This is a re-working of one of the sections of the music I created for Jane Turner’s dance piece based on the Gog Magogs, on the Stapleford chalk meadows.. My original music for her dance piece was based on the coordinates of the Stapleford Chalk Downs, just southeast of Cambridge. Jane’s choreography was based on some sketches I sent her by the somewhat eccentric Cambridge-based mathematician and historian T.C. Lethbridge, who, during an archeological excavation on the chalk downs, came to believe he had discovered lost chalk carvings in the side of the gentle hill overlooking Cambridge next to the Wandlebury hill fort.
Unfortunately, no one else has been able to detect them, not unlike his claims to have found secret Nazi invasion markings scratched on various churches and East Anglian signposts. He was such an eminent academic the War Department felt duty bound to investigate his claims, and he thus led a number of chaps from MI5 around small coastal villages for some time, inviting them to closely examine some scratches on a number of village signposts and suchlike. Eyebrows of course rose ever-higher as they marched fruitlessly from one bit of scratched, flaking paint to the next out-of-place stone in a church tower.
This is a very rough mix, part of some things I’ve been working on with the excellent Lisbon-based composer/producer Andre Nascimento. We have been bouncing some stems back and forth in what is hoped to become a larger project. So Andre has radically remixed/recomposed some of the music I wrote for the choreographer Jane Turner and her Magog dance project last year. This is in no way the final form, but just a taster. I’ll leave here for a few weeks and it swap over as and when.
This is a new project with my partner Jane Perryman, based around the yearly solar cycle as experienced from our rural cottage in Suffolk.
We began working on this project together on the summer solstice, discussing the methods and data as it unfolded. As Jane collected photos and material on a fortnightly basis, and based the shape of her ceramics on the changing angles of the sun, I would also be present recording environmental sounds at each session, getting up at civil twilight (for instance, 3:45 am at the summer solstice) to record the birdsong and other environmental sounds in the immediate area. Both of our elements have adopted the same structure and material: 26 segments of time using material from the immediate locale, which, in case of the soundscape, the palindromic structure reflects the changing conditions of daylight by both lengthening/shortening the duration of each segment to match (from 45 seconds to 90 seconds and back), and varying the dynamics, density of events to match the varying position of the civil twilight sunrise and noon azimuth over the period, along with reflecting this in the spatial mix of the sound, with the various environmental elements in the places in the timeline when they were collected. The question explored here is whether the use of the Unintentional, or use of structures and elements taken from things that stand outside of human intervention, make for a justifiable art object?
The sun’s electromagnetic drone which runs throughout the piece is used with the kind permission of Professor Alexander Kosonichev of the Stanford Observatory. This sound was also run through a Fournier analysis to derive the harmonics present and give a pitch series to use in the composition as simple melodic material, which was confined to five notes. The authorial hand is only evident here, as these pitches were used for brief bursts of simple melodic improvisation, So this is a collage, not a mosaic, which would imply similar elements existing on the same plane, as this is a collection of disparate elements as and when they occur in our surroundings. This is a piece of musique concrete, as it primarily uses raw material gathered from the world around us and modified.
After the fortnightly series of pots were completed and fired, their struck tones (the idea coming from the way a potter taps a pot to check for flaws) were recorded and assigned a place in the structure, along with the birdsong, wind, and rain that I had collected at that respective week. The sounds of the pots themselves are the only things altered, although not to any great extent; only slowed slightly (4x) to allow the natural harmonics, that would otherwise be much too brief, to reveal themselves.
Here’s what my friend Tom Hall wrote about it in an article:
Elective Affinities: Kevin Flanagan’s Soundtrack to Accompany From Light to Dark From Dark to Light.
Composer-performer Kevin Flanagan has made a sonic work as part of ceramic artist Jane Perryman’s collaborative project From Light to Dark From Dark to Light. The sonic accompanies the ceramic as one person might accompany another on an outing: there are shared interests and interplay, but also a sense of separate artistic identities. To borrow a phrase notably used by Goethe, we notice ‘elective affinities’ between the two works, but differences too that extend beyond the affordances of the media, tools to fashion and modes of perceptions employed to experience them (sight, touch, sound, heat, hands, eyes, ears, microphones, musical instruments, coffee, clay, noise, clay, wind, text, etc.). Reflecting as it does practices rooted in the 20th Century avant-garde more recently familiar from cinematic sound design, we might describe Flanagan’s work as a ‘soundtrack’.
The research and process underpinning the creation of Perryman’s project has been well-documented elsewhere. Experiencing the work is to notice aspects of gradually changing visual and textural form, regularity, organic irregularity, repetition and process. These notions form a good starting point for experiencing Flanagans’ 30 minute soundtrack, heard on an endless gallery loop. This presentation complements the soundtrack’s form, which encapsulates the spiral and palindromic nature of musical pitch and a telescoped, Viconian cyclical year. The 26 divisions within Perryman’s work are also reflected in the sectional temporal form of Flanagan’s soundtrack. (The two accompanied one another into the landscape each fortnight as described elsewhere, he with microphone and digital recorder.) The sonic perceptual divisions are marked by a prominent bass note in the piano, with the duration of each section (between 45 and 90 seconds) and other aspects of the soundtrack being determined by the ever-changing ratio between the duration of night and day.
The other sonic components that make up the soundtrack are readily apparent to the ear. We notice interplay between the simple piano musical ‘gestures’ and semi-improvised soprano saxophone responses. Speaking in January 2021, Flanagan described an interest in how closely these ‘are touching upon each other’ – we may compare this with the placement between Perryman’s ceramic artefacts in the gallery space. The minimalistic cluster of five repeatedly reordered notes we hear are derived from analysis of the low rumbling drone we sense underpinning the soundtrack, a ‘sonification’ by Professor Alexander G. Kosovichev of data recordings of solar oscillations.
Within the soundtrack we also hear the lightly struck, gong-like sounds of each of Perryman’s 26 ceramics in sequence and may notice connections to the sounding notes of the piano and sax. Finally, we hear overlapping ambient ‘field recordings’ made during observational sessions as described above. Listening, we notice the rich sonic textures the microphone happened to capture which mirror the lines and traces of natural materials which texture the surfaces of Perryman’s ceramics. Blending with the other sonic elements, we notice textures of wind, rain, aircraft, and birdsong, and are occasionally surprised by the sounds of vocalising Tawny owls, or the happenstance of encountering the human-made sounds of aircraft within the sonic environment.
Last year, I was asked to be Artist in Residence to oversee a series of events that were going to take place around the Stapleford Granary Arts Centre (Brit spelling). I had asked a series of East Anglian artists to propose work that was related to the locale of Stapleford, near Cambridge. The environmental sound artist Simon Scott was recording birdsong in the chalk downs above the village to create a piece to be performed with a string quartet. And we had Boo Hewerdine, the award winning Cambridge singer/composer was going to collaborate with a local ensemble, the Phoenix Chorale in choral settings (by me) of some of his music; plus Mark Cocker, an East Anglian natural historian, was going to give a talk, accompanied by music, about the avian wildlife of the chalk downs. Also the choreographer Jane Turner was going to create a work based on Lethbridge’s suppositions that there were giant carvings in the chalk in the downs of the gods Gog and Magog. And then, suddenly, we weren’t.
In the end, everything was postponed indefinitely because of the lockdown. However, so far we have managed to create on-line version of two of the events thus far. Jane Turner worked with the film maker Chris Frazer Smith and members of her troupe, present and past, to create a virtual performance of her piece:
Jane Turner’s Turning Worlds ensemble, Chris Frazer Smith’s film, my music.
Because the entire project was shifted online, Jane’s piece was a real test of my nascent software skills. The original piece was chopped by more than half in order to create a short film with most of the dancers filming themselves at home, along with a small group joining together to stay 2 meters apart on Stapleford Down itself.. The structure and pitch sets were based on the coordinates of Stapleford Chalk Downs, and local birdsong ( slowing down a skylark recording to reveal what became a bassline), which in turn fed into the instrumental parts. As we couldn’t at that point expect to get a group of players together, the instrumentation was largely determined by what sounded the least annoying as far as my orchestral sample library went. So I had to compose out everything as score in Sibelius, and then fly the individual instruments stems into Protools to be hooked up with a set of orchestral samples, and then edited into the video. This forced me to confront a number of tutorial videos with very capable Californian engineers named things like ‘Todd’, who walk you through the editing and recording techniques, but, unfortunately using the most excruciating West Coast Yacht Rock stylings of the last century as examples: “…wow – just listen to how that guitar soars over the vocals…” in a number of sub-Doobie Brothers’ examples; margaritas at the ready.
So now, I’m working on a piece for the Phoenix Chorale, which has come together with the singer-songwriter Boo Hewerdine to perform choral arrangements of some of Boo’s pieces in a virtual choir format. It should come together before the New Year. I had originally set a half-dozen of his pieces for the choir, but because of the wildly cumbersome work-arounds needed to record and align 25-30 separate choristers in a virtual format, we decided to just go with one for the moment. One of the problems was the fact that there was, of course, no conductor controlling the choir, so each part has a highly personal take on dynamics, phrasing, sound. That, and the fact that none of the singers had a safety-in-numbers feeling so as to be able to confidently project their part, instead singing by themselves in their room, all to aware of the family around them, which tended to inhibit their performance. Therefore you had to ride the levels of each singer’s track with the score in front of you to edit in the dynamics that would match the ensemble.
But it’s interesting to try and work so far outside your personal style; and the song needed to be surrounded by a sympathetic arrangement. Also, with the constraints of time, the pieces themselves with their largely diatonic nature, the need for absolute clarity as there won’t be any rehearsals, and the technical demands of working with a young choir, you find that these constraints are making most of the decisions for you ahead of time
So four performances have come and gone: Brettenham, Sporle, Stapleford and Fring, with the ensemble sounding more cohesive each time. There will hopefully be at least two more, in Wells and Kings Lynn, when the weather warms up the churches again in the spring, along with a recording session sometime in the new year. And here’s hoping the King Lynn Festival Too comes through as promised next June.
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And so, ten months on, none of this came to pass. The coming of the Covid lockdown meant that the recording was canceled, all the gigs in the Spring are postponed till who know when, assuming the venues survive? I’ve been lucky, the Festival I was meant to curate still resulted in some work, namely a piece with a choreographer, and another with a virtual choir, along with various bits and bobs and a gallery installation to beaver away at.
Things have gotten somewhat beardy in the meantime, but one carries on.
The small 11th century Saxon church at Newton, from the unique and incredibly damp central tower (check the moss and mold).
It’s early July, I’ve sent off the string and vocal parts after finishing them three weeks ago, and I’ve been sweating over Protools beginners manuals and videos for the last month or so to try and remember how the software works. The very clear, relentlessly upbeat (and noticeably nasal) West Coast sound engineer who narrates them can grate eventually, as can the somewhat twee MOR guitar bands he uses to illustrate his points. It was a bit like kids TV in the 50’s (” So kids, I’ve made this model of Sputnik just using toilet paper tubes, library paste, and bent paper clips for the antenna…”) . Still… we got through it.
So above is the first of four pieces based on the resonances of the Peddars Way churches; it is built from local sounds of the (pissing) rain of the day I went through, plus birdsong from the area once I got far enough away from the main road to lose the traffic noise. I sampled some notes on piano, etc, plus some singing bowls and a couple of propane tanks here behind the Lazy K Ranch. These were, through the magic of radio, pitch-shifted and generally messed with to the various actual church frequencies returned on the sweeps (strangely, the church does not exist in a tempered continuum); +30 cents here, -49 cents there, to create the sounds to assemble. (A chapeau here to John Ward). Fun, if time-consuming. I started messing about with organizing the structure rhythmically from the series, but just started having too much fun. So much for a disciplined approach.
This is going to be used as a setting to some improvisations – exactly how yet remains to be seen.
The idea of having way too much of anything, like these Baroque Nederland-ish depictions of plenty, is something that keeps coming back to me as I sort through all the material I’ve gathered for the Peddars Way project. I particularily like the coy reveal through the parted velvet curtains of a very un-Nederlands backdrop with hills. Wine, silk cloth, exotic fruit, cherries, oysters, shrimp, ham, Venetian glass, silver platters…someone has stopped for a breather …or something; perhaps that something suggested by the oysters.
Working on the Peddars Way piece, I realize I’ve gathered way too much stuff to keep the the thing cohesive: thirteen melodic fragments, five church resonance profiles, two plainchant melodies; plus several months of sketches of messing around with it all. Pages and Pages of messing around. It’s now more than half-written, and I’ve just spent an afternoon assembling the fragments in their working order to have a try at how the connections work. Normally I try to keep the number of processes and monads at a minimum; not so much that I’m concerned with a total gesamtkunstwerk , I’m not that concerned with a strict organicism of material and media springing from a single source as such.
The main question is do I try to keep it more-or-less through composed, or reveal the joins that make up the whole. Again, both the Berio and Stravinsky stuff I’ve been obsessing over is happy to use either a suite or a collection of individual songs as a template. The thing that makes it work is the coherence of the composer’s individual voice.
It’s a little like when I use the swiss chard I’ve cut out of the garden; I’ll wash and chop it a few times until nothing seems to be moving (always bad in a salad). Then, when I assemble it in its context, the connections will be revealed, hopefully. As I write this, I’m checking out the March chard from the garden to go into the risotto – all quiet on the veg front.
Trying to stay in touch with the Peddars way piece on a daily basis, I’ve been mildly angsting with large, scribbled A3 diagrams as to how all the various elements will organize themselves: everything is related, and, (ahem) it isn’t.
Thinking about it as I composed out various sections based on particular churches, it seemed what I had was a suite a of parts, some quite disjunct, and getting more so as I looked for ways to add improvisatory sections for the sax based on the church resonances I had been gathering with John Ward. And there’s also the possibility of getting the rest of the ensemble in on the fun, in a semi-aleatoric-kind-of-way.
perhaps not the most breathtaking of panoramas, but one I’ve been staring at all week…
A couple of models occured to me; the first was Stravinsky’sAgon, because it combines two radically different compositionsal approaches literally bolted together as a dance suite over a two year period when he went through a major and traumatic stylistic shift, adapting his previous way of working to incorporate his personal take on the serialist school he felt he was being superceded by. Even Boulez (after dimissing Stravinsky as a reactionary for years), one of the most total of the total serialists, admitted Agon had opened a new sound, and declared it one of the seminal pieces of the mid-twentieth century.
What interests me about it is that there was a major break between starting and finishing it, maybe precipitated by a late-mid-life crisis of relevancy. The older parts of the suite are still in his neo-classical style, while others explore his personal take on serialism. And they are shuffled up and combined so there’s no telling what you get next. But, amazingly, there’s no sense of which is which; and the listener would be hard pressed to point out such an incredible shift in aesthetic and method between sections. So there is hope.
The second was the open and luminous settings of folk songs by Berio; eleven songs from different cultures, each one different. They each give a nod towards the style in which they arose, like the acerbic Gaelic fiddle and harp accompianiment in the first piece, Black is the Color…. Although it doesn’t quite have the same stylistic cohesiveness as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, it also manages to set each song in a unique texture; like Schoenberg, using differing elements of a small ensemble in constantly changing colors. And the fiddle part oddly echoes the violin solo in the first Pas-de Trois of Agon.
Up on a hill, overlooking the Nar valley to the north, in the next-to-non-existent hamlet of Houghton St Mary, there is a small, now-restored-once-abandoned church in what is now a lost village equidistant to the Pickenhams (both north and south) . It was a good mile-ish hoof up a hill in the heat. With the pack. And no more water until I got to the pub three miles on.
So the story goes, that when its roof had collapsed in the 19th century and the water got in, the Old Testament inspired alterations of the Reformation, like scales from one’s eyes, gradually went with it. The lime render used (which has a lot to answer for as far as British church architecture goes) to conceal the idolatrous Papist images, once wet from the intrusive weather, had fallen away to reveal medieval wall paintings with Gabriel and his trumpet calling fort the faithful on the last Day of Judgement. The later hammer blows in the plaster to give the render purchase give the effect of an unfortunate bullet marked wall in a recently fallen dictatorship, which, I suppose, it was. The hammer blows of fate? The souls surrounding Gabriel are in Rapture… if only all gigs were like that.
Naturally, any sax player could to relate to what should perhaps be our patron saint; well, although not strictly speaking a saint. Gabriel has his own feast day, though. St Cecilia is fine, but she doesn’t have a horn to hand at crucial moments. Instead, she sang non-stop to prevent her marriage to Valerian being consummated; perhaps not an ideal life partner/soul mate for a lonely guy, and it might also say something about her singing. And then she was martyred. Perhaps a small comfort for Valerian was that he also martyred as well. Maybe. And that it all took place under the everyone’s favorite Stoic, Marcus Aurelius.
Gabriel on the east wall of he chancel
You can’t quite see them, but you would have heard them; there was a huge swarm of bees around the west door at the base of the tower. You had to calmly amble in. I tried recording them, but chickened out.
So… a month or so after I completed the walk, John Ward and I showed up with all his gear in the tiny but intensely evocative early 11th century pre-conquest Saxon church at Newton, just outside Castle Acre. This was on a cold, windy, rainy day in November as the sun was going down. The place feels ancient, with its small barrel-ceiling nave, Saxon stonework, a wonky central tower with dead-end stairwells that ascend to a long-lost gallery above the departed rood screen, and an even smaller chancel and modest altar, which you can just about touch both walls of. The floor and skirting are dripping with moss and damp, and nowhere does the building contain a right angle. You can see the moss in between the bricks in the photo; no kidding.
This is one of the few churches actually on the Peddars Way; however, the village must have shrunk considerably some time ago, now merely being accompanied by a large farm, a roadside pub, and a few houses; and now cut off from even most of them by the busy main coast road. Presumably the rest of the congregation had shifted allegiance to nearby Castle Acre when superseded by the Normans with the grander Church of St James, the Norman Motte and Bailey (there to show who was in charge), and the sprawling late 11th century Cluniac monastery about two miles up the road. Another statement of domination by a fresh wave of conquerors, leaving this small Saxon church & hamlet thoroughly cowed.
Newton All Saints. Measuring the resonant profile with John Ward
It was dark in the church; and difficult to get any usable photos with my vaguely crap aged tablet. While John set up his gear (a mike, a speaker and a laptop), I walked around the space, giving random claps, listening to the echoes and slapback. As the rain beat down, John gave several frequency sweeps in differing locations, the most interesting being under the central tower. The sweeps are kinda spooky, as you stand there listening for something to happen for the first 5-10 seconds before a low rumble appears, and then wonder what else is happening after it disappears, standing quietly until it quietly bleeps to inform you it’s finished. This, you realize, (of course) just brings home the amount of your very own hearing loss. There is stuff happening in the silent sections, but now it’s just music for dogs (here’s one of my particular faves:). So here’s the sweep result:
We got this profile from the center of the church; unlike most of the returns, which are on the haphazard side; usually containing what look like a number of harmonic spectra from several random bass notes; this is interesting as it shakes out to a slightly flat (10-12 cents) E G C; with an additional top octave C is sharp by about 20 cents; an inverted C major triad: a concord, of sorts.
Confession: I was disappointed; I have trouble with simple consonances with my composer hat on. This should not be the case.
I’ve been up against it the last couple of months composing and preparing for the Cambridge Jazz Festival gig on the 26th of November, featuring ‘Jazzman’ John Robert Clarke’s performance poetry and Laura Brera’s dance interludes – just about there…things are at the herding cats stage trying to set up some rehearsals; unlikely we’ll have everyone in the same place at the same time.
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