Air-Edel Sessions
Thanks to an unexpected extended stay, I went straight from University College Hospital in Westmoreland St. to Air-Edel studios which is about a five minute walk away. Harry and Theo played their hearts out and all was captured expertly by Nick Taylor who was engineering.
We recorded a lot of music and I’ve started to edit and mix the recordings. Here are Nick’s notes on the mic placements and pre-amps…
…some lovely gear there!!! Air-Edel is a legendary studio and extremely well equipped with a nice calm vibe (although I’m sure things heat up when a bigger band gets in there!!!).
I didn’t realise that the building has been a recording studio since 1937! It was later used by Chapman/Chinn to record many of the glam-rock hits I grew up with like Blockbuster by Sweet and later on,‘Boogie Nights’ by Heatwave.
I’ve got a nice Dolby Atmos mix together in my home studio with the room Blumleins and omnis placed in the sound field as recorded.
I’m currently editing Elegies (and Energies) and am still amazed at how Harry managed to play it! As I was writing the piece, I was aware that it would be an incredibly difficult as it centres around hemiolas (three against two rhythms) sometimes both parts in a single hand. Harry not only managed to play it, he also turned in a terrific performance with all the feels. This will be the first of the Air-Edel Sessions to be released and will be available on 28th April along with the sheet music.
Free World Symphony
I’m making good progress with The Free World Symphony. I’ve finished the first movement ‘Narcissus’ and just need to go through it for expression and dynamic markings. It’s quite a noisy piece and nods in the direction of Holst and Walton as well as quoting myself from an earlier piece, Olympus Mons…All warlike influences.
The second movement (Resistance) begins by quoting “We shall Overcome” to the backdrop of my ‘Empathy’ motif. I’ve never quoted an existing theme before, but this was too good to miss given the subject matter. It’s a nod to Dvořak’s New World Symphony (as is the title of my piece!) with the theme featured by the Cor Anglais. There’s a very interesting article about the development of the song and its adoption as a popular, actually the ultimate protest song HERE. I’ve just started on a brooding middle section…I’m nearly ten minutes in to the whole piece, which I reckon will total 25-30 minutes.
My most recent traditionally structured pieces have had the movement structure slow/fast/slow. As I’m looking at it now, the symphony will be fast/slow/(fast/slow). I was never completely convinced by the scherzo movement in recent symphonies (apart from Walton’s which for me is the star movement of the symphony…I’d forgotten just how good it was!). A scherzo certainly wouldn’t have worked in my piece, so I decided to make it a sort of prelude to the segued finale which is titled ‘Blossom’.
No title for the prelude bit…In fact, I can only just glimpse what the end two movements are going to be like through my composer telescope. The focus needs adjusting and the lens is a bit grimy, but this’ll clear up as time goes on.
Alt-formats
A lot more music is becoming available in different formats. Books 1&2 of the original felt piano releases of the Electric Nocturnes are already available on CD and they’ll soon be joined by books 3&4 and 5&10. These may be released on vinyl too…More news soon!
The Galan Trio’s CD Embrace which consists of music by ThrEE composers (including my piece ‘In the Light of Greece’) is now released on NEUMA Records
More and more sheet music is becoming available too and all these releases, physical and online can be found via my SHOP.
Upcoming performances
6th April - Electric Nocturnes No. 38 & 44 - Peter Kiss, Piano - Budapest Music Centre, Hungary.
22nd June - A British Conga - Hastings Sinfonia - De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill, UK.
…waiting for dates for several other pieces…Exciting!!!
Health stuff
My kidneys are still recovering after repeated infections, so I have a pipe coming out of each of them to relieve pressure on the system. The resulting external plumbing is a real drag, but it’s only temporary and I’m hoping to be relieved of this soon.
Otherwise, I’m feeling triffic and doing well. There may be some more chemotherapy at some point, but I’ll know more in a couple of weeks
Stuff I like
I’ve been reading a very interesting book on ethnomusicology by Prof. John Blacking called “A common-sense view of all music”. It’s based on Percy Grainger’s undervalued contribution to the subject. It contains this quote from Grainger in 1933 which shows what a forward thinker he was…
I firmly believe that music will someday become a 'universal language'.
But it will not become so as long as our musical vision is limited to the output of 4 European countries between 1700 and 1900. The first step in the right direction is to view the music of all peoples and periods without prejudice of any kind, and to strive to put the world's known and available best music INTO CIRCULATION. Only then shall we be justified in calling music a 'universal language'.
It’s a particularly interesting read for me as my complete music for Ancient Greek Lyre has just been published and composing that music made me very interested in the field of ethnomusicology. More thoughts on this soon!
I like that Grainger quote, really interesting. x