David died on the 6th November 2020 aged 94 Shiki said that in order to write a haiku a good mental discipline to follow was to look down at the violet at your feet and then look up at the distant mountain. David’s version of this might have been to take infinite care of a […]
Music is a pump for inflating the soul: hypertrophic souls turned into huge balloons rise to the ceiling of the concert hall and jostle each other in unbelievable congestion… (Milan Kundera: Immortality) ✺ In Plaguetime I greatly miss playing the recorders with CoMA Firewire in Colchester; I have composed some music in the mean time […]
I sent a good friend a copy of my Room Twelve. He thanked me for it and said, ‘I already dipped in – and it is as WONDERFUL as all the others…’ He asked, ‘How do you do it?’ while suggesting that it was a silly, unworthy and unanswerable question… HOW DO I DO IT? […]
I spent the weekend of 7th-9th December 2018 at Benslow Music, Hitchin, Hertfordshire for what, over the last few years, has turned out for me to be an annual Tooveyisation or Hug-in with Andrew Toovey, or, what I signed up for, ‘Composing with Andrew Toovey’. Each year, amongst other things, ‘homework’ consists of being […]
In July 2018 I was given the task of reviewing Cor van den Heuvel’s Selected Haiku. He is regarded as a significant figure in haiku circles. In his Afterword I learned that he was much influenced by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s work which propelled me into re-reading the novels with this in mind starting with Jealousy. This […]
THE CHALLENGE OF THE NEW Recently I’ve been thinking about the challenge of the New. In particular, the challenge to the ears contrived by anybody composing ardent real New Music. I am involved with groups who seek to play, or have played, what might be called ‘modern classical music’ in public places. While they are […]
Preamble For twelve years I’ve been privileged to be a member of a Music Group in Colchester, Essex, UK called ‘Firewire’ under the auspices of CoMA (Contemporary Music for All). We play members’ own formally composed music – all sorts – and spend a lot of time freely improvising. When a new member who is […]
I’m used to quoting HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU THINK TILL YOU SEE WHAT YOU WRITE? Variously attributed to EMForster and WHAuden. It rings true for many people. It’s probably also worth asking HOW DO I KNOW WHAT I DO WITH MY LIFE TILL I SEE WHAT I WRITE ABOUT IT? It’s useful to […]
I was looking at an obscure piece of writing about music the other day: the first few pages of an Introduction to The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works by Lydia Goehr (1992). Her argument, which is apparently still all the rage in some circles, goes something like this: we treat pieces of music as artefacts […]
I’m looking foward to going to the COMA Summer School in August 2015 to enjoy a week of music-making and listenings as I have done since 2006. When I joined COMA it was an acronym for Contemporary Music for Amateurs (which is what I am) – the name has been changed to Contemporary Music for […]
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