When you imagine going to a classical/art music concert, you probably picture a big concert hall full of audience members in fancy outfits all focused on the stage while the performers fill the otherwise silent space with their music. But it isn't always like that. I recently went to a performance that was not in [...]
Ultimate Care II - Matmos This album is made entirely from the sounds of a washing machine...genius. I will never listen to a washing machine in the same way again! If you’re enjoying my content here and want to support me you can give me a one-off tip via Ko-Fi. Previous Friday Favourites Other places [...]
Bird Raptures - not quite what I had planned... Last week, I mentioned I had started a setting of Christina Rossetti's Bird Raptures for SATB choir... Compositions sometimes make their own decisions about what they want to be. I spent the last week trying to shoe-horn this text into an SATB arrangement...and it just didn't want to work. [...]
It would be remiss of me to go much further in my 'Friday Favourites' segment without talking about Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening practice. I discovered Oliveros' work relatively recently at an ~exchange concert. At the end of the concert, all the performers came together to play Sound Fishes...it was wonderful. I felt so [...]
Triptych for solo piano The first piece of Triptych is pretty much finished! (Well, as finished as a piece of music can ever be...). I have worked out what the ending wanted to be; sometimes the simplest solution is the best solution. I feel like, as a composer, I spend a lot of time worrying whether my [...]
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith I've been listening to EARS, an album by Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. This is a great album for Deep Listening (a listening technique, or lifestyle, developed by Pauline Oliveros) as, I think, are most electronic pieces because of the way they create the illusion of sounds travelling around you. The 'spaces' that Smith [...]
Since last Wednesday, I've written a new piece for a call for scores. This piece, a setting of In the Bleak Midwinter for Mezzo-Soprano and Grand Piano, unavoidably took up a lot of time so Triptych took a back seat for most of the week. I have finished composing the first part of the first piece, but [...]
A new segment called...Friday Favourites (yay, more alliteration!). Every Friday I will share a new piece/arrangement/composer/ensemble/something-music-related that I've discovered recently, in the hopes that you will also discover something new that you enjoy. This week I heard an arrangement of one of my favourite string quartets, Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8, performed by the brass [...]
Because composing a piece takes a long time, there's not a lot of new material to show you on this piece today. However, there is quite a lot I can talk about. The main thing being that the plan is to divide this piece into three pieces. Have a listen and I'll explain what I [...]
Improvising a piece is all very well and good, but if I want other people to be able to play it I need to write it out. I also use this as an opportunity to edit and improve the piece. For me, the first stage of putting the composition on paper is writing it out [...]
Rachel Graff 