We are living in heightened days sensitive to the unearthing of hidden soundscapes and yet, we have been flattened by the darkly, dreariness of our foreshortened horizons.   ‘Seeking a Steady State and Singing’ springs entirely from the intensification of place and space that has surfaced as we navigate our lives through a year of multiple lockdowns. Through the musical interrogation of 'scaffolding' and 'swerving sounds' that echo across the year I have sought to compose music that reflects these times.  As I composed this piece in the early months of 2021 the poetry of  Alice Oswald  and her anthology Woods Etc. was near and this is where my title is taken:  ‘…and the mind whispering in its shell, and all trees with their ears to the air, seeking a steady state and singing it over till it settles’.

Seeking a Steady State and Singing

NB. Listen with headphones.
Archival recordings of Coventry voices and the sounds of Coventry today in a binaural soundscape: a montage of past and  present that is interlinked, juxtaposed and deconstructed to uncover  narratives and resonances in the immediacy of the moment.  
Voice Recordings reproduced by kind permission of Culture Coventry Trust, Coventry Archives.

Now & Then (binaural)

Soft, growing rain wraps around the resonate reeds of the bass clarinet to evoke and create new musical landscapes.  The incredibly diverse and imaginative sounds created by Sarah Watts on her instrument makes for a rich field to pick, dig and build from. Her technical prowess and musicality are the source of all the sounds heard and these sounds are transformed and overlaid using various digital tools and environments. Ultimately, the work is a journey to and from the contemplative quality of falling rain.  The gift of rain is the gift of life.

Gift Of Rain

The work is conceived as an unfolding of trace material that marks its original source: soundings made on an upright piano.  This is my piano. The piano that has been by my side as a tool for composition but never, until now, the actual source of my composition.  A pocketful of playful recordings from the soundboard, piano keys, pedals and strings are the sonic roots.  Throughout, and within the transformations and messing-up of the source sounds, there lies an inherent trace, a timbral DNA,  a semblance of sonic integrity that is the ephemeral body of Piano Trace.

Two, musically-explicit threads knit and weave the interlinked composition’s halves. They are the cords, the ropes, that ultimately suspend the concentrated and shifting gestures and its interruptions.

Piano Trace

'A Shadow that Falls' (2019) for unpitched percussion and fixed media.
Percussionist: Thierry Miroglio. Recorded Coventry University 2023.

‘I’m going to Flicker for a moment
And tell you the tale of a shadow
That falls at dusk…’   (taken from a poem by Alice Oswald)

‘A Shadow that Falls’ was composed for the French percussionist Thierry Miroglio and is for unpitched percussion and electroacoustic fixed media. The fixed media is composed from sample recordings of Miroglio playing. There is no conventional written score for the performer, instead there is a ‘listening score’.  The percussionist improvises to the fixed media, stereo track that accompanies the player and to the listening score that only they hear on a third, private track.  To shape and inspire their performance the percussionist hears lines and words taken from the poem ‘Shadow’ (2015) by the English contemporary poet Alice Oswald. There is a sense of revealing and unfolding, of emptiness, of mindfulness in the performance.  The work requires no music stand and, where possible, asks for special low lighting to generate silhouettes (shadows) around the performer.

A Shadow That Falls

‘Like the Sea Itself’ is a musical meditation on the elemental nature of the sea. The work developed in close collaboration with New York cellist Madeleine Shapiro and it is influenced by Alice Oswald’s poetry on the nature of water. As Oswald writes, ‘how does it start the sea has endless beginnings’, while her Sea Poem begins, “What is water in the eyes of water” and continues, “loose inquisitive fragile anxious”.
The composition was composed over the autumn of 2024 and is composed of two elements: recordings the composer made of the North Sea on the Suffolk coast, and recordings of Shapiro improvising to these sea recordings in her apartment in Manhattan, New York. The fixed media is shaped and assembled on the energy and turbulence of both the cello recordings and the sea itself. The predominant digital tool in the composition process was the Kyma APU.
‘Like the Sea Itself’ can exist as a fixed media sound composition (as here) or as a live free improvisation on the cello to the fixed media sound composition.
Photo image with permission from Teresa Williams. Title: 'Melite, Nereid' - daughter of the old man of the sea.  The original is in private collection. https://www.instagram.com/p/C4vs7zcIiGf/

Like the Sea Itself

This piece is made from the recordings of a single evening of summertime seaside life in a small holiday town on the eastern edge of England.  It is conceived as an audio tableau that explores and sonically exploits new meanings, new resonances, uncovering a musical discourse that suggests other narratives.

tnwilliams

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