(Scroll right to the bottom to find out the background to this creative diary.)
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[11/16]
將模糊幻想具體化：
在創作某一部分四個小時後，你會不可避免地意識到，這不是你想要的，於是不得不推翻重來。在那一刻，你需要極大的耐心和對最終成果價值的信念。這已經是第三次發生在這部作品上了，但每一次的重來都讓作品朝著更好的方向發展。
Reification of inchoate fantasy:
There are inevitable moments when four hours into writing a section, you realise it’s not what you wanted, and you have to undo and redo it all. In that moment it takes a lot of patience and faith in the value of the final result. This is the third time this has already happened with this piece, but each time it has taken the piece in a better direction.
[11/10]
Today I sketched out in full the first 48 seconds of music. I’m really struggling to hear it, to decide if it’s right or not. There’s a LOT of notes (my old problem).
This is “cascade one”:
[11/5]
My posts are probably too long. I’ll try to keep it short today.
A practical update. I’m way off schedule with finishing the piece, but it should be ok. I just can’t have any eventualities that knock me back any further. This is a source of stress in itself: the anticipation of potential snags and divagations.
I’m physically not in very great shape. The first time I really encountered the inimical relationship between composition and physical health was around 2017 when i was composing Novella (Chapter One) under extreme time pressure, while struggling with flu that had turned into a chest infection, exacerbated by the air pollution of the northern Chinese winter. I had a bad back from a gym mishap. At the same time I was preparing a Kizomba dance performance, and training my children’s choir to sing my opera for children’s choir Cao Chong Weighs the Elephant. A layer of fat settled on my stomach which has rarely been absent since then.
This is relevant to the piece: composition is a holistic activity that is intellectually engrossing, while being emotionally and spiritually all-encompassing and physically and psychologically taxing. In moments of time pressure where one has to choose between working and caring for oneself, one often makes a short-term decision to prioritize work over physical health (this is something that pre-circa 2017 I would never have done). I think long term, however, one clearly gains more return on investment in the form of thought-energy and work-energy from consistently prioritising physical health over short-term tasks– the problem is how one escapes the chronic crisis-mode that makes one feel one has no time for anything but the current most urgent task?
***
I spent Sunday afternoon working on a chord progression for about twenty pivotal bars. (This is the moment when the offstage horn player arrives onstage and takes their place in the ensemble. Followers of this diary may remember that they are the “keystone species” in this fragile and disfunctional ecosystem.) I had about four versions. Oddly, by going back to simple principles from tonal harmony (“common tones stay in the same part, the other voices move to the nearest new note”), I finally found something that seemed to work, but in the evening I felt troubled by the sense that the day’s work hadn’t gone how it was supposed to. I spent all of Monday afternoon and evening undoing and redoing it. I didn’t need any chords at all, actually, just a heterophonic melody. It’s much better now. It’s easy to feel that Sunday had been wasted time, but these meanders in the path of the river seem an essential part of the journey.
[11/1]
During the typhoon yesterday I finished the planning for the first half of the piece, and I’m leaving that to oxidize for a few days (like a cake of puer tea, newly broken open), while I turn to the central panel of the piece, which I think of as a kind of baroque rondeau de chasse (my own term). I’m modeling the phrasing on a bourrée for solo violin by Bach, but I found yesterday that the more complex harmonies and denser texture need longer to “speak” than Bach’s, and so one simply cannot copy and paste the phrasal structure without adjusting the tempo.
I wrote a personal rule for Feral (from the 12th Sept): Every bar/phrase must have something in it that exceeds the capacity of my inner aural imagination to conceive. It must be the most sonically strange and surprising piece– just as an ecosystem, rewilded, is left to just be what it naturally is, “unmanaged”, replete with “dynamic interactions”, a scene of “nuclear anarchic filigree”. Following Kafka: “Everything can be hazarded”.
***
I saw someone describe Birtwistle’s Earth Dances as an imago ignota (an image beyond ordinary understanding). What it would be to compose an imago ignota!
***
I seem to think quite parametrically as a composer: a series of acetate transparencies layered one on another and projected to make an image.
This is not necessarily a divergent concept, however, an exploration of the intransigence and incommensurability of different parameters generating perceptible structural tensions. In Feral, on the contary, it’s rather a convergent concept: harmonising the action of multiple parameters in consort to generate the energetic ebb and flow of the music.
I don’t want to compose portentous music. I try to make most of my pieces affirmatory. I deeply admire the spirit in which Sorabji wrote, I believe at the end of the Opus Clavicembalisticum, the words “The spirit that denies!”, channeling, according to this article, Goethe’s Mephistopheles. I think the human race these days is very much in need of affirmation, rather than denial, however. Maybe my feelings will change in a year or two.
This notion of the spirit that denies nonetheless makes me think of my teacher, and of the novels of Henry James. I think it was Claude Willan, friend and fellow tenor in Schola Cantorum of Oxford (and now an associate professor at Rowan University), that once described to me a compelling aspect of James’ novels (of which I’ve only read The Wings of the Dove, a novel which as I remember it exactly conforms to the following picture).
James writes his novels in a kind of negative space around where the novel should be: there is little description of place, action, characters’ physical appearance and similar concrete details. There is instead a minute sketching of the inner psychological and emotional world of the characters brought about by those very external details which the novelist holds back from us.
I wonder to what extent the “deliberate rejection of order” (to quote the article linked above) that one finds in Sorabji, as well as a similar studied evocation and simultaneous avoidance of conventional harmonic gestures in the music of Finnissy and other composers, is itself a kind of “writing in the negative space” around those conventions both which the music eludes and to which it alludes. (I wonder if there might also be a tangential connection here with Schoenberg’s essay from the mid-twenties on the wisdom of avoiding triadic structures in early serialism.)
For twenty years I’ve felt that so many of Finnissy’s pieces subscribe to this kind of aesthetics of negative space (not negativity!): so often what is most striking about the music at any one moment is not what it is or does, but what it is not being or doing: the conventions and tropes with which it flirts or which it adumbrates without positively inscribing them.
[10/25]
Today’s work on pitch sets:
More from last weekend’s notes:
It’s important to be forgiving towards yourself, and to recognize your ways of working. Recognizing them does not necessarily mean accepting them and never trying to improve upon them, but Aristotle’s “know thyself” is an important starting point in successfully navigating the psychological pitfalls of creativity.
I seem instinctually to assemble pieces of music in a very different way from my teacher, who often advised me to “sketch first, then edit together”- like a cinematographer splicing together different shots. By contrast, I tend to work from writing a lot of words, conceptualising sound combinations and developments in abstract before reifying specific notes and rhythms- the biggest danger of which is that one fantasises about sounds which seem great in one’s imagination, but slip through the fingers when one tries to put them down on the page.
***
Composition of large pieces in particular calls upon nascent thoughts to persist across relatively long spans of time. For instance, the questions I had been working on last weekend, relating to instrumental combinations and the timbral taxonomy of the work, involved my drawing upon sketches and notes from 25th Aug, 16th and 17th Oct, as well as the accumulated reflections of score study and listening from Sept. 11th-13th which I collated into a “sound catalogue” on 27th Sept., and a structural sketch which I made on 27th Sept. There is also the residue of conceptual work relating to the idea of informational cascades from circa 3rd Oct, which I ultimately rejected, but needed to exist in order to arrive at a more satisfactory solution on the 15th-16th Oct.
This is a complex interaction of possibilities variously considered, rejected, modified and recombined– and sometimes misremembered. All of this takes time and is serious work.
[10/24]
我有連續三天半的時間完全沒有碰我的作品。令人驚訝的是，一個人的短期記憶那麼快就會被徹底清空，而且必須花不少時間來重新熟悉自己以前的思路。
我前兩天還在忙著改編兩首英國民歌。雖然這是是比較簡單的創作任務，它仍然可以清空我對《返璞歸埜》的思考。好在我懷著一個清晰的腦袋去看我的草稿，就覺察到一個錯誤。
在我作曲的過程中，我會不斷地衡量很多不太兼容的甚至是互相矛盾的可能性，而這些矛盾可以很久未被發現，懸而未決。一旦你的意圖清楚了，你會發現哪些可以保留，哪些要放棄。
我上週末記錄了很多的思考，我還在陸續分享。這是星期六寫的：
Weiwuying International Music Festival has a very daring approach and a very appreciative and educated audience. It’s a wonderful haven of imaginative and courageous adventure. Havens are easily taken for granted, and this one absolutely must not be.
I think people marketing concerts (it’s often the musicians themselves) sometimes struggle to represent to the target audience what it is they have to offer, because the reality of what they’re offering is so much more complex than can be conveyed in a poster or even in a pre-concert talk. Sometimes audiences need a healthy amount of experience, including knowledge of the tradition and many hours of listening under one’s belt, in order to appreciate the musical languages, replete with allusive tropes and playful manipulation of expectations, that are being employed by different composers.
It’s worth thinking about how societies generate or facilitate opportunities for people to engage with sophisticated ideas and creative expressions, because the path of least resistance is always to give people things they readily and superficially like, rather than those things they could come to love deeply.
[10/20]
Weekend post (I got a lot done and have lots to share).
I was listening to forest soundscapes on the BBC sound effects website on Friday night after finishing my teaching for the day, trying to analyse their constituent parts and the tessituras of each part. It’s very interesting how in the couple of examples I had found that particularly attracted me, different bird calls occupy different tessituras, as if there’s been an evolutionary jostling for space in which to have one’s call heard amidst the din of the other birds. I tried to transcribe some of the calls but couldn’t get much further than impressionistically identifying the most prominent pitches along with contours and rhythms. (The rhythmic aspect is subjective, as one has to apply the framework of an underlying pulse to what you’re hearing, based on what you think the rhythm implies.)
I’ve been trying to think about how to partition the pitch space in my piece, and how that alters through time. My first sketches involved fixed vertical sets that stretched from the lowest note on the piano up to the highest note on the marimba, but I subsequently doubted this approach, and explored beginning with a narrow tessitura in the middle range, and progressively opening it out in both directions until it reaches the widest span. After listening to these rainforest landscapes, however, it seems my initial instinct fits my “narrative” more closely: after all, it would seem that a healthy ecosystem would be one in which all the native species have had a chance to evolve into their particular niche, whereas an uneven distribution and clumping of sounds in particular narrow tessituras would be more suggestive of a pathological state. (The piece is likely to fluctuate between the healthy and the pathological…)
I’m at the stage now where I am spinning lots of parametric plates: timbral, modal, rhythmic, motivic and tessitural changes, all trying to keep them working in consort with each other, or if their agendas conflict, working out if that’s okay, or if it’s something that needs to be reconciled. I am tending towards reconciliation.
This reminded me of something: I was very surprised when Sam Cave told me over breakfast in Victoria back in August that he tends to let the unfolding of the music happen naturally, and does not “calculate” proportions of sections, or the distance between the entries of voices and the like. For me it’s interesting when one senses in a piece that there are operations forcing the hand of the composer: I think that’s why I tend to calculate things a lot more.
“Enough! or Too much!”….
*****
A meta-reflection:
I’ve found that in writing my online creative diary, the very fact that I’ve been putting it online immediately changes the psychology of writing for me. But I didn’t realize at first that it would change the psychology of writing to friends too– because one is always aware of the potential usability of the material for the online diary. Nonetheless, I think we definitely present different selves to different friends, and I don’t think this is a falsification, rather it’s just a natural consequence of the unique chemistry that exists between any two people. A few days ago I sent a message to Tom Green which I knew would probably end up being an entry, and the way I write to him is definitely different (psychologically at least, even if the content is indistinguishable) from writing to Sam Cave. On those rare occasions when I am brave enough to write to Michael Finnissy, it’s very, very different psychologically.
That’s sad, in a way, as it shows that one is never being one’s true self. Thucydides would perhaps argue that we only discover our genuine selves in wartime when societal norms completely break down, but I don’t think that brutal, desperately surviving version of the self is any more “true” than any other. Social media is weird for the way it changes us.
[10/19]
To the accompaniment of a cappuccino once again, I’m sketching pitch sets fixed in vertical space (à la Webern, Carter, Lutosławski etc.):
Yesterday evening I returned to my favourite forest soundscapes from the BBC Sounds Effects Archive. More on this in my next post. In the meantime, here is my favourite (with two Great Indian Hornbills and some higher pitched unidentified birds in the foreground).
[10/16]
A short one for today:
I am turning my mind to the percussion instruments, buoyed on by Minxiong’s best capuccino. I’m still in the process of checking with Weiwuying what is available. I’m very happy to hear that they have a steel pan, a wonderful but little-used instrument.
I’m working on the distribution of the instruments amongst the two percussionists, and making notes regarding viable mallet types for each instrument. Samuel Z. Solomon’s book “How to Write for Percussion” (I’m currently relying on an elicit copy I obtained in Tianjin) is of great assistance in elucidating all things percussive in nature.
[10/15]
I too easily forget just how much I love being in library reading rooms.
Today is a mildly upsetting date: two months to go before the deadline for the piece. I had originally hoped to have a full hand-written draft of the piece ready by now, but I am terrifyingly far from reaching that milestone.
I am still plugging away at the opening three “cascades”.
Yesterday I discovered a funny way of turning seven hours into 30 mins. It goes like this: have seven hours free to compose. Do thirty minutes of composing, in which time I work on correcting a chord, only to find that I prefer it the way it had been before. I realise that I’m actually falling asleep (and even beginning to dream) while still sitting on the piano stool. I am compelled to go and lie down. I get up two hours later with what feels like sunstroke, because the apartment is too hot (I left the window open with the AC on). I remember that there is a document that I had to forward from person X to person Y. I discover that said document needs to be corrected before sending it. I start to get stressed when I realise I only have two hours left to compose. I need to go out to eat something and to buy an Oulong milk tea to calm down. I come back and discover another document that urgently needs to be proof-read and sent to the same person Y before the end of the day. Time’s up.
I’m sure this sequence of circumstances is not unfamiliar to a lot of creative artists, or indeed to anyone trying to make progress with a task, the scale of which exceeds the scope of our short-term memories and requires sustained effort over a period of months. Particularly familiar must be the sense of panic, anger and despondency as one realises that one has lost, or is in the process of losing such a precious and hard-to-come-by expanse of contiguous work-time. The value of time for a creator does not seem to be proportional to its length. Four hours are worth more than double the value of two hours. Seven hours are probably worth five times’ two hours. It’s all about flow, and having the ability to stuff one’s short-term memory with all manner of imagined, hypothetical, half-attempted and speculative structures, and to keep them suspended and spinning like a mobile in one’s mind’s eye. One somehow has simultaneously to be both the Captain and the Doctor from Woyceck: unperturbedly taking things “langsam, langsam” (because only then can one think freely), while striving also to seize every precious unwasteable moment.
[10/13]
Some important quotes I’ve found recently:
“If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens.”
Tarkovsky (origin sadly unknown- from a random Facebook post)
“I’ve always defined a composer as someone for whom there is a music that is intolerably absent from the sound world out there, and if that’s the case, and you feel this obligation, kind of obsession, to supply that music, then nothing’s going to stop you.” Chris Dench, “The Labyrinthine Worlds of Chris Dench”, Interview by Samuel Andreyev, July 26 2020
“What makes art interesting is that it deals with the general in the particular… [A] piece of music is always internally dissonant in the sense that those general aspects should ideally inform our general listening to some extent, but it’s the particularities of the work which lend wings to the retention and reworking of those impressions after the piece is finished.”
Brian Ferneyhough, Library of Congress Interview, March 11 2016
***
Here’s a composition update from me: I spent two days working on the opening bars of Feral, and at the end of it I had about six different versions, none which I felt I could use in the piece. It’s undoubtedly been a valuable clarifying exercise: what am I trying to do? Even: Who am I as a composer? As my much-cited teacher would say, “What is a “George” sort of chord like? What is a “George” sort of rhythm like?” This is why I’ve banned myself from any kind of overly goal-directed listening from now on, as I’m too easily pulled in different directions. I listened to the opening twenty seconds of Ferneyhough’s Contraccolpi two days ago, and immediately turned it off, because I was just too enamoured by the invention (this gorgeous soft-sounding ratchet-type percussion instrument here, that gorgeous and elusive microtonal (?) harmony there…). I so easily get pulled in a different direction in that instant, without properly assimilating those things I admire into a “George” idiolect. It’s not that one cannot borrow (or steal, or beg for that matter), but rather that it has to be rationally and deliberately integrated into my own independent system of tensions and signifiers. Sounds high-falluting, but that’s how I currently conceive of this process.
My immediate problem with Feral is that the opening sounds (in one or two versions) like a bad imitation of Adès’ In Seven Days–which is for me one of the greatest opening themes ever composed. Perhaps the problem is precisely that I think it’s too great. Can this be rectified with a few tweaks of rhythm, counterpoint or pitch material, or is a thorough re-start necessary? This remains to be seen.
The opening four and a half minutes of Feral are a succession of three “cascades” that ramify (as our old friend Ignacio Agrimbau would say) through the ensemble. The paths of ramification exactly follow the branching structure of the hyphae of a tricholoma mycelium, as I copied it from a sketch in “Entangled Life”. I’m thinking I’ll actually draw the mycelium into the manuscript before designing each cascade, to get an abstract sense of the proportions of this proliferating process. I would normally calculate all the durations of entries of instruments based on nested proportions of the golden section, and I’ve done that for some aspects of Feral‘s structure, but I want to try to use the eye and the inner ear to judge this mycelium-like development. Michael had suggested I find a map of the rivers of Yellowstone park (site of perhaps the most famous instance of a trophic cascade), but I couldn’t find a detailed enough diagram of all the waterways for it to afford me sufficient material with which to work. I tried the estuary of the Teifi too, but that was also somewhat lacking in granularity. If I can make the mycelium idea work, that is actually even more interesting for me at the moment.
Really feeling huge pressure now with this! The psychological aspect of composition is a terrifyingly powerful thing. Composition is also physically exhausting, both because it uses so much mental energy and because one is sitting for a long time without moving.
Note to self: Try raising up my Ikea adjustable table and do some standing-up composition, for the sake of my pelvic tilt!
[10/10]
Addendum: It’s 1am on the 10th. I went back to a sketch from two weeks ago. I find it’s useful to leave things, forget how they sounded, and return to them afresh. It was better than I remembered, and new possibilities for the “trophic cascades” element of the piece opened up to me. Some very, very valuable work over the last three hours, as well as some very ambitious rhythms. This piece may well feature my first ever 21:13 (which I conceive of as three sets of septuplets semiquavers in a pulse slightly slower than the prevailing crotchet pulse).
[10/9]
能夠堅持自己創作的人很寶貴：Cage, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Carter, Xenakis, Feldman，潘皇龍，Tarkovsky，Lynch，李白，Pollock ，Brothers Quay, Yoko Ono 等等都是這種人了。重點不是他們的技術好，或者他們做的好不好，而是他們有沒有勇敢去實現自己內在聲音指示的創作。特別是技術好不好這個問題沒有意義，因為為了能夠做出自己的創作他們不僅僅需要把握現有的技術，而新製造一套專用的技術。
當然我不是說我有一個特別的聲音，或者我很勇敢。不過人家至少可以把這些當作偶像。
A chat with my dear friend Sam Cave made me rethink yet again what I’m doing, reminding me of the fundamental concept of John Conway’s “Game of Life”: complex patterns emerging out of simple principles. It might have kicked me into examining properly what I’m doing with the entrance of the horn (see my previous diary entry), and how that material could be constituted. Simple principles can generate powerfully effective results.
I’m still not sure I want the central rondeau da caccia (for that is what it is) to be entirely spectral (or in fact pseudo-spectral, because I’ve decided it’s eminently possible to “cheat” a bit with 12 EDO notes- and I suspect that’s what Grisey and others all do anyway), but I was toying with it this evening. The original plan was, first spectral, then diatonic, but perhaps the diatonic material… and then material ever more infiltrated with (my interpretation of) Ferneyhough’s microtonal “hypertonality” would work to demarcate the sections.
I tried to sketch some phrases according to Sam’s description of Birtwistle’s approach to hocket-like material in Carmen… And it’s funny how something that sounds very clear and effective is actually hard to do well! Then again if it were easy, then everyone (or lots of people) would do it, and it wouldn’t be something distinctive and special about Birtwistle.
This sort of sketch is so simple it inevitably looks naïve to any of the myriad of people who’ll have had almost identical ideas.
That twelve note chord that builds up in the last bar of that sketch is the moment when the trumpet begins from offstage. Everything stops and just this distant, muted high C is left lingering from some unexpected place. I slightly had in mind moments like that ten (?) note chord in Mahler Ten, but more importantly and always in the back of my mind when dealing with near-chromatically saturated chords are those dense sonorities at the beginning and end of Colin Matthews Suns Dance, a talismanic piece for me as I write Feral. That is a piece of such energy and flexibility of invention that it is almost dangerous to think too much about it in comparison to my writing.
[10/6]
I’m starting to reify what happens with a crucial moment featuring the French horn. The horn is meant to be the “keystone species” in this musical ecosystem, what the wolf in the Great Glen, or the wild boar in the Forest of Dean, or the mackerel in Cardigan Bay might be. What does it mean to have a musical element, the absence of which causes everything to go out of whack, with other elements over-proliferating and monocultures taking over, that once it is reintroduced makes everything lock back into place, rebalance itself? A very difficult question. 
[10/3]
Today’s listening while copying chords in McDonald’s:
What I love about this is how unpretentious Ferneyhough comes across when he talks in this sort of context.
I’m finding it useful to listen to composers talking. It’s helping me with my piece more now than listening to pieces.
—
[9/28]
A very important hour of study I did with the first three minutes of Adès’ Living Toys two weeks back. The way he freely and impressionistically combines triadic harmony and certain gestures that “pretend” to be harmonic series (both 12EDO) with the real harmonics of the solo horn is fantastically inspiring. The implied roots are never the same, so you have moments where, for example, if I recall rightly, the fifth harmonic of an F fundamental is combined with a B major chord in the strings—where it functions as a pseudo seventh harmonic. I was amazed by the elusive pitch combinations he was creating. The 12EDO triadic (but non-tonal) harmony combined freely with pure intervals worked perfectly well. Even the first entry of the horn is so imaginative, which skirts around the G/C drone in the tubular bells and double bass. I really felt that he was hearing these things very deeply.
—
[9/27]
Looking for a way of ensuring that certain decisions are “taken off my hands” in a way that excludes subjective or habitual practices, allowing for the emergence of an objective “thisness” (haecceity, as John Duns Scotus put it).
I listened to Samuel Andreyev’s interview with Michael Finnissy yesterday and today, and it gave me a lot of impetus. It felt like being in a lesson with him. I made some big steps forward today.
I’ve also just listened to Stravinsky’s Persephone, which I love. This allegory of decline and renewal in natural cycles, a kind of ritual of resurrection, is very poignant. The ending is astoundingly beautiful for me. The production I watched incorporates Cambodian dance which really inspires me too: I want to do something similar with Chinese opera movement in a contemporary music context. (Finnissy mentioned the piece in the Andreyev interview and this prompted me to revisit it).
—
[9/25]
I’m thinking that if there is connectedness, however complex that relationship is, it will be perceptible– just as one can hear in Ferneyhough’s La Terre est un Homme that there is deliberate expression there, even though it is hard or impossible to grasp or predict. I feel my inner ear is struggling to conceive of the sonic reality of the materials which I feel the Idea compels me to create.
I’m really struggling with Feral. I’m conflicted. How do I create “the thing itself” rather than an image of the thing (a wild ecosystem and not merely a postcard of a wild ecosystem), while at the same time having a clear sense of connectedness between participants in that ecosystem? Connection within apparent chaos (and brutality?!).
It’s hard to define cause and effect when dealing with musical materials. What is the logic behind a particular change wrought by one layer in the ecosystem in relation to the others?
Chris Dench is such a great composer!! ik(s)land［s］is really special, and Dench’s music is so well sculpted and replete with clear intention.
I’m still trying to do as much listening as I can, to find my way with Feral… But I’m very aware now that it cannot become an excuse to avoid actually writing it.
I’ve just been writing to the festival asking if they have all kinds of percussion instruments (tuned gongs and all kinds of Chinese opera cymbals and a flowerpot drum, as well as a steelpan!).
—
[9/20]
I rarely talk to people about Barrett. I rarely put his music on, I don’t own a single score (not even a PDF), and yet he is titanically important to me, and I’m completely in awe of his imagination, craft, and artistic courage. I’ve been watching this, this evening, and it’s actually affected me to the point of tears. It’s hard to describe why it’s so powerful, but I think one could call it chthonic, visceral, arresting. It’s just so amazing.
Richard Barrett talks so well about his intentions. This whole mini-docu is worth watching. In a way, I feel his creative mind was constituted during a blessed era when this level of self-belief and boundless creative ambition were both possible and even socially sanctioned. I find it psychologically very hard to go there myself in the time and circumstances (of course, a talent differential may also be relevant). Still, this is an essential input for me in writing Feral, however that manifests in the final piece.
(The section with the violin solo, the soprano singing ancient Greek, and Barrett himself improvising with electronics and then the whole ensemble improvising on his material/in his style are all incredible!)
—
[9/19]
I’m so far from completing Feral!
Three more months…
It’s an eleven-minute piece for fourteen musicians after all. And it’s about something highly esoteric, which increases the conceptual load (or not esoteric, in fact, but conceptually complex).
It’s about cascades in nature, watery ones, yes, but primarily about the signalling cascades in mycelia and trophic cascades in ecosystems (metaphorical royalties payable to the authors of the extraordinary books, Entangled Life and Feral).
I read yesterday in Monbiot’s Feral that the proliferation of jellyfish in the last half century in Cardigan Bay is likely because of overfishing of two keystone species, herring and mackerel.
—
[9/16]
Warning from the philosopher Vlad Vexler: Distinguish between the thing itself and a depiction of the thing. Am I crafting something truly Feral (hard to imagine, isn’t it? But one must try somehow), or an image of feralness (an image of an image, a shadow of a vase projected on a cave wall, or a piece of music about a postcard of a storm).
Listening to the BBC Sound Effects archive. Field recordings of rainforests.
[9/15]
In the high anxiety stage of composing my new piece for thirteen players, Feral, and seeking guidance from the Masters, arrived at Ravel’s “Ondine” from Gaspard de la Nuit.
And island within a lake within an island within a lake within an island: I’ve only just realised that this is such a good image for what that piece is in my current learning journey! (Thanks to David Hawkins for this image.)
[9/11]
I’m reading a book called Entangled Life, about fungi. It’s very inspiring. I’ve been copying some of the sketches in the book of different fungi’s mycelial structures.
Imagine a kind of musical polyphony that mimicked mycelia…
But I find it hard to grasp the constructive principles that differentiate these mycelial types, even after sketching them.
Today I listened closely to: Smetana Vltava (which actually isn’t a rondo, really, or at least it didn’t seem like it today, unless the water theme is hidden in the sections as a cryptic rondo—I must have misremembered), Birtwistle Earth Dances and Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum, and Finnissy Câtana. Lots of ideas and inspiration from all these.
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[8/16]
Coincidentally, I bought Monbiot’s Feral recently, and I’ve just started reading chapter two, which is about mackerel in Cardigan Bay.
The descriptions of his visit to the Great Glen are very beautiful.
I’m dipping in and out, totally out of order.
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[8/8]
Question to Tom Green re. my idea for Feral: How would you convey a musical ecosystem? What sorts of interdependencies and trophic cascades would you create?
In response to his scepticism about programmatic music: It’s not programmatic. It’s a Schopenhauerian “parallelism”.
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I’ve been commissioned by the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying) to compose a new work for fourteen musicians, to be premiered by the festival ensemble, conducted by Brad Lubman, in the Weiwuying International Music Festival on 18th April 2025. In preparation, I’ve been thinking about the piece, collecting material, studying other composers’ scores, making copious notes, and reading books on both music-related and non-related topics, for about six months. I started writing notes and rhythms about six weeks ago. It’s going slowly so far. As I compose Feral (which is a title Michael Finnissy reassured me I could “live up to”, and so that is the title), I find I’m having so many thoughts about the cultural, symbolic, kinaesthetic and geometric meanings of music, about the art of composition, and about the art and psychology of listening, and up until now I have mostly shared them with friends only– mainly with composer-performers Tom Green, Sam Cave and Chiu Hsing-Tzu, who tend to me my three most important sounding-boards. I realised sometimes I think of something worth preserving in a more permanent form, and so I’m starting this creative diary. （2024/10/5）
Here’s my post about the commission:
關於作品委託的貼文在這裡：