Introduction

My compositional work between 1996 and 2002 can be divided into two main areas:

i. Beginning with the series of works entitled drift of summer, I set out to explore the relationship between the composer, the score and the performer, seeking to allow a traditionally skilled performer a more active role.

The main reasons for this were:

A wish to underline the individual nature of each performance, both by different performers (to allow them to make the work ‘their own’) and the individuality of different performances by the same performer; to allow the personal, individual, characteristics of the players and local circumstances to influence the realisation of the piece.

A wish to open up aspects of the work, to allow it a life of its own; to find a sense of (limited) unpredictability or spontaneity for all involved (audience, player, composer).

An attempt to ensure a more involved and dedicated performance than is usually the norm, by allowing players to invest more in the work, often insisting on a certain amount of commitment in preparing for performance. This can be both through technical expectations (asking players to perform at some limit of their technique e.g. as fast as possible) and in the actual realisation/ making of parts of the piece.

Trying to move away from the restrictive notions of interpretation of works by the performer. If one allows that players participate in shaping / making the work in a limited sense, even in traditional circumstances, then it seems to me to be desirable to channel this involvement and build it into the work. This can be achieved by pointing the players’ attention to where their interpretative powers should be directed (e.g. by an absence of notational information such as pitch or rhythm).
Underlying all of the above factors is a basic wish to find a certain energy, tension and intensity in performance which are more often found in improvised musics than in ‘closed’ works for the concert hall, and to couple this with the more considered, ‘researched’ aspects of technique (general process, rhythmic patterning etc.)

The ‘opening’ of drift of summer described here can be seen to have taken the following forms:

* Formal freedoms - pathways through set material.

* Qualitative freedoms – phrasing, dynamic shaping of material.

* Temporal freedoms – absence of rhythmic specificity.

* More general freedoms, such as the withdrawal of certain notational parameters.

The drift of summer pieces were a deliberately extreme, experimental series of works which attempt to work through the ideas outlined above. They were followed by a shift of attention towards the redefinition of other aspects of my compositional technique, particularly pitch, rhythm and structure. However many of the aspects of the open work explored in this series have continued to influence subsequent pieces; in fact all works written after this point are open in some respect. This can be seen, for example, in the absence of pulsed, metric writing in both twine and fffppp.

ii. The works which follow the drift of summer series see the development of a more consistent basis for my work, drawing upon acoustic and spectral models and knowledge. One of the main reasons for this was an increasing dissatisfaction with the generally parametric compositional approach used before, and a wish to bring the different aspects of sound/music together, rather than treating them as separate entities. Through the use of acoustic and spectral models this becomes possible; basing music upon the structure and behaviour of sounds themselves. This was first seen in twine, which uses material developed from the common acoustical phenomenon of combination tones; here the process is recursively applied to generate the overall shape of the piece, as well as the basic pitch information. Other works have built upon this, for example aux ombres which is based upon spectrum analysis of the sound of the lowest note of the instrument, almost all aspects of the work being derived from this.
Having developed a wider range of compositional tools, these have been assimilated into my general technique and gradually begun to be used in a more flexible way, with several different compositional methods used in a piece such as trace. Finally, later works have taken these techniques and sought to bring them together with earlier compositional methods, as can be seen in Duo where a wide range of techniques, both acoustically and cyclically based, are used side by side, the contrast and differences between these techniques becoming one of the concerns of the piece itself.
As well as the shared and overlapping techniques used in their creation, a number of other relationships exists between several of pieces included in the folio. The most obvious examples of this can be seen between twine and a piece of twine, which clearly use the same material, the latter piece modifying the earlier material to fit the new ensemble, and between drift of summer1 and the opening sections of trace, which realise material from the score of the earlier double bass piece. Both these examples show reworkings of earlier material and the transformation of this material in response to various instrumental forces and contexts. Trace itself, partly due to the length of time over which it was written (as well as its duration), contains many of the compositional methods used in other pieces.