A cornucopia of newness – 10^62, et al
I have blogged before about the strange synchronicities that seem to characterise my composing life. To paraphrase: composing is 90% perspiration, 9% inspiration …and 1% revelation, in the form of performances. That last 1% is usually spread fairly thin for us ‘difficult’ composers – we who want our audiences to still be thinking about the music ten minutes after it has finished – and yet for some unaccountable reason such performances often cluster together.
For instance, within about a month I was notified of several recent past or near-future performances and/or recordings of my pieces: silence for tenor saxophone, resuscitatîve for contrabass, ‘…flickering instantiation…’ for harpsichord, Arpisms for flute, and 10 to the power 62 for soprano saxophone and twelve live or prerecorded saxophones. In addition to this tsunami of (mostly) premières, I was sent the completed CD recordings of the effort to return to the cities of the sane for bass clarinet, in Platonia for bass clarinet and piano, and passing bells for piano.
I have done a short blog (to follow) on each of these events so as to distinguish between them and provide links, and where available a recording is posted on the webpage along with the respective scores, and some background/comments.
All my life I have heard ‘retirement’ referred to as a mixed blessing, a final period of one’s life where gardening and Sudoku dominate. Often it is asked whether retirees will know what to do with themselves in the empty time they have to live through. What bollocks. I have now been retired – at least from day-job work – for about ten years, and in that time the demands on me as a composer have slowly escalated to the point that I am doing many, many more hours per week composing than I ever did as an employee in call centres or offices or the shop. In fact, in order to get 10 to the power 62 ready for its première on 2 March 2026, I was working on it between 6 and 8 hours a day, seven days a week, for over six months. Towards the end it became hard to find time to do anything else, blogs in particular. And the piece is not even completed; I have soon to embark on its Parts II and III, a prospect of equal parts exhilaration and exhaustion.
‘Exhaustion’ in part because for the last few years – since COVID at least – I have written almost exclusively standing up, an idea I got from chatting separately with Rihm and Dusapin decades ago. It seemed to me to be a sensible response to the vicissitudes of getting older while still keeping sharp. In time, I guess, my legs will give out. There is a chair…
What this rigorous schedule has brought home to me, though, is that I am going to be similarly busy for a few more years yet – I have three operas planned, the first on Zamyatin’s We, the second on Enoch Soames, and the third on Greg Egan’s witty short story Eugene. I have a symphony, a Concerto for Orchestra, a Piano Concerto, and my long-gestated piano piece, (the) Barry Jones Dances, in the works, not to mention more immediately a shortish piano piece in celebration of my old friend Michael Finnissy’s 80th birthday, fff. The churn of ideas will have to continue remorselessly …until I run out of them, at any rate, or my mental acuity plummets (quod erit demonstrandum, hopefully).
No one, myself included, is likely to ever write a book on me – at least, I sincerely hope not. But reading a piece in the Guardian about memoir it occurred to me that this website is in fact my ‘memoir’, for what it is worth. I had previously been in two minds about the relevance of my frequent anecdotalising, but the fact is it adds context and a degree of explanation as to why this particular human took it upon himself to contribute these sounds to the world. Such explanations do seem to assist both performers and listeners in assimilating the music, so I will continue to provide a certain amount of personal reflection about the pieces when I come to upload them here. Even if it is unarguably a bit ‘me, me, me’.