There are five days left to listen to my and Matthew Welton’s new piece Crow rotations on the BBC Radio 3 New Music Show website. This is a 30 minute song cycle of eight songs written for singer Juliet Fraser and the recently streamlined House of Bedlam lineup of Kathryn Williams (flutes), Carl Raven (alto saxophone), Stephanie Tress (cello), and I’m providing the electronics.
Here’s a programme note:
This piece has come about through a pretty organic process of around 18 months of conversation. We’re both massively interested in questions of form, structure and repetition, and this time the discussion moved between musical and poetic form including canons and rounds to scientific and philosophical ideas around the forms things take, how we differentiate between things, and how we might think of many of the processes of life as forms of rotation. – Matthew Welton
I am always affected, when reading Matthew’s work, by the tension between sumptuous sounds, images, and combinations of words, and their formal severity and organisation. We devised a formal approach in which the music gradually gathers variety as the text becomes more and more sparse. Starting with a collection of sixty especially made different electronic drones, inspired by patters in the diagrams of chemical compounds, I’ve sought out ‘organic’ consonances organised in strict repetitions and rotations. — Larry Goves
You can find the piece here. It starts 1 hour and 22 minutes in:
Larry Goves 