listen! Festival at Black Swan Arts in Frome. The prints and the music are both responses to digital visualisations of birdsongs from the dawn chorus at Cheeseburn. More details available on the various sites where the work is documented. The title is taken from "All these things are mine" by Edward Thomas, c. 1911, and refers to the singing of a blackcap . . . which is not one of the birds in the project, but it's a lovely quote.

. . . singing every minute high up in golden-green blossom . . .

Three movements played without a break, part of a collaboration with Mike Collier, Geoff Sample, and Alex Charrington, this is music for a set of 14 prints made by Mike and Alex, based on sonograms by Geoff. I have written this solo piano piece based on melodies derived from Geoff's sonograms of individual birdsongs. Rather than imitating the song of the birds, I have "translated" Geoff's visualisations (sonograms)into medieval neumatic notation, which the sonograms themselves resemble, and then translated the medieval into modern notations, and then composed freely with this material. The first section is based on transcriptions of redstarts, the first to sing in a typical dawn chorus, then a flourish leads into the main dawn chorus - blackbirds and robins, joined by wren, chaffinch, and dunnock, finally a tranquil evening chorus dominated by wood pigeons. The title, as has become normal for these collaborations with Mike Collier, is from a poem by Edward Thomas. The image is the third of Mike's images from the sequence of fourteen. Mike's exhibition of prints with my music has been seen (and heard) at National Drawing Centre, (Trowbridge, Wilts), Platform A Gallery, (Middlesboro), Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Black Swan Arts, (Frome), and Cheeseburn Grange, (Northumberland). 

The pianist here is Kate Williams.

Here's a link to Mike's artist website.
http://mikecollier.eu/
Connected to this project is a co-edited book by Mike and myself with John Strachan called "Songs of Time and Place: Birdsong and the Dawn Chorus in Natural History and the Arts", published by Gaia Project Press in collaboration with Art Editions North and Bath Spa University. ISBN: 978-0-9932192-9-0.

Out Of The Wood Of Thought That Grows By Night . . .

mix of two improvisations done with two violins held underwater in fast flowing river so that the different currents "bow" the strings. It's very much an interactive experience improvising with the river itself. The river is the Devil's Water in Northumberland, a tributary of the River Tyne between Corbridge and Dilston. this is the first experiment in a long-term environmental sound-art project.

Devil's Water 1

This is the first movement - a toccata - and the related second movement of a set of 10 etudes for piano which (mostly) explore a single basic interval. The Toccata, though, uses gestures consisting of expanding patterns of intervals as a way of opening the cycle - second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh in rapidly expanding "arpeggio" figures, like laying out the basic materials the rest of the pieces are based on.

Piano Etudes 2018 - 1. Toccata and 2. Etude on Thirds

This is a slow waltz from the cycle of Piano Etudes where most of the material is based on the intervals of a fourth or a fifth. It has a deliberately "nostalgic" feel, which contrasts with the more mid-century-modernist atmosphere of the rest of the cycle - a point of repose, as it were. Overall, this is project about me exploring those aspects of the western art music tradition that for one reason or another I neglected earlier in my creative life, before the 20 years silence in terms of written compositions between 1996 and 2016.

Waltz Lent - etude on fourths and fifths

A slow build based on a very simple "ground" of major and minor seconds. This is the central piece in the cycle of Piano Etudes, based as it is on the smallest of intervals available on the piano. The opening toccata and the finale both use the full range of available intervals, so this, despite its rather aggressive moments, stands as the minimal point at the centre of the cycle in terms of its actual intervallic content - a sort of focussing in on things.

Piano Etudes - "Divisions on a Ground" - Major And Minor Seconds

Three movements for piano trio, following the traditional fast-slow-fast model. I've tried to consciously engage with the gestural world of a kind of early Romanticism - Beethoven, Schumann - but with modal rather than tonal attitude to the notes, and with little bursts of something more jazz like - or, at times, folky. The title comes from the idea of re-wilding, which is a very contemporary idea, but also pays homage to the early Romantics' love of wildness and wilderness, and the Sublime.

(re)wilding - three movements for piano trio

Mostly consisting of hydrophone recordings made at Fontburn Reservoire in Northumberland, this piece was made to accompany an exhibition of Louise Plant's stone sculptures (see image) based upon the eddies and vortices made in water by rowing. I was struck by the bright, almost glassy quality of the hydrophone recordings, and so have also done some convolution filtering with samples of crystal wineglasses. The piece is quiet and contemplative, playing with the idea that elements can transform into one another. Just as Louise has transformed forms observed in water into stone, I've tried to find a solid resonance to the sound of water. Louise's exhibition runs 224th-26th August, then again 31st Aug to 1st Sept at Cheeseburn Grange Sculpture Gardens, near Stamfordham, Northumberland.

water into stone

The sounds of the Northumbrian landscape at Cheeseburn Grange, near Stamfordham, recorded from inside of one of Yafeng Qi's huge steel scelptures that were shown in the grounds of Cheeseburn in 2018. The low frequencies are the sound of the wind blowing the sculpture like a giant (5m long!) flute. Into this resonant soundworld drifts the sound of a Northumbrian folk tune, "Bonny at Morn", played on fiddle. The fiddle and field recordings have also been convolution filtered onto one another. This is the soundtrack to a video by Merrie Snell, using footage of the landscape reflected in the distorting surfaces of the sculpture, and so together sound and image evoke the presence of these pieces which are no longer there, having returned to China earlier in 2019. The image is of the sculpture "In Each Phase No. 1", the piece that acts as a giant flute in the soundtrack, and through which pine cones can be heard tumbling at strategic points in the music.

reflected absence

a new composition using a combination of aeolian field recordings mixed with edited gestures from an improvisation done using the same aeolian string structure that the field recordings were made from - if that makes sense. This means that there are strong pitch connections between the aeolian and the more gestural sounds. Most of the gestures were made by "bowing" the strings with long twigs and thin branches, causing erratic details (juddering and twanging) but coherent longer-term gestures. 

Aerial Elementals II

The title is from The Tempest when Ceres blesses Ferdinand and Miranda - i have always found this line joyfully moving - the latest that Spring should come, for the two lovers, would be at the end of harvest, in other words that there should be, for them, no winter.

Spring come to you, at the farthest, in the very end of harvest

an improvisation between me and Stefan Ostersjo on a giant "tree-guitar" in the woods outside of Morpeth - a very slow start, listening to the distant sounds gradually coming into focus. An old guitar is wedged into the branch of a tree, and then fishing line strings stretched from the tuning heads about fifteen to twenty feet, around the trunk of a nearby oak tree. I am mostly playing the long strings with a stem of dry nettle (the brittle stinging hairs, when dry, act rather like horsehair), and Stefan is playing the strings as they pass over the guitar neck. A hazel branch serves as a mobile bridge/whammy bar. I should also say that we are also improvising with the environment itself, being influenced by external sounds, which at two points in the music include the delicate percussion of icy pellets of snow falling on the guitar body, and (if you listen closely) the strings too. These moments really capture the exquisite stillness when the poise of the environmental sounds - the wind and the snow - seem to offer us the gift of holding back the flow of time for a few moments.  

Bennett Hogg and Stefan Ostersjo - a gift of wind and snow

Three different spaces - inside a viola, an intentionally malfunctioning recording studio, and the Stockholm underground system.

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