A Round-up of my 2024

I've been doing quarterly and, more recently, monthly updates on the blog here all year (sadly not much else), so this will be something of a round-up of roundups; as a result, I'll try to keep it light and refer to the previous posts where necessary.

AFNFH - welcome to DGMFS!

Now I normally concentrate mostly on music and general art stuff in these round-ups, but I have to begin with something else. The highlight of what has been, on several fronts, a frankly difficult year, was that Sarah and I became grandparents, welcoming one (ahem) Albert Frank Nikky Ferrier Hopkins to the world. Congratulations to Molly and Joe for bringing a real ray of light into all our lives!

OK, on to more usual matters. It was the busiest year so far for the Brighton Guitar Quartet, with shows at St Laurence Falmer, St Peter's West Blatchington, Christ Church Worthing, Hove Library and the Chapel Royal in Brighton. We also did quite a few "private" shows, including, a couple of the excellent "Platform" shows organised by Jon Rattenbury,  at Ellis Gordon Court in Newhaven (commemorating Housing 21's 60th birthday), at the Springboard competition in Hove (adjudicated by Richard Durrant), and at the annual bash at Bom-Banes in Kemptown organised by my teacher Gregg Isaacson for all his students and student groups. For the season we introduced a whole bunch of new material, including Phillip Houghton's very challenging "Opals" suite, pieces by Turina, Mussorgsky and Boccherini, and two of my own arrangements (of Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze" and, er, John Barry's "You Only Live Twice").

BGQ at the Chapel Royal, Brighton in October

We're working on new material for this year, and already have shows lined up in Falmer and Worthing, with more to be announced - keep an eye on the website for details. As ever, my thanks to Ruairi Gann, James Hartt and Olivier Thereaux for their great company and hard work, and to Gregg for his endless patience and guidance. Here's a recording of our concert in Worthing in June:

I've also been playing, somewhat more informally, in a great little classical guitar trio with Paul Dallaway and Shaun Bullard (whom I met at the Greenwich Guitar Festival a couple of years back), performing Roland Dyens' quite lovely "O Trio Magico" on a couple of occasions. Oh, and Shaun and I have put in a couple of performances of "The Aleph", a slightly warped take on a lullaby, written to celebrate Albert's birth (here's a MIDI version of the piece - I'm hoping to record it with Shaun at some point this year):

I've only attended one festival/workshop this year, the hugely enjoyable third instalment of Guitars by the Sea, organised by Jon Rattenbury and Steve Gordon. This year featured Mark Eden of the fantastic Eden Stell Duo as guest workshop leader and a Saturday evening concert by the brilliant young guitarist Kianush Robeson.

October marked the 10th anniversary of my taking up classical guitar and starting lessons with Gregg at the tender age of 47. If memory serves, I had a couple of reasons for taking it up. I was, frankly, embarrassed at my almost total inability to read music, despite having played guitar on and off since my early teens (and, yes, despite being awarded a diploma in jazz from the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles way back in 1987). I was also acutely aware of not being able to play solo, and not really having any repertoire to play "on demand". I had no idea where it would lead all those years back (and certainly not to a Master's degree!), but it's been the ride of my life - not without its challenges and disappointments, but rewarding at a very deep level. My deepest thanks to Gregg for being without doubt the best teacher I've had in any discipline: patient, yes, and endlessly insightful, but always demanding, a combination that's been perfect for me.

In general, for reasons discussed here, I've taken a break from solo performance over the last year, concentrating instead on ensemble playing and composition (of which more below), but I'm hoping to return to it more seriously in 2025, and am already at work on Takemitsu's "Rosedale" (because of course I am). In the meantime, I'm gradually recording all of the pieces I've learned over the decade and I'm posting them on SoundCloud.

I took up "formal" musical composition even later than I took up classical guitar, really picking it up while studying for my Master's at Surrey in 2021/2. This year I've really got stuck in with a vengeance, not least spurred on by several opportunities to submit pieces for performances at various New Music Brighton concerts. Pieces this year include: two classical guitar sextets, "The Honeycomb Conjecture" and "The Level at Midnight"; two solo piano pieces, "Johnson & Johnson" (premiered by the brilliant Karen Kingsley at the Friends Meeting House in Brighton in October) and "A Prayer, Lightly Offered"; and the aforementioned guitar duo "The Aleph"; "The Pillars of Hercules", an electric guitar duet (which Paul D and I premiered, also at the FHM back the spring). I also began work on a set of solo guitar studies, which I'm calling "Picotudes", inspired by Reginald Smith Brindle's "Guitarcosmos" series. And finally, I've been continuing to transcribe pieces for the BGQ, recently arranging Handel's beautiful aria "Streams of Pleasure Ever Flowing" and, rather more differently (mentioned earlier), Barry's "You Only Live Twice". You can see score videos of all these pieces on my YouTube channel, but here's the most recent I've posted, the sextet "The Level at Midnight"; it was originally written for an NMB concert given by Jon Rattenbury's Brighton Guitar Group in the summer, and I've finally got around to recording it myself:

On the subject of New Music Brighton, in November I was appointed its chair, taking over from Guy Richardson, who's steered the organisation brilliantly for the last nine years - big shoes to fill! (I also seem to find myself increasingly involved with the Lewes-based string orchestra Musicians of All Saints - not sure how this keeps happening, but there you go). In the meantime, despite diving into "proper" composition quite so deeply, I'm still swimming in the same electro-acoustic waters, albeit less frequently. In the spring I finally got around to finishing "Ghosts of the Kemptown Branch Line", with which I resurrected my Abyssal Labs project, which I began work on in Annecy in 2023 (yes, I know, not a fast worker... ) The piece is still awaiting mastering and a formal "launch" on my Bandcamp page, but here it is in its pre-mastered form:

And over Christmas, I began work on a new Abyssal Labs piece, "An Unanswered Prayer". The piece is something of an experiment, trying to bridge the gap between how I've been making music since 2011 with my more recent "formal" practice, and takes a single piece of midi from a passage in (the aforementioned) "A Prayer, Lightly Offered" as its sole material. Although I worked in Logic to produce some of the atmospheres, both this and "Ghosts" before it were built in Ableton Live, which I'm now pretty much sold on it as a composition/production tool. Thanks to Frank (more of him anon) for AL tech support and advice! Although the piece is only in sketch form at the moment, in the spirit of presenting work in progress, here it is:

For a host of reasons, I haven't made it along to much live music this year, at least not by my standards. I did have a complete ball on the Friday of the Arctangent festival, headlined magnificently by Meshuggah, of course. Other standout shows included Tool at the 02, Richard Thompson at the Dome in Brighton, Patricia Kopatchinskaja performing Schoenberg's Violin Concerto at the Royal Albert Hall, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor at the Troxy. I have, however, been to a lot of classical concerts in and around Brighton, organised by NMB and MAS and also Sussex Musicians' Club. It's been a delight to hear a huge variety of (often very challenging) music performed at a very high standard by semi-professional and pro-am players. I urge everyone down here to get along to some of these concerts and support a vital, but overlooked, part of our local music ecology.

Hanging with Kate and Frank at Arctangent

For personal reasons perhaps the most meaningful live gig I went to this year was Frank playing the Waiting Room in Stoke Newington. Frank had taken something of a hiatus from both live performance and recording, and this was his first show of 2024, so it was great to see him back on such great from after a very difficult year. Frank's major release of the year was the fantastic "Echoes of Tomorrow EP", but here's his most recent single, "Loss Function", released at the tail end of the year:

While it's not been an especially big year for me on the live music front, I have nonetheless been listening to a huge amount of new music. A lot of listening recommendations have come from friends and family, but of the more traditional "gatekeepers", I have to mention: Ted Gioia's substack; Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone and Gilles Peterson, both on BBC 6Music; on BBC Radio 3, Record Review, The New Music Show, Late Junction and The Early Music Show; Metal Injection; and The Quietus. I attempted to compile a "Top 50 albums of 2024" in my last post of the year (a tricky exercise!), but in the meantime here's a snapshot of my listening over the year (although at 1100 pieces and a run time of 110 hours "snapshot" probably isn't the right word):

Oh, and one more playlist to be going on with. Back in March, to celebrate International Women's Day, I put together a "Women in Modern Music" playlist to celebrate the often underappreciated contributions of female composers and musicians to a range of contemporary music, from orchestral and chamber work to electro-acoustic, free improvisation, sound art, jazz and out-rock. At the time the time I first published the playlist, it ran to 100 pieces. However, I've been continuing to research and add to it, and by IWD this year I'm hoping it will be up to 200!

I have to confess that this hasn't been a big reading year for me, and in 2025 I'm really hoping to have more time set to one side for deep reading rather than endless scanning of online articles and blogs, but we'll see. I have to mention two standouts. I am, of course, a total Neal Stephenson fanboi, so it was great to see him back with the rollicking Polostan, the first of a new historical saga (his first since the Baroque Cycle). On the non-fiction front, I found David Goodhart's The Care Dilemma typically insightful, following on from the previous two books in his informal state of the nation trilogy, The Road to Somewhere and Head, Hand, Heart. As the year starts, I'm hugely enjoying Caitlin Horrocks' The Vexations, a fictionalised account of Erik Satie's life (thanks to the brilliant Anno Mitchell for the recommendation!)

Some 2024 reading, some light, some not so much

Away from music and (vaguely) intellectual pursuits, another confession: this has probably been my least athletic year in over a decade. But I have tried to keep at least somewhat in shape. I ran just two half marathons this year, The Brighton Half in February and the fantastic Three Forts Challenge, an annual trail run in the South Downs with which I normally celebrate my birthday in early May. But the biggest, well, ordeal I put myself through all year was the sponsored 100 Push-ups a Day Challenge I did for Cancer Research. I raised just shy of a grand for the cause; thanks so much to everyone who sponsored me. My God, it was brutal at times, but by the end of it I was pretty buff (for a 57-year-old, at any rate!)

I promise never to share this in public again

A final word. The older I get, the more grateful I am to have so many great friends around me. It's perhaps invidious to pick out individuals, but I will anyway; so thanks to the following for immensely welcome support, great company and fantastic conversation over the year: Kate Norton, Amy Taylor, Marc Jaffrey, Anno Mitchell, Nick Reynolds, Steve Morgan, Melissa Richardson, Nigel Huddleston, John Souter and David Kaplowitz. Thanks also to my amazing kids Joe, Frank and Lily, who've had their own truly horrible year. And of course, thanks to my wife, Angel Academe co-founder and soul mate Sarah Turner for her constant support and endless patience - none of this would be possible without her.

An attempt at a kind of 2024 Top 50 Albums list

It's the time of year when more serious, and certainly more seriously opinionated listeners than me tell you what you should have been listening to all year. Well, that's not what I'm doing here. Rather, I'm simply listing 50 albums that have given me pleasure this year, and in several cases a lot of pleasure. A few things to note before diving into the list...

• Despite the fact that some of my favourite live music moments of the year have been metal shows (Meshuggah! Tool! Animals as Leaders!) only one metal album has made the list, weirdly. I dunno, it just doesn't feel like it's been a defining year for metal releases. But feel free to argue (and make some welcome recommendations!)
• The list is a lot less guitar-y than you might expect of me. In fact, it's arguably way more piano-y. I think that's at least in part because was listening to so much piano music while prepping and composing my two first piano pieces, Johnson & Johnson and A Prayer, Lightly Offered.
• You'll notice a disproportionate amount of John Zorn in here. Some decades ago no-one who knew me would have been surprised at that, as I never stopped wanging on about him (I wrote about how seeing John Zorn's Naked City back in the late 80s pretty much changed my life as part of my Master's programme). However, over the years my ardent admiration hasn't exactly waned, but it's definitely, er, drifted. Partly that was an issue of access - it was hard even for a financially reckless record buyer like me to keep up with Zorn's output when it was only available in physical formats. But the migration of the Tzadik catalogue to Spotify has changed all of that (although to be clear, I'm still buying Tzadik CDs by the handful!) There are many problems with Spotify and at some point I might get around to addressing these, but I'm sorry, it's still an incredible resource.
• The attentive reader will note that there are a lot of women composers of various stripes on the list. To be clear, this is not me in some fit of virtue-signalling, which is a vanishingly unlikely prospect. It's just that I went down something of a rabbit hole back in March, researching and compiling a "Women in Modern Music" playlist to celebrate International Women's Day. And I've stayed down the rabbit hole: the original playlist ran to 100 pieces of music by women working in contemporary classical, jazz, free improvisation, sound art and out-rock, and is now up to 150. 
• If I had to pick just one album from the list it would be Rafael Toral's Spectral Evolution, which is quite exquisite. If you want to hear about how Toral made the record (which went through no fewer than 50 mixes!), I recommend Samuel Andreyev's excellent conversation with him, in which he talks in some depth about the compositional and recording process.
• Some hat tips! I've mentioned all of these sources before, but once again, I'm indebted to the following for fantastic recommendations: Ted Gioia's substack; Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone and Gilles Peterson, both on on BBC 6Music; and from BBC Radio 3, Record Review, The New Music Show, Late Junction and The Early Music Show. And of course thanks to all the friends and family members who've made recommendations across the year, especially Marc Jaffrey, Frank Hopkins, Steve Morgan and Nick Reynolds: your recommendations might not have made the list below (although Frank does feature on it!) but they've surely informed my "2024 Listening" playlist, which runs to a whopping 110 pieces of music clocking in at just under 108 hours.
• And of course thanks to Sarah for her endless patience with the almost constant sonic ambience!

Samuel Andreyev - In Glow of Like Seclusion

J.S. Bach - Preludes, Inventions, Sinfonias, perf. Mahan Esfahani

J.S. Bach - The English Suites, perf. Zhu Xiao-Mei

Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere

Surya Botofasina/Nate Mercereau/Carlos Niño - Subtle Movements

The Bug - Machines I-V

William Byrd - The Great Service and English Anthems, perf. Alamire

Tim Brady - Imagine Many Guitars

Benjamin Britten - Violin Concertos, perf. Baiba Skide

Laura Cannell - Earthlore

Laura Cannell - The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined

Loren Connors & Alan Licht - The Blue Hour

Beatrice Dillon - Seven Reorganisations, perf. Explore Ensemble

DKAPZ - Rule by Monsters

Elephant9/Terje Rypdal - Catching Fire

Graham Fitkin - Loosening

Dai Fujikura - Wavering World

Mabe Fratti - Sentir Que No Sabes

Frisell, Cyrille, Downes - Breaking the Shell

The Gesualdo Six - Queen of Hearts: Laments & Songs of Regret for Queens Terrestrial & Celestial

Bára Gísladóttir - Orchestral Works

George Frideric Handel - Theodora, perf. Arcangelo

Catherine Christer Hennix - Further Selections from the Electric Harpsichord

Frank Hopkins - Echoes of Tomorrow EP

Julian Lage - Speak to Me

Chris Lawrence - Kenny Wheeler: Some Gnu Ones

Emilie Cecilia LeBel - Landscapes of Memory

Brad Mehldau - Aprés Fauré

Brad Mehldau - After Bach II

Pat Metheny - MoonDial

Ennio Morricone - Crime and Dissonance

The Necks - Bleed

Rachel Podger/Brecon Baroque - The Muses Restor'd

Hania Rani - Nostalgia - Live

Alfred Schnittke - Film Music Vol 6

Franz Schubert - Wintereisse, perf. Rachel Fenlon

Brandon Seabrook - Object of Unknown Function

Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance - Jinxed by Being

Richard Skelton - the old thrawing crux

Sun Ra - Lanquidity (Reissue)

Laetitia Sonami - Éliane Radigue - A Song for Two Mothers/Occam IX

Rafael Toral - Spectral Evolution

Leslie Uyeda - The Sex Life of Vegetables

Freya Waley-Cohen - Spell Book

Patricia Wolf - The Secret Life of Birds

John Zorn - The Hermetic Organ Vol. 12 - The Bosch Requiem

John Zorn - The Hermetic Organ Vol 13 - Biennale Musica Venezia

John Zorn - Lamentations, perf. Lage, Riley, Frisell

John Zorn - Her Melodious Lay, perf. Lage/Riley

John Zorn - Hannigan Sings Zorn, Volume 2

October/November 2024 round-up

A relatively brief round-up this time out... or maybe not...

I mentioned last time that the Brighton Guitar Quartet had pretty much wrapped up our 2024 season, but we do/did in fact have a couple of "pre-season friendlies" lined up. Around Christmas every year our director Gregg Isaacson puts on an informal concert for all his students to play to each other at the delightful Bombanes in Kemptown, and this year played a short set there (and I even threw in a solo piece, my first solo outing in over a year). And we'll be playing another short set at Jon Rattenbury's excellent bi-annual Platform event. I'll also be playing in a trio with Paul Dallaway and Shaun Bullard (we're tackling Roland Dyens' "O Trio Magico") and I'll be giving my duet "The Aleph" another outing with Shaun. And it will be nice to hear pieces by three of my fellow New Music Brighton composers - Guy Richardson, Martyn Adams and Chris Gander - getting another outing following the Brighton Guitar Group's NMB concert earlier this year.

However, what I'm really excited to announce is that we're now lining up the first gigs of our 2025 "season". On Friday, March 14th (3.30pm) we'll be playing at Hove Library as part of their ongoing Live Lounge series. A month later, on 24th May we'll be back at St Laurence, Falmer for a late afternoon concert (exact time TBC). And on June 17th we'll be playing a lunchtime concert (for the third year running!) at Christ Church in Worthing. We'll also be putting in an appearance at the annual Springboard competition in March, which this year is adjudicated by the brilliant guitarist and arranger Gerard Cousins. As ever, all the details are on our website; more to add soon. Once again, thanks to Ruairi, Olivier, James and of course Gregg, for sharing the BGQ journey this year. I'm psyched about 2025!

On the subject of Gregg, I should note that I've just clocked in at 10 year studying with him! Lots to write about regarding that, and hopefully I'll get around to that in my next round-up post, but for now, I just want to log my deepest gratitude to him in public

Setting up the GTBS student concert at St Luke's

While I'm on the subject of classical guitar, I had a great time at the third instalment of Guitars By The Sea in October. Put on by Jon Rattenbury and Steve Gordon, the weekend is a kind of festival-come-workshop, and this year feaured Mark Eden of the fantastic Eden Stell Duo as guest workshop leader. The dazzling young guitarist Kianush Robeson gave a concert on the Saturday night, with lots of 20th Century works, including Reginald Smith Brindle's little-heard Three Etruscan Preludes (regular readers will know that I can never pass up an opportunity to mention Reggie). The weekend culminated in a student concert at St Luke's Church in Seven Dials, featuring two ensembles, the whole group playing as an orchestra and some solo slots. Oh, and Shaun and I premiered The Aleph, of course! Thanks to Jon and Steve for all their hard work in putting on such a great weekend. Here's to GBTS4!

I also mentioned last time that I had my piano piece "Johnson & Johnson" played by Karen Kingsley at a New Music Brighton Concert at the Friends' Meeting House. I'm delighted that I now have some audio of the performance. Thanks to Roger Harmar for his excellent recording.

I was also thrilled that Karen went on to play the piece at a concert at Portsmouth Cathedral earlier this month. Sadly a bad case of man flu meant that I couldn't make it, but I gather from a couple of my fellow NMB members that the piece went down well.

On a related note, I finally finished off my next piano piece, "A Prayer, Offered Lightly" and have submitted it for possible inclusion in a Malcolm Lipkin memorial concert to be given by Nathan Williamson next March. Fingers crossed; in the meantime here's a score video of the piece (MIDI only at this stage, but not a bad approximation!)

And talking of New Music Brighton, I'm honoured (if slightly daunted) to have been appointed chair, as the excellent Guy Richardson is standing down after nine years in the role!

Frank at The Waiting Room

I've made it along to a few gigs since I last posted. After some initial doubts, I was after all able to get along to see my son Frank do his first show of the year at the Waiting Room in Stoke Newington. It was a cracking set, running to almost 90 minutes and in front of a full house. Thanks to various friends for coming along and supporting Frank. Frank and I have also started doing some recording together, working on somewhat longer-form ambient pieces, with me adding guitar parts to Frank's beautful textures and harmonic progressions. More on that soon, I hope!

Setting up to record with Frank at "Boom Studios"

Anyway, others shows I got along to included: The Musicians of All Saints in Lewes (including the premiere of a great piece by Guy Richardson); the fine pianist Yoko Ono at the Chapel Royal in Brighton (with another NMB premiere, a beautiful Hokusai-inspired piece by Barry Mills); jazz pianist Joni Mayraz at the Jazz Cafe in Camden (thanks to Marc Jaffrey for getting me along to that); and the soul jazz quintet Butaxca (featuring my great buddy Steve Morgan on piano) at the Brunswick in Hove. I also went to a screening of Oleksandr Dovzhenko's masterpiece Earth at the Attenborough Centre in Falmer, with a beautiful live soundtrack provided by pianist Roksana Smirnova and guitarist Misha Kalinin.

 

Some reading/listening/viewing over the last few weeks, with the usual apologies to readers who might not share (all of) my interests and sensibilities:

The Rest is History's brilliant series on American politics in 1968

Ted Gioia: Is This the Worst Month Ever for Legacy Media?

Joan Bakewell interviews Marcel Duchamp for the BBC in 1968 (file under "different times, people")

Olivier Messiaen - The Music of Faith (The South Bank Show, 1985) (ditto)

The amazing jazz keyboardist Hiromi plays an NPR "Tiny Desk" gig

Charles Ives Society: Improvisation and Ives

Ted Gioia again: What You Can Learn from Just Seven Pages by Hannah Arendt 

Ian Pace: Why Christian culture is essential to education

Spiked: The myth of the population time bomb

Matthew Crawford: Anti-Humanism and the Post-Political Condition

Chris Snowdon for the IEA: Not Invented Here #4 - Smoking

John Gray: Trump and the triumph of illiberal democracy

And more from Gray, this time on Jordan Peterson

Brendan O'Neil Show: David Goodhart on how we're failing to care for the young and old alike

Sebastian Milbank: London has lost its soul

Sam Harris: Is History Repeating Itself? - A Conversation with Simon Sebag Montefiore

 

Anyway, enough of that. Here's a snapshot of what I was listening to in November:

In my next post, I'll be doing a wrap-up of the year. Bet you can't wait. As ever, my eternal gratitude to my wife and soul mate Sarah for endless support with all of this. Oh, and I just had to get in a crate of this for Christmas:

 

Early Autumn 2024 Round-Up

It's been a busy few weeks but has somehow felt less eventful than for a while, but that might say more about my state of mind than anything else.

The Brighton Guitar Quartet played our final couple of public performances of the year. In early September we played an afternoon show at Ellis Gordon Court in Newhaven, celebrating the 60th anniversary of Housing 21. We turned in a couple of sets featuring pieces we've rolled out over the year and revived a few from previous seasons, and it seemed to go down pretty well. Thanks to Housing 21 for asking us along (and happy birthday!) and to Ruairi for organising it all.

James and Olivier; insert your own caption

A couple of weeks later we played in the opening concert of Sussex Musicians Club 2024/25 season, alongside the amazing soprano Daria Robertson and pianist Kevin Allen, who treated us to Schoenberg's Op.23 - quite the season opener! We played Olga Amelkina-Vera's Ninochka, Phillip Houghton's Opals suite (our best performance of the piece so far, IMO - it certainly seemed to be especially well received) and my own arrangement of Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze.

Shiny heads at work

So that's us done for the year, but we're already at work on material for next year, getting our teeth stuck into a fairly large-scale work by Vincent Lindsey-Clarke and my arrangement of John Barry's You Only Live Twice. Anyway, I just want to take this opportunity to thank James, Olivier and Ruairi for their commitment and great company this year, and of course thanks to our director Gregg Isaacson for all his guidance, insight and patience with us. Here's to 2025!

While I'm on the subject of classical guitar, I'm looking forward to the third instalment of Guitars By The Sea in a couple of weekends' time. Put on by Jon Rattenbury and Steve Gordon, the weekend is a kind of festival-come-workshop, and this year feaures Mark Eden of the brilliant Eden Stell Duo as guest workshop leader. The dazzling young guitarist Kianush Robeson will be giving a concert on the Saturday night, which you should get along to if you can! I'm especially excited to be giving my duet The Aleph its first live outing in performance with the excellent Shaun Bullard.

Right then, away from the guitar...

Saturday just gone I was delighted to have my first "formally" composed piano piece, Johnson & Johnson premiered in a New Music Brighton concert given by the fantastic Karen Kingsley at the Friends Meeting House here in Brighton. The concert featured 15 pieces by NMB composers, drawing on a massive array of influences including Baroque fugue (John Petley), Chopin (Lewis Dixon-Szul) and jazz (Lluís Nadal). Perhaps the most impressive entry, for obvious reasons, was Theme from an Unmade Film, by the 12-year-old (!) Ellery Mitchell. Congratulations - and thanks - to Karen for her Herculean work in putting the programme together. Thanks also to my friends Helen, Allan, Mel, Nick, Nigel and Marc (and of course Sarah) for coming along and supporting me, and thanks to the inestimable Peter Copley for his help in knocking the piece into shape (and making it vaguely playable). The concert was recorded, so once the performance of my piece is available I'll stick it up on Soundcloud. In the meantime, here's a MIDI rendition, complete with score.

As I mentioned last month, I'm now at work on another piano piece for possible inclusion in another NMB concert to be given by the brilliant pianist and composer Nathan Williamson in the spring. It's a very different sound world to J&J, something of a hymn, dedicated to Joe, Frank and Lily in commemoration of their terrible shared year, with love and admiration at how much they've supported each other. I hope to have the piece finished over the next few weeks, but in the spirit of sharing work in progress, here's the latest draft:

I haven't made it along to much live music over the last few weeks, but what I've seen/heard has been fantastic. Last weekend my good friend and Angel Academe colleague John Souter took me along to the Troxy in East London to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor's unexpected return to touring. I've seen Godspeed many times over the last two decades, but this was the most assured performance I've ever seen them give. As I pointed out on Twitter, the bloke in front of me in the queue to get in was wearing a Black Flag t-shirt, while I was wearing a Yes t-shirt, which I think sums things up nicely. If you don't believe me, check this:

Or as some wag on Twitter put it:

At the other end of the musical spectrum, Sarah and I (and Olivier!) went along to the first concert in the string orchestra Musicians of All Saints' 2024/25 season. The concert featured Handel and Mendelssohn alongside new work by Geoffrey Alvarez and NMB's Peter Owen and was brilliantly conducted by Maria Copley. Their next concert is November 9th, again at the All Saints Centre in Lewes. The concert will include two premieres of work by Peta Crompton and Guy Richardson. You can buy tickets here - and please do, these concerts are always a treat and we should support grassroots classical music-making of this quality.

Finally, my Brighton buddy and former Radio 3 colleague to me along to the Albert Hall for Prom 67, with the BBCSO conducted by Tarmo Peltokoski playing Vaughan Williams and Shostakovich. The highlight, though, was Patricia Kopatchinskaja performing Schoenberg's Violin Concerto; a truly mesmerising performance. Thanks to Brian for taking me along; as I write there are 6 days left to hear the prom on BBC Sounds.

Pat Kop in action

I mentioned last month that my son Frank has got his first show of the year lined up for next week at the Waiting Room in Stoke Newington. I'm gutted not to be able to make the gig, but please get along if you can. Tickets are available here.

A highlight of the last month was attending a day-long conference at Goldsmiths College co-hosted by Goldsmiths and the University of Surrey: More Sounds, More Personalities, British Post-Minimalism, 1979-1997. The day had been curated by composers Ian Gardiner and Tom Armstrong (one of the tutors on my Master's programme) and featured a series of fascinating - and wide-ranging - presentations looking at the turn British art music took in the 80s as it embraced pop aesthetics and electric instrumentation. Well, that and much more besides. Several of the papers are available as YouTube videos or blog posts; links to them can be found on the MSMP page on Ian Gardiner's website.

One name that cropped up a lot over the course of the day was, not unreasonably, that of Gavin Bryars. As it happens, at the event, I ran into composer David Lancaster whom I first met at a Gavin Bryars workshop in the French Pyrenees last summer. It was great to catch up with both him, and of course with Tom.

In the meantime, my record-buying habit, if not exactly out of control, is certainly coming along nicely ;-)

Some of that lot features in this Spotify playlist of highlights from my listening over the last three months, with hat tips, as ever, to Ted Gioia, Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone and three Radio 3 shows in particular: the New Music Show, Record Review and Late Junction. The playlist also features more recent jazz than normal, as a result of reading Nate Chinen's Playing Changes - Jazz for the New Century, recommended to me by Paul Dallaway. It's an informative, if occasionally frustrating read, and if I get the chance I'll write a little bit more about it here.

And now for a little bit of reading/listening/watching, with the usual caveat that some of this will not jive with everyone's interests or inclinations!

Milton Mermikides: Magical Mystery Tour - The Invention of The Beatles

Discogs: 3 Trends That Prove CDs are Making a Comeback

Florence Read interviews Geoff Dyer

Improvising Life and Music with Jazz Legend Pat Metheny

Sam Harris interviews Richard Dawkins about his new book, The Genetic Code of the Dead

Ted Gioia: What's Happening to Entertainment?

And again: The Decline of the Novel - it's worse than you think

Nina Welsch: The nurseryfication of culture

Radio 3's The Sound of Cinema: John Barry - the music of James Bond

David Elstein: The near-invisibility of the Proms on BBC TV is a symptom of the collapse of public service broadcasting in Britain

Frank Furedi: We’re sending far too many people to university

Alexandra Wilson - The inexorable decline of arts education and the rise of knee-jerk politics and managerialism

Marilyn Simon: Why does hot girl summer have to end?

Matthew Crawford: Individualism creates mass men, not individuals

The Atlantic: The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books

Robin Ashenden: The 1990s were Britain’s sunset years

Sam Buntz: Yuval Noah Harari has written another long book with little wisdom

Oh, and some recent non-screen-based reading!

Finally, from the DGMFS, er, archive... Abyssal Labs is a project I began in 2012 and abandoned in 2014, a series of dark ambient soundscapes (or whatever) originally conceived to accompany yoga and other contemplative practices. I don't think it really achieved its aims, but in revisiting the music I figured it stood up on its own terms and last year revived the series with Ghosts of the Kemptown Branchline. Anyway, back in 2012 I put together a series of short playlists showcasing some of the music that inspired the series, and I've recently combined them into one set, which runs to a fairly mammoth 28+ hours. So enjoy!

That's it for now. As ever, thanks to Sarah for her endless love, patience and support.

August 2024 Round-Up, and a look forward to the autumn

Hanging with Frank, Kate and assorted brilliant weirdos at Arctangent

Well, the highlight of the month (and, little Albert's arrival aside, of the year - although it's been a low bar) had to be going to the Friday of Arctangent's 10th anniversary festival with Frank (more on him below), my best mate Kate and her good buddy Emma. As ever, the day featured a great assortment of music at the meeting point of metal, electronica, punk, math rock and even rap. We saw a bunch of great acts, including (off the top of my head) Animals as Leaders, Ihsahn, Three Trapped Tigers, Fange, Maruja and Iress (a real revelation). But of course, the highlight - and indeed the reason I'd headed to the Mendips (other than the great company) - was Meshuggah. 

I've lost count of the exact number of times I've seen the technical death metal Swedes, but it must be edging towards 20, across three different countries and in every size of venue from Brighton's Concorde 2 to the Royal Albert Hall (and including their last Arctangent show in 2019), and they've never been anything less than astonishing. But Christ, this was mind-blowing, with totally perfect sound from the very first notes. They remain the most uncompromising rock act I've ever seen - they're just so pure. Here's a video of them performing Perpetual Black Second, shot by someone who had a very, very good view!

And here's a Spotify playlist I put together based on the setlist:

Anyway, in the last year, I've managed to see all three of my favourite metal bands: Meshuggah, Tool (in London, with Frank) and Cult of Luna (in Bristol with Kate), so happy days!

The Brighton Guitar Quartet took the month off from performing (although not rehearsing!), but we're back in September with our final "public" concert of 2024, taking part in the first concert of the Sussex Musicians' Club 24/25 season. We'll be rolling out work by Bach, Phillip Houghton and Olga Amelkina-Vera, alongside performances by pianist Kevin Allen and soprano Daria Robertson. The concert is at 7pm on Saturday at the Chapel Royal, North St, Brighton.

Then it's on to preparing new repertoire for our 2025 season, which should kick off sometime in the spring. I mentioned last time around that I'd arranged John Barry's "You Only Live Twice" for the group. This month I took a crack at arranging a rather different piece, "Streams of Pleasure Ever Flowing", the stunning Air and Duet near the conclusion of Handel's oratorio Theodora. It was quite a task, and at my teacher Gregg Isaacson's suggestion I may yet tinker with the arrangement to make it a tad more democratic. But in the meantime here's a score video of the first draft (MIDI guitars at this point, I'm afraid):

Away from the guitar, but still on a composer-y note... A couple of months back I mentioned that I'd entered my first formal piano composition for inclusion in a New Music Brighton concert to be given by the pianist Karen Kingsley in October. Well, I'm delighted that the piece has been accepted! The concert is on Saturday 5th October at Brighton Friends’ Meeting House on Ship Street. Please come along if you can - there should be a great selection of music. Here's a reminder of the piece that will be getting its premiere, a jazz-ish piece based on melodic material from two very different Robert Johnsons, the Renaissance lutenist and the great Mississippi bluesman:

I'm now at work on a new piano piece for possible inclusion in another NMB concert to be given by the brilliant pianist and composer Nathan Williamson in the spring. I'm adapting music I'd originally conceived for the BQG, a chorale-like piece dedicated to Joe, Frank and Lily in recognition of the recent tragic loss of their mother. It's early days yet, and I've got a couple of months before the deadline, but in the spirit of sharing work in progress, here's a brief sketch:

I also seem to have got myself involved with The Musicians of All Saints, handling various aspects of their comms (website, newsletter and wotnot). Not sure how that happened, but there you go. A chamber orchestra based in Lewes and closely associated with New Music Brighton, MAS was founded in 1987 to perform contemporary classical music by living composers and 20th-century composers whose work deserves a second hearing. Sarah and I hugely enjoyed several of the concerts in their 2023/24 season, and it would be remiss of me not to mention their upcoming season, beginning with a concert at The All Saints Centre in Lewes on September 21st, featuring work by Mendelssohn, Handel, Geoffrey Alvarez and NMB member Peter Owen. You can buy tickets here.

Here's a recording of the orchestra playing Frank Bridge's "Lament for Strings", illustrated with lovely engravings of the Sussex countryside by Keith Pettit:

So, I said I had more on Frank. He's got his first gig of 2024 lined up on Thursday, October 17th at the Waiting Room in Stoke Newington. It's selling fast, so get your tickets soon!

Frank also gave a great interview to Magnetic Magazine, giving a thoughtful and detailed technical breakdown of how he made his beautiful track "Echoes of Tomorrow". If you haven't heard the piece yet (and why not?!), here it is: 

 

Read/watched/listened to elsewhere

To repeat what I said last month, this is only scratching the surface, and I'm still presenting these links (mostly) with little in the way of comment, and in some cases somewhat gingerly. But infer away! The first two are links to the most recent Gresham lectures given by my former lecturer, the brilliant Milton Mermikides, which sadly I couldn't make. But I'm looking forward to his next series, beginning on September 12th at LSO St Lukes.

Musical Consonance and Dissonance: The Good, Bad and Beautifully Ugly - finally, he got around to Meshuggah! (@14'10")

Is Music Infinite? - check out the "heaviness contour" @ 10'31"!

Ted Gioia: Nine Observations on the Avant-Garde

... and again: The Death of the Magazine - Or what happens when journalism forgets about quality writing

... and again: My Alternative Tech Canon: 26 Mind-Expanding Books

Classical Nerd: Witold Lutosławski and the Taming of Chance

The Rest is History: A new series Henry IV and the build-up to the 100 Years War

Ian Pace: Academia must not dissolve scholarship into politics

Samuel Andreyev: Beethoven’s Bagatelles: the Universe in a Drop of Water

Matthew Crawford: Travelogue: Budapest and Croatia - Is Christianity sexy?

Michael Henderson: Is the Proms safe with the BBC?

N.S. Lyons: The Machiavellian cause of Britain’s disorder - The country is ruled by weak and effete foxes

Sam Harris: Letters to a Christian, 1

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The death of free speech in Britain

Christopher Snowdon: Champagne in the membrane - Alcohol is not a major risk factor for dementia

Charles Amos: Defending an outdoor smoke - There is no rational argument for prohibition

Marilyn Simon: "Unsex me here" and other bad ideas - On Nature and Man

 

Some musical listening

Here's a snapshot of my listening in August, with major hat tips to Stuart Maconie's ever-brilliant Freak Zone on BBC 6Music, BBC Radio 3's Record Review and Late Junction, and of course to Ted Gioia.

And from the DGMFS archive, as the summer wanes and we head into spider season (if the cobwebs in my house are anything to go by):

Simon Hopkins · Boom Logistics: Spider Season

As ever, thanks to Sarah for all her endless support and patience. See you all next month, if not sooner!

July 2024 Round-up

Mmm... so if memory - or rather more accurately, Googling - serves, this is only my, er, third post here this year. Admittedly, I covered quite a bit of ground in those previous posts, which were quarterly round-ups, but I think I can do a little bit better and at the very least post monthly updates. (I've also hinted, in previous posts, that this has been something of a difficult year, so I'm not going to beat myself up. Or at least not too much.)

 

BGQ and other classical guitar stuff

Me (the hunchback), James, Olivier & Ruairi

The Brighton Guitar Quartet continued our 2024 season on July 20th with a lunchtime concert at St Peter's Church in West Blatchington, one of Brighton's prettiest suburbs and home to a rather lovely mill. The church itself had a quite wonderful acoustic and we all agreed that this was one of - if not the - best performance we've ever turned in. We played to a full house too, which is always nice. Thanks to Gill and Michael Evans for inviting us to play, and of course to everyone who turned up to see us. (And my personal thanks to three of my - frankly far more accomplished - fellow composers from New Music Brighton, Peter Copley, Chris Gander and Barry Mills, for coming along.)

We won't be playing at St Margaret's in Rottingdean in September as we'd hoped as the church is being refurbished(!), but we've got other irons in the fire and I'll keep you posted.

I've been especially busy on the composition front. I've arranged my favourite Bond theme song, John Barry's "You Only Live Twice" for guitar quartet and the BGQ has just started to work on it. Hopefully we'll be rolling it out later this year. In the meantime, here's a score video of the arrangement, albeit with not-entirely-satisfactory MIDI-guitar audio. If I get chance - and that frankly seems a little unlikely - I'll record all the parts myself and re-post at some point.

And then, well... on July 3rd I became a grandparent, with my oldest son Joe and his fabulous partner Molly giving the world one Albert Frank Nikky Ferrier-Hopkins*. What's a sentimental old would-be composer to do other than write a piece of music to commemorate such a thing? So here's a little lullaby for two classical guitars that I wrote to welcome Albert to the world. Once again' it's a slightly crappy MIDI rendition, but I'm hoping to perform and record it with the excellent Shaun Bullard at the Guitars by the Sea festival-come-workshop** here in Brighton in October. 

Look out for the "narrative nudges" I've put in along the way, something I started to inlude in my guitar sextet "The Level at Midnight" which I hope to be posting here soon. And while I'm at it, I'm constantly adding to the "Chamber Work & Scores" page here at DGMFS, so keep checking in. Oh, and here's the piece's dedicatee, nestled in the arms of some gammon in a metal t-shirt.

Albert and your humble correspondent

I've written about my struggles with solo classical guitar solo performance recently, mostly in the light of failing a performance diploma with Trintity College not once, but twice. I'm still unsure about how to proceed; it might simply be that I've started way too late in life to be a seriously strong solo perfomer. So I'm mostly throwing myself into composition and ensemble performance. But, but... I am thinking about taking ABRSM's somewhat lower level (and, it has to be said, rather controversial) ARSM exam over the next year or so. I just love learning new material! So I'm currently at work on "Rosedale" from Takemitsu's three-movement "In the Woods" suite for guitar. I think that what I really get from the process of learning stuff at this level is more about compositional understanding, but I do love getting pieces "under the fingers" somewhat. This pic of my mark-up on the first page alone gives you some idea of what a head fuck the piece is. If nothing else, learning pieces like this night at least keeps dementia at bay for a while, even at the cost of inducing other forms of madness...

For what it's worth, here's what it should sound like, played by someone that's closer to my grandchild in age than to me. In beach wear.

 

Reading, more widely

I wrote a few pre-lockdown years ago about upgrading my reading by beginning to tackle the "Great Books" programme. That project is somewhat, er, "ongoing" (or stalled). Luckily, the jazz critic and polymath Ted Gioia has launched his own truncated, and yet in some ways more wide-ranging or capacious version, a "Twelve month immersive course in the humanities". Thanks to a good grammar school education I'm slightly ahead of the game, but it it's still a lot or reading. And it's not been helped by my best mate Kate Norton generously gifting me a subscrition to Mr B's Emporium, who seem to have me down as a sci-fi fanboi, which is probably not entirely unfair. So here's the current bedside reading pile:

 

Read/watched/listened to elsewhere

A little gingerly, I'm going to introduce this element of my (hopefully more regular) updates, partly because the "read elsewhere" section of our Angel Academe newsletter is quite so popular. I say "gingerly" as some of these links may indicate a wider set of interests and opinions that are potentially unpalatable to some. In the future I may offer some commentary, and will hopefully be a little more comprehensive. Who knows? As so much else in these parts, it's work in progress.

Sean Thomas in the Spectator: Avant garde is Boring

Matthew Crawford on his (brilliant) Archedelia Substack: UK riots: the role of government psyops in managing public sentiment about immigration

Ted Gioia: 52 Reasons to Fear that Technological Progress Is Reversing

Samuel Andreyev: 10 short MUST-HEAR 20th century masterworks

The Critic Magazine interviews SDP leader William Clousdon

The first in a series of podcasts about the development of the English town, from Porfessor Jeremy Black

A Mania for Subjugation: A new podcast series about Alexander the Great from Dan Carlin

The Rest is History podcast tackles the roots of World War I

Again, I hope to have much more of this in future updates. But hopefully this is enough to be getting on with (and won't make you hate me too much!)

 

Some Listening

A couple of playlists to leave you with. Here's a snapshot of my listening in July, with major hat tips to Stuart Maconie's ever-brilliant Freak Zone on BBC 6Music, BBC Radio 3's Record Review and Late Junction, and of course to Ted Gioia.

And here's a playlist I put together after reading Thurston Moore's memoir, "Sonic Life". If I get chance, I'll say bit more about the book at some point (ultra short version: loved the book, not sure I'd want to hang out with the author).

 

From the DGMFS archive

Here's the first fully-fledged 2014 album from my Boom Logistics project. It's much sparser and more, well, pastoral, than later efforts, but I think it stands up, not least thanks to Simon Heyworth's frankly alchemical mastering.

That's it for now!

 

Notes

* If "Ferrier" rings a bell for the more classical music-literate among you, yes, little Albert is not-too-distantly related to the the great English contralto Kathleen Ferrier, who, by co-incidence, was born about half a mile from where I grew up in central Lancashire. There is also possibly a Reginald Smith Brindle connection, but let's not go there. Yet...

** There are still some places left on the course, by the way, so if you're a classical guitarist of any standard who's interested in getting some ensemble playing experience, sign up!

2024 Q2 Round-Up

It's been a busy time since my last update, not least on the personal front, but I'll be writing about that some other time - I'll keep this post to (mostly) musical activity.

First up, as anyone reading this will surely recognise, I've done a pretty major rinse of the DGMFS website. Yes, it's a fairly blatant piece of displacement activity, but it's been on the to-do list for a long time. Having been using Typepad since about 2008 I'm kind of "locked in", and unless anything radical happens to the service, I'm stuck with a pretty staid, old-school kind of website. But I can live with that - indeed, it's probably appropriate. In any case, there's always going to be a "new thing" when it comes to online publishing, and chasing that isn't always the right thing to do. (Medium, anyone? Let alone MySpace, Tumblr or Flickr - and yes, I was on them all... )

Anyway, I've got a new, more autobiographical homepage (and opted for first person, which I think better matches the tone of the site overall); there's new (pre-mastered) material on both the Boom Logistics and Abyssal Labs pages; and quite a lot of new music on the Chamber Work/Scores page. Oh, and a new, I hope, more straightforward nav. Any feedback is welcome (and thanks to Sarah and Frank for taking the time to give it the once over).

Strange things are afoot at Hove Library...

Beyond that, lots of musical activity! Following the start of our 2024 season in Falmer in March, the Brighton Guitar Quartet has performed a couple of shows. In May we did a mini-set at Hove Library as part of their "Live Lounge" series. Then last week we returned to the lovely mid-19th Century Christ Church in Worthing for a full lunchtime concert at which we performed, amongst other things, Phillip Houghton's "Opals" suite in full, my own arrangement of Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze" and Sébastian Vachez's "Carre d'as", a fantastic, tongue in cheek piece that we haven't played in some years.

Here's the concert in full:

We'll be back on Saturday, July 20th for a lunchtime concert at St Peter's in West Blatchington, with further shows to be confirmed for the autumn.

For some months I've been sitting in with Jon Rattenbury's Brighton Guitar Group, boosting the numbers a little in preparation for a New Music Brighton concert at St Luke's, Prestonville. It's been an incredibly ambitious project for Jon to put on, working for six months on nine new compositions by NMB composers including Guy Richardson, Lluís Nadal, Phil Baker and, er, me. Not only was a lot of the music pretty thorny, but the project was beset with other problems, with quite a few players unable to make rehearsals and/or the final performance.

As it happened, the show worked really well, with the group truly rising to the occasion and playing to a packed house no less! As for my own piece, "The Level At Midnight", well it was certainly a very useful experience to write a piece for a mixed-ability amateur group and then see it come together "from the inside", as part of the group performing it - and to see where the difficulties arose (not always where I expected!) By the way, as part of the Research Techniques module on my Master's course, I wrote an essay about writing challenging, contemporary music for amateur performers. It was interesting to re-read it in the context of this concert, and you can download it here:

Composing Contemporary Music for Amateur Perfromers

Anyway, thanks to Jon for asking me to play, and for his Herculean work on the project!

Talking of New Music Brighton, they have a piano concert by Karen Kingsley coming up October, and I've submitted a short piece for the show, "Johnson & Johnson" - my first formal composition for piano. Here's the programme note:

"This piece is something of a conceit, bringing together melodic materials from "The Witches' Dance" and "Hellhound on my Trail", supernaturally-themed pieces by two very different Robert Johnsons, the English Renaissance lutenist and the great Mississippi bluesman. The main “verse”, played three times, is built on the I-IV-V structure of “Hellhound”, albeit with harmony that’s more Bartók than blues. The slow middle section lays interpolated melodies from the lute piece across a minor blues vamp. The feel of the piece is somewhat improvisatory, taking many of its rhythmic cues from Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau."

Mmm, whatever. All I can say is that writing it damn near broke me! As ever, I did a lot of prep, often in parallel processes. I did a lot of score reading (alongside listening) of solo piano works, from Chopin Nocturnes to Takemistu; in general, I surrounded myself ambiently with a lot of piano music (much of it in this Spotify playlist); and I spent weeks assembling and manipulating material, with a lot of experiments simply binned. In the end, I'm actually rather pleased with the outcome, which is somewhat more "jazz" than I'd anticipated. Whether it gets chosen for the concert, we'll have to see (I'm still somewhat scarred at having had my piece "Casualties of the Dharma" rejected for last year's Brass Fusion concert and at having Jon R push back on "The Honeycomb Conjecture", my original submission for the Brighton Guitar Group show). Anyway, here's a MIDI rendition of the piece. Thoughts welcome, as ever!

In January, I embarked on a series of classical guitar micro-studies, which I'm somewhat cheesily calling "picotudes". The pieces are responses to each study in Reginald Smith Brindle's 1981 collection of studies, "Guitarcsomos", adapting them in various ways or simply using them as a launchpad to explore different aspects of guitar technique. The intention is to work through all of RSB's studies like this, at least in part to try to gain some insight into his compositional process/thinking when approaching the guitar. (I have no idea what shape the next phase of my academic career will take - if any at all - but I'm reasonably sure it would have something to do with Smith Brindle.)

So, here are the first five as score videos (MIDI only at this stage); I'll try to post them here and on the scores page as each batch of five is written.

Away from formal, notated work, I've finally finished my long soundscape piece "Ghosts of the Kemptown Branch Line", with which I'm reanimating by dark ambient Abyssal Labs project, albeit that project's original contemplation-accompanying intent. As ever, there are still things about the piece that I'm not fully happy with, but with something of this scale, that's almost inevitable and in any case, I've got to the point where I can't really "hear" it any more. (As an aside, in a recent, highly enjoyable exchange with the composer Samuel Andreyev, Jim O'Rourke mentioned that Rafael Toral's brilliant "Spectral Evolution" (which O'Rourke has recently released) went through 50 mix iterations until they settled on a fine version. That's a super-human level of attention to detail, in my eyes. Or ears.)

Anyway, here's "Ghosts" on YouTube. It's still a premaster - I'm hoping to get it properly mastered later this summer and will self-release on the DGMFS Bandcamp page.

Away from music, I put in my second half marathon of the year, my annual outing at the Three Forts Challenge in the South Downs, taking in Cissbury and Chanctonbury Rings. As ever, a tough run, but always (at least in part) a beautiful experience. And it was great to run it with Frank and his gf Isabella and great mates Kane and Sam, albeit somewhat behind them all.

Keeping it metal on the Three Forts Challenge

I'll leave you with a couple of things. Here's a snapshot of my listening in 2024's second quarter:

And from the DGMFS archive, "Marching into American Sunlight", a very early Boom Logistics piece. Honestly, I was just figuring out how to make this kind of thing back then, but for all that, I actually think it stands up pretty well!

As ever, thanks to Sarah for her love, support, and unceasing patience - none of this would be possible, or even frankly conceivable without her.

2024 Q1 round-up

Well, ok... it's early April and I haven't posted a damn thing here this year. That's slack, even by my standards. Why so? Well, the short version is that there's been what's euphemistically called a "health scare" in the household. The longer version... well, that's not the kind of thing I go into here, but suffice it to say that I've been distracted by fairly serious issues on the home front, and those issues aren't going anywhere for a while, sadly.

That being said, I have been at least reasonably busy on the music front, so I thought I'd catch up on a few things.

The Brighton Guitar Quartet had a bit of a winter hiatus following our Rottingdean gig in October. In March we returned to the lovely St Laurence Church in Falmer, playing a full set to a packed house. The set was mostly new material for us, including two movements from the late Phillip Houghton's astounding "Opals" suite and my own arrangement of Bach's famous aria "Sheep May Safely Graze". Thanks to everyone who came out and supported us. You can hear the full set here:

Brighton Guitar Quartet · St Laurence Church, Falmer, March 2024

The BGQ also put in our annual appearance at the Springboard Competition here in Brighton. Alongside them I also put in a performance with a somewhat ad hoc trio featuring two excellent players, Paul Dallaway (more of him later) and Shaun Bullard, whom I first met at one of Gerald Garcia's Benslow weekends, if memory serves. Oh, and the day's adjudicator, Richard Durrant conducted an ensemble workshop in which I played electric bass (and can I just say to my teenage self, via time travel, take up the effing bass, you pillock!)

Anyway, the quartet's got several more gigs lined up this year, including Hove, Blatchington and Rottingdeam. Check out our website for details.

I haven't played with Jon Rattenbury's Brighton Guitar Group for some years, although I'll be perennially grateful to them - it's with them that I cut my ensemble and sight-reading teeth. But Jon's group are working on an exciting project, a concert of specially commissioned pieces from composers in the New Music Brighton group, of which I'm a member. I've written a piece for the concert (of which more below) but in the meantime, Jon's asked me to join the group for rehearsals to beef up the numbers, and I have to say I'm having a ball! Thanks to Jon for inviting me and to all the other players for indulging me. The concert is on Saturday June 15th; keep an eye on the NMB website for details.

I'm also still rehearsing - albeit somewhat occasionally - with Steve Gordon's Bach Band, including working on Steve's fiendishly tricky (although ingenious) guitar ensemble arrangement of Bach's 6th Brandenburg Concerto. No gigs lined up at the moment, but I'll keep you posted.

Now before I move on from classical guitar news, something a little more glum. I mentioned in my final post of 2023 that I'd just re-sat my performance diploma with Trinity and reported that "if I don't make it over the line this time, I have some serious re-thinking to do about the whole solo classical guitar thing." Well, I'm afraid that's exactly what happened - in fact, I scored even lower this time round. I have to say that I was genuinely shocked; I think it's fair to say that I'm at least reasonably self-critical, and I really did feel confident that this was a good performance. But there you go. In all my previous "marked" performances (grade exams, my Master's recitals, and competitions) I've always had pretty much the same overall feedback, which can essentially be boiled down to: "very musical performance somewhat marred by technical flaws", which given how late I took up the instrument I can live with. This time the musicality of my performance was criticised too, and apparently couldn't, er, save the day.

So what about the "rethinking" I said I'd do if this happened? Well I certainly have some underlying technical issues to sort out (not least my pretty unreliable rest stroke). And then there's the performance anxiety. Given how infrequently even serious amateurs like me get to play solo in front of a live audience, it's difficult to see how I can really address that, although of course all the ensemble work really does help. I'm just not sure at the moment. Maybe I'll just carry on working on solo material for my own pleasure - and of course as a way to help me develop my underlying chops and compositional understanding. No decision as yet, but I can report that while I was thinking of tackling some simpler pieces and more basic etudes, my teacher Gregg Isaacson has thrown the last, insanely virtuosic movement of Roland Dyens' "Libra Sonatina" at me - so who knows?

Away from performance, then... I mentioned earlier that Jon Rattenbury's guitar group are putting on an NMB show in the summer. I put myself forward to write a piece, a guitar sextet, and managed to knock out a first draft pretty quickly thanks to a Covid-enforced isolation leading up to Christmas. In the event, Jon thought that the piece would be a bit too challenging for the group to pull together in time, which I think on balance was fair. Rather than re-work the piece, I decided to reserve it for an expanded lineup of the BGQ, and knocked out another one over the Christmas "break". It's rhythmically more straightforward than the first piece, but uses broadly the same kind of "additive cells" approach that I've unashamedly nicked from Leo Brouwer. Having played it in rehearsal with the group, I'm happy with how it's coming together, although some of the hocketing and syncopation (or a combination of the two!) is presenting some challenges.

The piece, entitled "The Level at Midnight" (an obvious homage to Charles Ives, who I quite somewhat obliquely at a couple of points) will receive its premiere at the June concert, so I won't spoil that by presenting it here. However, I can give you a sneak preview of the first piece I worked on for the group, "The Honeycomb Conjecture". Here's a score video for the first draft - and I do stress draft - this needs a lot of work in terms of dynamics and other performance directions. It's also just MIDI guitar for the moment, but it should give you an idea of how the piece might eventually sound. (Also, I should note that following Richard Durrant's ensemble workshop at Springboard, I'm thinking seriously about adapting the contrabass classical part for electric bass... ) Anyway, here it is:

And I had yet another composition deadline over Christmas, again for an NMB concert. The group occasionally puts on a "composers' concert" in which members get to play their own pieces or get other composers from the group (and any willing friends) to do so.

I decided to write a piece for two electric guitars to perform with the excellent Paul Dallaway. I was hugely enjoying exploring Reginald Smith Brindle's classical guitar duet "The Pillars of Karnak" with Paul, and my electric piece takes some of its structural and harmonic grammar and (in my head at least) munges it with 80s-era King Crimson. Or something. We premiered the piece this weekend at the Friends' Meeting House in Brighton. My sincere thanks to Paul for putting in the time to nail it and helping me finalise the score.

Paul, me, and a couple of lovely guitars!

Now that the premiere is out of the way, here's a score video of the piece. It's a slightly naff MIDI guitar rendition at the moment. Saturday's concert was recorded; when I get a copy of our performance I'll post it here.

Talking of "Reggie" Smith Brindle (my hero!) I started working on his "Guitarcosmos" series of etudes earlier in the year, as part of the aforementioned rethinking of my technique. A few studies in, it struck me that I was interested in them as much to gain insight into RSB's compositional thinking as to work on my chops. A natural leap from there was to use each study as a basis to write my own; ok, perhaps not a natural leap for everyone, I grant, but it suggested itself readily to me. So I got down to work. I've only completed a handful of these studies (which I'm calling "Picotudes"), but here's a couple to be going on with. In an ideal world, I'd knock one of these out every week, but as I said somewhat cryptically at the head of this post, I'm far from living in a "perfect world" at the moment. (Note, once again, that these are MIDI renditions.)

Until very recently I was continuing my music theory and composition studies with Peter Copley down here in Brighton. We'd been working in parallel on Bach chorale harmonisation (especially realising figured bass) and species counterpoint. For the moment I'm putting those studies on hold, but here's where I'd got to in my counterpoint studies: species 2 in 3 voices.

Away from music, I've been trying to keep my body in vaguely working order. In February, as ever, I ran the Brighton Half Marathon. Not a great time (2'09"), but five minutes better than last year and not bad for my age, I guess.

One more push...

And as I write this I'm a week into a particularly mad challenge, a commitment to do 100 pushups every day in April to raise money for cancer research. I started in batches of 20 reps across the day and am currently at two sets: 60 + 40. Ouch. I'd love to get to the end of the month able to do the 100 in one go, but that might be a push (as it were). If you'd like to sponsor me, you can do so on my giving page. Thanks to everyone who's sponsored me so far!

Next month it's the Three Forts Challenge half marathon trail run in the South Downs. Not sure I'm quite up to it yet, and I certainly need to get some hill training in over the next three weeks, but most years it tends to come together, so let's see...

A couple of things to leave you with. For International Women's Day in March, I put together a Spotify playlist commemorating the often undersung contribution of women to modern, post-modern and avant-garde over the last half-century or so. The set is mostly "contemporary classical" (whatever that now means) with the odd foray into jazz, electronica, free improvisation and outsider rock. I hope you find something in here to enjoy:

And here's a snapshot of what I've been listening to overall since the beginning of the year:

Finally, from the DGMFS archive, a score video of my piece for mezzo-soprano and guitar, an adaptation of three sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning written as part of my Master's compositional work at Surrey, sung beautifully by my fellow student Yi Zhang:

December and November round-up

Right, the usual apologies for the lack of a recent update; as ever, busy busy busy on multiple fronts.

On November 28th I re-sat my classical guitar performance diploma with Trinity. I won't get the results until after Christmas, but I felt pretty good about it. Let's just say that if I don't make it over the line this time, I have some serious re-thinking to do about the whole solo classical guitar thing. But let's not get too ominous just yet.

I certainly did a lot of performance prep for the exam. On the Friday before I ran the complete set for my son Frank and his gf Izzy. Frank is, of course, a discerning music fan and a music maker of no mean ability, so that was daunting enough. But then on the Saturday, my teacher and the Brighton Guitar Quartet's "dear leader" Gregg Isaacson put on an informal intra-player afternoon concert at the delightfully bonkers Bom-banes in Kemptown. The BGQ turned in a couple of numbers as did Gregg's other more intermediate quartet (more of them below), and a bunch of us did a solo slot.

An identity line-up in Bexhill

Then on Sunday I went over to Bexhill to play at one of the regular AK Classical Guitar Society events organised by the excellent Anastasiya Kryvanos and Kianush Robeson, and played Turina's "Homage a Tarrega", with which I went on to open my exam recital (no pressure there!) As part of the event, Kia turned in a fantastic half-hour solo set, the highlight of which was, for me at any rate, a relatively rare outing of Reginald Smith Brindle's "Five Etruscan Preludes". Kia has a beautiful sound and touch and he really brought out the mystery in these miniatures. Incidentally, the piece is featured on the recently released first volume of the complete Smith Brindle solo guitar works performed brilliantly by the young Italian guitarist Duilio Meucci.

Anyway, thanks to Kia and Anastasiya for organising such an enjoyable afternoon; I hope to be popping along to Bexhill again next year (details on upcoming events here).

But the classical guitar fun (or series of ordeals, depending on one's point of view) didn't end there, as last weekend it was the final Platform event of 2023 here in Brighton. I've mentioned Platform on many occasions on this blog. Organised by Brighton guitarist Jon Rattenbury, it provides a great opportunity for players of all levels to perform to each other, either solo or in various ensembles. The concerts always kick off with The Brighton Guitar Group, an orchestra led by Jon, and this time round they were in great form, performing pieces by Praetorius, Sor and Carulli. The BGQ played a couple of pieces from the new set we're working on, an arrangement of Mussorgsky's "The Old Castle" and the first movement of the late Australian composer Phillip Houghton's thrilling, numinous "Opals" suite. I also really enjoyed depping for one of the players in Gregg's "other" quartet who couldn't make it on the day; a bit of a semi-sight-reading by-the-seat-of-the-pants performance, but great fun.

Jon and the Brighton Guitar Group

By the way, Jon's orchestra is going to be performing a special concert next year organised by New Music Brighton, a group of composers based down here on the south coast. The concert will feature new music commissioned from NMB and at some point over the next few weeks I will submitting a piece. Or at least that's the plan - more soon on that front.

Lots of guitar stuff is already scheduled for 2024. The BGQ have gigs lined up in Brighton, Falmer, Rottingdean and Worthing with more to be announced. I'll be playing at the annual Springboard competition in Brighton in several solo categories and in a trio with Paul Dallaway and Shaun Bullard. Oh, and talking of Paul, I'm hoping to write an electric guitar duet for us to play at the New Music Brighton composers' concert in April. Something else to get cracking on. On and then there's Steve Gordon's Bach Band, with whom I'm going to be playing Brandenburg 6 at point, which is, er, daunting.

Anyway, news on all that as I have it. In the meantime... I've mentioned my continuing music theory and composition studies with Peter Copley here before. We're continuing with Bach figured bass realisation, and here's my latest effort:

Simon Hopkins · Bach: "Lasset Uns mit Jesu Ziehen" (harmonisation exercise)

We're also working on species counterpoint, working through Fux's "Gradus ad Parnassum". I haven't posted anything here so far as it's all a bit, well, exercise-y, but here's my first attempt at species 4 exercises (suspensions and syncopation) which start to almost resemble music.

A couple of other bits of miscellany. Long-term readers and friends will know of my abiding love of John Zorn's work; indeed, only last year I wrote about the life-changing moment of seeing Zorn's Naked City playing in London in 1989. Much to my surprise, Zorn's Tzadik label catalogue is now available on Spotify. I've done my best to keep up with Tzadik over the years, but the wallet can only be emptied so far, so this is great news (I shall of course continue to buy the CDs that particularly grab me). I've especially been enjoying the work he's written for the quartet of guitarist Julian Lage, pianist Brian Marsella, drummer Chas Smith and bassist Jorge Roeder. Here's  just one of their recent albums, "Full Fathom Five":

Somewhat re-engaging with Zorn's work brought me to a couple of interviews he'd done over the last few years with Bill Milkowski, republished to commemorate the composer's 70th birthday. I was particularly taken with this quote, and will leave it here without comment: "I was never a believer in applying for grants. I don’t like to put my hand out to somebody and say, “Please help me.” I just went and did what I did and I managed to survive in the marketplace. I understand how some people can’t do that and need the grant process, but I find the grant process itself is so demeaning. Immediately, it’s like you’re asking daddy for a handout, you’re being judged by people who have no right to judge you, and if you do get the grant it’s usually half the money you asked for two years too late."

I also really enjoyed the first volume of the brilliant jazz pianist Brad Mehldau's memoir, "Formation; Building a Personal Canon". It's a gripping read, and at times shockingly candid, but among all the addiction and sexuality stuff, or indeed the Allan Bloom and Theodore Adorno (honestly, it's that kind of book) it's very profoundly about music. And also often very funny. I did of course, particularly enjoy the chapter about prog, which ends with an observation I can hardly fault: "... Punk is childlike as well, or teenage-like at least; it's immature to just say "fuck everything" indefinitely and never suit up and do something constructive in society. In my own wanderings, I've found grown-up proggers a happier bunch than grown-up punkers. They seem to age better." Quite.

That's it for this update. I'll try to get in a 2023 round-up over the next week or two. In the meantime, from the archive... Here's a recording of the first and only live outing for my project Boom Logistics. This was a performance at the Unitarian Church in Brighton supporting the improv group Fourth Page, whose bassist Peter Marsh and Paul May joined me in what turned out to be something of a loop-athon. (Brilliantly, the show was on the main Saturday evening of the London Olympics - the "greatest night in Britsh sporting history" as one friend put it - so the audience was somewhat threadbare). I actually find myself liking it rather more than modesty should allow, and am starting to wonder, ten years and several releases on, what a "mature" Boom Logistics live show might turn out like...

Some thoughts on my piece "She Erases a Constellation" for Flute and Guitar (2021)

I've just posted a score video for my 2021 piece for flute and classical guitar, "She Erases a Constellation", which was the first full submission on my Master's course at the University of Surrey, and to be honest my first real attempt at anything one might call "formal", or at least notated composition. I've posted the commentary I had to write about the piece below. (The course was at least in part research-based, so all creative work submissions required an accompanying reflective commentary.) But before that, some thoughts two years on.

• I guess the first thing that strikes me is that it is a little jejune. To be sure, there's a lot of influence in there, which you would expect after >45 years of listening to music seriously. But if an informed listener were to come to it cold, I think they'd immediately see this was the work of a student finding his way. (I think this goes for the commentary too).
• That said, I can see that I was already starting to grapple with some of the themes that I'd continue to work with on the course (and since), in particular rhythmic and harmonic ambiguity.
• The piece was written, as I recall, about six weeks into the course, at which point most of the composition modules had been led by Milton Mermikides (now Gresham College's Professor of Music). On each week of the course we'd been set various compositional exercises and I really threw myself at them, turning out sketch after sketch (as anyone following my Soundcloud "Surrey Sketches" playlist at the time will testify). A lot of the material ended up recycled in this piece.
• As a result, as I noted in the commentary below, there's perhaps a little too much going on stylistically. Like I say, a bit jejune.
• The recording is currently midi-only. I'm hoping to record it properly in 2024 if I can find a flautist to work with. I think at that point I'll re-work the score, and try to incorporate more idiomatic writing for the flute. Are some of those passages even playable?!
• And on that point, I realise that the guitar part is a bit of a monster at times, particularly the faux-metal ostinato passages. One thought I'm paying with is to re-score the piece for flute and electric guitar, which I think could work well. We'll see.
• I think I'm mostly struck by the distance between this piece and my final submission, the small ensemble composition "The Poems by Li Bai". Although some of the approaches in that piece are foreshadowed in "She Erases", the difference in scale, ambition, materials, attention to detail and execution is pretty colossal. It was quite a year!

I'm hoping to re-work the DGMFS website over the Christmas, er, "break", including a page dedicated to all my scores so far, so expect more score videos like this one over the next few weeks. In the meantime, here's what I had to say about it two years ago.

 

Commentary (October 2020)

Process

Following Reginald Smith Brindle’s observations about the difficulty of starting with a blank page[1], I started with a simple sketch of the piece’s outline:

I then outlined the piece purely rhythmically, initially working with cells such as this:

The entirety of the agitato A section and much of the Tranquillo B section were written as rhythms only, according to the narrative structure outlined below. Different harmonic and melodic approaches were ascribed to “zones” of the piece. The melodic lines and chords were then written into this framework. I worked on paper with the first full draft, adding dynamics, expression and correcting errors in the scoring:

The scoring was finalised in Sibelius and the audio was rendered (in midi) in Logic X.

Structure/narrative

The overarching narrative took its cue from the first movement of Leo Brouwer’s “El Decameron Negro”[2], especially in its juxtaposition of agitated and reflective passages. Essentially ABA in structure, the piece’s sections respectively move from rhythmic and harmonic dissonance towards a more congruent endpoint.

Analysis: rhythm, harmony & melody[3]

 The piece employs rhythmic dissonance throughout. The opening (bb 1-11)[4] and duet in the Tranquillo (bb46-69) use radically different rhythmic groupings in the parts to render them apparently independent, somewhat influenced by Morton Feldman[5]. The guitar solo (bb70-92) uses guitaristic Euclidean rhythms in the style of John McLaughlin[6] and Roland Dyens[7]. The ostinato groupings in bb22-33 are obliquely inspired by the math-metal of Meshuggah[8] and Tool[9].

The harmony draws on a range of approaches The opening (bb1-10) is based on two whole-tone scales, and is polymodal from b9. The chords in bb11-17 are Lydian AITs based on the notes of the first AIT. The approach is modal in many places (eg. Lydian dominant and altered scale in bb18-30; Dorian #4 in bb54-67; Aeolian, Dorian and Lydian in bb68-90). Trichords are deployed extensively (eg. bb16-18 and bb54-67).

The melodies were mostly drawn instinctively from the harmony. The melody in bb 46-57 is based on a palindromic dissonance contour (IC: 16234543261); this is foreshadowed in the flute solo. The flute part in the recapitulation is in large part melodically inverted from its initial appearance.

Notation

I drew on Eliane Gould’s Behind Bars (2011)[10] for notation guidance. The guitar part is more closely annotated (see below); RH fingerings and string directions are given where necessary to avoid ambiguity but are indicative only[11].

Critical reflection

I’m broadly happy that the narrative objectives of the piece and the intended tension between dissonance and consonance (generically speaking) have been achieved. I would love to have worked with a flautist to explore the flute more idiomatically, and of course to have had the time to record the guitar parts properly. Overall, I may have employed too many of the approaches discussed in the course so far, and in retrospect might have given a little more breathing space to fewer.

[1] “Another important factor must be borne in mind when we begin a piece: too much detail at that stage can be a handicap.” Reginald Smith Brindle: Musical Composition (1986), p5

[2] See The Music Salon Blog (2012): http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2012/12/townsend-el-decameron-negro-i-el-arpa.html

[3] For a full breakdown of the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic approaches, see Appendix: Annotated Score

[4] Observations about the opening A section apply to the recapitulation.

[5] See Samuel Andreyev: “Morton Feldman's Bass Clarinet and Percussion: Analysis” (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emeDjNSxsCs

[6] eg. Mahavishnu Orchestra: “Faith” (1975) https://open.spotify.com/track/3jobR8lLBgq4VZiqRcZhae?si=50c396dc7bd2405c

[7] eg. “Lettre mi-longue” bb33-35 and “Lettre à soi-même” bb6-14 (2001)

[8] See Jonathan Pieslak, "Re-casting Metal: Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah"(2007) https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/mts.2007.29.2.219?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

[9] See Rick Beato: "What Makes This Song Great? Ep.15 TOOL" (2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScRG40_7zb0

[10] For flute: pp253-260; for guitar: pp373-389

[11] “My fingerings are offered only as suggestions throughout, but students are urged to consider the rationale behind them before throwing them out!” Gerald Garcia, introduction to “25 Etudes Esquisses” (1995)

Download She Erases a Constellaton - Annotated Score