Passed the Last River (2006) - 12 minutes

Commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society for Michael Collins and the Dante Quartet

for clarinet quintet

Passed the Last River (2006) - excerpt

Commissioned by Arraymusic as part of the 2005 Young Composers Workshop
for bass clarinet, vibraphone, piano and double bass

The Evening-Being Device (2005)- excerpt

6 minutes
Commissioned by the London Sinfonietta
for flute and electronics

Wintermute was commissioned by the London Sinfonietta and first performed by David Cuthbert and Sound Intermedia at the BFI Southbank. The title comes from William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. In the book, Wintermute is a vastly powerful artificial intelligence who orchestrates a heist designed to increase his capabilities beyond the restrictions of the government-enforced “Turing Law Code”.

Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina, but left the United States in 1968, one of the tens of thousands of draft dodgers who fled to Canada to avoid military service in Vietnam. This led to the dialogue of Neuromancer’s futuristic underworld drawing heavily on what Gibson calls “1969 Toronto dope dealer's slang, or biker talk”. This piece uses an early, out-of-print audiobook of Neuromancer as the sole sound source for the electronic sounds. As the piece progresses, snippets of this underworld dialogue—in Gibson’s own voice—can gradually be heard seeping through the texture of the piece.

This piece is about the compression of vast amounts of information. It’s about cataloging, indexing, sorting, resorting and organising: an innocuous spreadsheet in a cyberpunk bureaucracy.

Wintermute (2014) - excerpt

Written for the BBC Symphony Orchestra as part of the BBCSO/Sound and Music Workshop

for orchestra [3(III=picc).3.3(III=bcl).3(III=cbsn) - 4.3.3.1 - perc(3) - harp - strings]

6 minutes

Aerial Courser (2009) - excerpt

for cello, double bass and four keyboard samplers

Aurora Orchestra, Nicholas Collon (cond.)

Available on 'Objects at an Exhibition' http://www.nmcrec.co.uk/recording/objects-exhibition

Supermarine (2015) - excerpt

Performed by Standing Wave

Premiered in March 1912, Reinhold Glière’s Symphony 3 in B minor is a work of mammoth proportions. Depicting the epic tale of Kievan Rus’ folk hero Ilya Muromets, the symphony lasts upwards of eighty minutes and is scored for a large orchestra including quadruple winds and eight horns. 

Oh Come Now! There is a Beautiful Place! is an arrangement of Glière’s symphony on a relatively miniature scale. The title is drawn from a painted poem by Kenneth Patchen which reads in its entirety “Oh Come Now! There is a Beautiful Place! What do you think we’re all looking out of”.

Oh Come Now! There is a Beautiful Place! was commissioned by Standing Wave as part of their 20c Remix project.

Oh Come Now! There Is A Beautiful Place!

For Flute(=picc.), Clarinet, Percussion, Piano, Violin, Cello, and five-channel playback
Performed by Arraymusic

I. Prologue (Silence, errance)
II. A Thin Layer of a Hard Shadow
III. That Particular Gaze
IV. Stide Stroll Roam Patrol
V. Sounds Difficult to Repeat
VI. Un mauvais présage, une mauvaise augure
VII. Purgatory
VIII. Parallel to the Picture Plane
IX. Epilogue (Come Back, Stay Longer)

John Max (1936-2011) was a Canadian photographer from Montreal best known for his 1972 exhibition Open Passport.

His work, celebrated at the time, has been somewhat forgotten, perhaps as a result of Max’s reluctance in later life to develop his film or to show new work. Some of his close friends estimated that at the time of his death he had upwards of 2000 rolls of undeveloped film, others suggested that for several years he had been taking photographs without any film in his camera.

To Discard All Images presents new recordings of forty-six Canadian photographers each describing one image from Open Passport.  Many of these recordings are of close personal friends of Max, but just as many are of photographers who were not previously aware of his work.

The title is taken from a poem by Max which he wrote as an epigraph for Open Passport:

To discard all images
Leaving their impressions behind
Of burning hearts
And tortured souls
And soft silent tears

Smouldering . . . 

Without name
Without country
Without passport . . . . . . 

To Discard All Images features the voices of Raymonde April, Benoit Aquin, Robert Bean, Sylvia Grace Borda, Dianne Bos, Jim Breukelman, Annie Briard, Chris Buck, Robert Burley, Michel Campeau, Bertrand Carrière, Serge Clément, Burt Covit, Marlene Creates, Donigan Cumming, Sally Davies, William Eakin & Lulu Akhanamoya, David Evans, Evergon, Fausta Facciponte, Michael Flomen, Will Gill, Elisa Julia Gilmour, Rafael Goldchain, Terence Gower, Angela Grauerholz, Naomi Harris, Joseph Hartman, April Hickox, Clive Holden, Joshua Jensen-Nagle, Ruth Kaplan, Shelagh Keeley, Rita Leistner, Laura Letinsky, John Lucas, Shelley Niro, Deanna Pizzitelli, Normand Rajotte, Guillaume Simoneau, Edward Singer, Shin Sugino, Althea Thauberger, Christopher Wahl, Robert Walker and Carl Zimmerman.

To Discard All Images

Townes Van Zandt was one of country music’s most legendary songwriters, a recipient of near-universal acclaim throughout his 30 year career. Steve Earle once called Van Zandt “the best songwriter in the whole world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” Despite his critical success, his career was marred by substance abuse and poor business decisions and for much of the 1970s he lived outside of Nashville in a tin-roofed, bare-boards shack with no heat, plumbing or telephone. He suffered from alcohol and heroin addiction, his friends observing that when he ran out of heroin, he would inject cocaine, vodka, or rum and Coke intravenously.

His descent into poverty and destitution seems all the more extreme when viewed in contrast to his comfortable, wealthy upbringing. Van Zandt was born into an eminent Texan family of oil executives, lawyers, and politicians. In 1963, while Townes was studying at the University of Colorado at Boulder, his family became increasingly concerned by his erratic behaviour and they had him committed to a mental hospital where he was subjected to insulin shock treatment.

“When Van Zandt was discharged from a Galveston,Texas hospital after three months of the treatment, huge holes in his memory had blossomed. Prior to the treatments, the promising college student had been groomed by his wealthy parents to become a lawyer or perhaps even a politician. For the rest of his life, he wound up wandering the country, living in shacks, abusing drugs and booze—and penning some of the greatest folk and country songs of all time.”

Jason Heller, “How Townes Van Zandt’s “Lungs” veers from Platonic epistemology to magic realism”, avclub

Walk the Darkness Down is a sort of vague, hazy tribute to Townes Van Zandt. Each of the open-string guitars is tuned to the spectral average of one of the ten songs from Van Zandt’s self-titled 1969 album; the spectral average determines the most prominent frequencies averaged over the whole length of the song. The result is a microtonal cloud of pitches which is redolent of Van Zandt’s music without ever referencing it directly. Walk the Darkness Down was written with the support of the City of Toronto through Toronto Arts Council.

Walk The Darkness Down

Performed by Standing Wave

They Sing and They Clap and They Shout 
2019 | 12'

Commissioned by Standing Wave
for alto flute, bass clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, violoncello, and electronics

"They Sing and They Clap and They Shout" is based on the songs of Swedish-American labour activist Joe Hill (1879-1915). Hill was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, an international labour union founded on principles of “revolutionary industrial unionism”, and he contributed numerous protest songs to their “Little Red Songbook”. In 1915, Hill was executed for murder in Salt Lake City after a lengthy and widely-publicized trial. The IWW—and many subsequent historians—have maintained that Hill was framed, and he has since been held up as a martyr for the labour movement. After his execution by firing squad, his ashes were divided into 600 packets and sent to various branches of the IWW and their allies. The ashes were marked with the epitaph: “Joe Hill murdered by the capitalist class, Nov. 19, 1915”. 

"They Sing and They Clap and They Shout" incorporates many of Joe Hill’s songs, or, more specifically, many performances of his songs. The piece is peppered with transcriptions of tiny fragments from performances by Joe Glazer, Cisco Houston, Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock, Pete Seeger, Earl Robinson, Barbara Dane and, particularly, Swedish folk singer Finn Zetterholm (drawn from his 1969 album "Joe Hill på svenska"). 

Joe Hill travelled across America lending his voice and his songs to IWW strikes and protests. In 1912 he travelled to British Columbia where he joined the Fraser River railway strikes and composed several new songs specifically for the striking workers. These included “Where the Fraser River Flows” based on the then-popular tune “Where The River Shannon Flows” by James I. Russell. They Sing and They Clap and They Shout incorporates a recording of “Where the Fraser River Flows” by the great American folk singer and activist Utah Phillips, used here with the generous permission of his estate.

"They Sing and They Clap and They Shout" takes its title from Joe Hill’s most famous song “The Preacher and the Slave” in which he coined the phrase “pie in the sky”:

Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right
But when asked how 'bout something to eat 
They will answer in voices so sweet

You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay 
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

"They Sing and They Clap and They Shout" was commissioned by Standing Wave.

They Sing and They Clap and They Shout

The Lesson of the Ice-House (2012) — 4 minutes
Commissioned by the Manchester Camerata and Sound and Music
as part of Sound and Music 'Embedded'
Performed by Hannah Roberts and the Manchester Camerata
for cello and drone

Christopher Mayo

Pinned to spotlight

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