Delighted to be featured in WHALE arts Impact Report
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I spent the morning recording today. I wanted to capture stone sound, sounds of the violin and also prepared violin. This was done with solder wire wrapped around the strings, as well as electrical clips on the E and D strings. I also bowed cardboard. Cool sounds. I used Neumanns KM 184s, 48000 hz and 24 bit rate. Messing about with Max patching led to this tonight. Quite fun.
I came across the music of Conlon Nancarrow recently . He was a talented experimental composer born in 1912. He lived in Mexico and composed for player piano using scrolls. His music is very energetic and its drawing an increasing following in the last few years. For those of us that use coding there is much inspiration. His piano parts are often impossible to play live. Here's one below.
I have been looking at tuning systems for the piano recently through the great Kadenze courses. The piece below, composed and performed by Christopher Otto is one of the listening suggestions. Have a listen. You can hear the beats through the intervals being just out of tune. Interesting and startling piece.
My music was featured at a lovely evening of night projections, music and sculpture at Ocean Terminal on Friday 14th October. The event was well attended and was a great success.   Rosetta's mission is complete
Rosetta was crash-landed on the comet is has been following on 30 September. The ESA Blog tells us that the site Rosetta landed on is named Sais (after the location where the Rosetta Stone was). Sad really.
One of my pieces which I composed in 2014 was inspired by this great mission. Oddly there have been many more plays of it recently on Spotify. I guess search engines must be coming up with it. Here it is. I had the opportunity with fellow and composers and musicians to perform Sticks by Christian Wolff recently . Very interesting and a great example of sounds and ecology brought into composition.
The performance instructions are as follows: Make sounds with sticks of various kinds, one stick alone, several together, on other instruments, sustained as well as short. Don’t mutilate trees or shrubbery; don’t break anything other than the sticks; avoid outright fires unless they serve a practical purpose. You can begin when you have not heard a sound from a stick for a while; two or three can begin together. You may end when your sticks or one of them are broken small enough that a handful of the pieces in your hands cupped over each other are not, if shaken and unamplified, audible beyond your immediate vicinity. Or hum continuously on a low note; having started proceed with other sounds simultaneously (but not necessarily continuously); when you can hum no longer, continue with other sounds, then stop. With several players either only one should do this or two or two pairs together (on different notes) and any number individually. You can also do without sticks but play the sounds and feelings you imagine a performance with sticks would have. |
 Fiona Harrison
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