Chamber Music Plus

Chamber Music Plus website publishes a free brochure of classical music concerts in central and northern England. It's a great overview of events, festivals and music societies for 2019/20.

Momentous Quartet

The video installation of A Truly Momentous Quartet is running at Newent's Secret Gallery until the end of August. Successful live play through there on Saturday eve. at the annual Art Competition prize giving. Sound-track CD published which includes Alchemy In Music.

What Music Might Be

The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre.

Or:
Vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.


Or:
The hidden arithmetical exercise of a soul unconscious that it is calculating Leibniz (a contemporary of J.S. Bach)

What Is Music? Where does the border between music and sound lie? Is there something other worldly or mystical about music? Can music create altered states of perception, or the possibility of experiencing these? How is music the language of us all? What is music’s place in a rational, scientific culture? What is the value of music?

All these questions deserve some updated answers...
John Cage thought that any sound can be music: He said that,'There is no noise, only sound' in an attempt to make us aware of the musical possibilities contained in the sounds and acoustic spaces that surround us all day long.

Message to Myself

The process of composing music, for me, is a game. Given one or two seed ideas, it then becomes a matter of copying and pasting, starting with something quite simple and then using this to build a piece that has enough twists and turns to become musically interesting and satisfying. It's a minimalist approach as the fragments that I copy and paste become repetitive and layered, perhaps distributed among the different instrument parts in overlapping ways. The game is to make it work as a whole. Even the most simple musical fragment can quickly become uncontrollably complex so, I suppose, the craft is in maintaining the simplicity while adding in the interest.

The history of modern art, from impressionism to contemporary abstractions, is particularly useful for inventing associations with musical ideas. The closest I can get to relating my copy-and-paste method with a visual form is that of the cut-out-and-pasted pictures made by Henri Matisse in his later years. His quite crude juxtapositions of colours and shapes, collaged together are often abstract, sometimes more figurative, sometimes somewhere in between.  Whatever, they are all expressions of an inner artistic force or experience.

I like having a title first.  That seed brings forth musical expression; sucks inner experience into the outside world to become the building blocks dropped into my computer software.  I had always thought of this particular composition process as simple and naive in a childish way - a child could have done it.  But I value composing like this as something not to move on from having learned how to do it, but on which to focus more, to value and to hone.  It makes inventing or purloining titles, then composing, a pleasure; not a chore. All I am doing is playing the game.

If you'd like to listen to one or two samples: billanderton.uk/compositions.html