… is a new work for
fifteen strings and 'speaker'; that is, a vocalist who speaks a text
rythmically, not a loudspeaker! It's been commissioned by the Glasgow
Philharmonic Orchestra for a performance at Òran
Mór in Glasgow on Monday 14th April as part of their
'A Concert, a Cocktail and a
Canapé' series. Here's the programme note;
'Suppose
somebody had travelled back in time and accidentally stood on a
semiquaver written by one of the Immortal Greats; might the whole
future evolution of music have been different?
So-Called ‘Natural
Selection’ is a tangent to, or a study towards,
The Other Other Hand,
an hour-long music theatre work to be premiered at the Plug festival of
new music at the RSAMD on Thursday 1 and Friday 2 May 2008. Both works
betray a fascination with the slightly worrying strands of
‘social Darwinism’ apparent in C Hubert H
Parry’s 1909
The
Evolution of the Art of Music, and the concern that many
of these supremacist notions perhaps still inform our understanding of
so-called ‘classical’ music.'