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NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION 2010: Stop writing dishonest programme notes.

This work was conceived in the abstract and does not relate to human experience. It does not illustrate the composer’s state of mind, he having suddenly found himself awake in the middle of the night, unable to control his thoughts. While the experience of insomnia, especially when suffered over consecutive nights, can be physically and emotionally crippling, at times the abundance and insistence of multiple streams of unwanted thought (unruly Beta waves) can be, if not pleasurable, then certainly fascinating. This piece does not seek to illustrate this through music, nor does it sonically pose this question: why does the brain seize control of the consciousness and produce such a plethora of unwanted activity that sleep is made impossible and the host becomes miserable?

At times, certain thoughts seem to somehow rise above the melee of insomniac thought and become quite focused and of seeming import, however inane these might seem in the cold light of day. This is not portrayed in the music by infrequent parings-down of texture and emergence of single, insistent motivic ideas. The music doesn’t describe how such thoughts soon get swallowed up as the jumble of thoughts returns and the victim adjusts position once again, glancing desperately at his or her clock radio and resolving hopelessly to try to make yet another attempt at deep breathing and sheep counting work.

The composer could claim that the work is about these things, but that would be a lie; he no longer wishes to construct programme notes after the act of composition that conform to some conceivable extra-musical agenda.

This version of this work is the first of a number of versions, with another swapping cello for viola and another as a solo guitar piece currently projected.

The work was requested by Dylan Lardelli and is dedicated to this increasingly mythic musician.

• Watson, C.: about nothing...really; computer-set 

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This work for clarinet quintet in three movements was written following time spent in the north of Scotland, during which I visited the remote and desolate places that my family left behind when they emigrated from Scotland to New Zealand in the 19th Century. Although the music is not intended to be strictly descriptive, the image underpinning the work is that of an infinite shore that stretches from the line of steep cliffs at Badbea overlooking the North Sea, around the world to the rocky southern shores of Aotearoa New Zealand. The work draws on the tonal colour and extremes of pitch that are possible in the clarinet, and the extraordinary platform of sound of the string quartet.

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• 5 Works by M Louise Webster 

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Bout is inspired by the sport of women’s boxing. In an interview with Canadian boxing pioneer Savoy “Kapow” Howe, I was struck by her detailed demonstration of the inner monologue of a fighter. Melodic and rhythmic material from her words insinuate themselves into the piece, along with referee’s whistles, counts and bells, training routines and the dogged persistence of the fighter.

Bout: A round at fighting; a contest, match, trial of strength, physical or intellectual.

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• Juliet Palmer: Bout 

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burlesques mécaniques is a rather extroverted collection of grotesque miniatures whose characters are not people or animals but dances. These dances have been mechanised, electrified, and often obscured by their own rhythmic impulse. Old forms and formulaic tropes are given new identities, freed from the confines of metric stability and the expectation that they be “danceable”. The essentially mechanical, artificial aspect of music (and of art in general?) is embodied in the piano, here a brittle, seedy protagonist whose string limbs hover and flail about it. Conflicting rhythms dominate the surface, oscillating between insistent repetition and mad, angular flourishes. The generally jerky, muscular rhythmic material is periodically frozen throughout the work, most strikingly in the ninth movement (chain). Here a string of rich, impressionistic chords briefly reveals an alternative, interior world which is then rudely dismissed in an almost haphazard finale.

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Much of the music is derived from a motet by Giovanni Gabrieli: Dominus Deus Meus à 6, C127. This material is dispersed, like grains of sand carried by the wind, strewn at varying distances from their origin. For most of the piece, the instrumental parts do not share a metrical grid, but are adrift in a semi-improvised rhythmic space. The music attempts to balance its focus between the persistent harmonic traces of the motet, and a foreground made up of the grainy physical details of the instrumental sounds.

• Philip Brownlee: Canzona per sonare: Degraded Echoes - hardcopy score & parts 

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• Philip Brownlee: Canzona per sonare: Degraded Echoes; audio 

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• Adams, C.: Chamber Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Contrabassoon/Bassoon; computer-set 

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• Adams, C.: Chamber Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Contrabassoon/Bassoon; computer-set 

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• Chris Gendall: Eigene Gestalt - hardcopy score 

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• Chris Gendall: Eigene Gestalt; video 

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“Do or do not; there is no try.” – Yoda

figments represents a series of “tries”: attempts to remember, recast and reconfigure an earlier work, also called figments, that was lost or destroyed early in 2012. The only surviving material of the original is contained in a small number of photographs taken while composing. These photographs offered triggers for building up material in a non-linear fashion, a collage of moments.

In this new work, every so often a cohesive narrative emerges, but equally often the train of thought is obscured or lost, only to be taken up again, remembered differently or approached from a new angle. The task of completion and reconciliation of competing and conflicting materials is eventually abandoned, leaving tangents to integrate and disintegrate freely, the initial goals perhaps concealed or missed in the remembering.

To me, “do or do not” is an oversimplification bordering on authoritarianism; “trying”, while transient and rich with flaw and slippage, is the only tangible and realistic form of action here.

• Alex Taylor: figments - hardcopy score & parts 

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• Ross Harris: Fjärran - hardcopy score 

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• Bolley: Fleeting Masks; computer-set 

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