Seven Urban Visions (2005)

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Seven short texts I wrote in 2005, which I had completely forgotten about and just found by chance. Fascinating to find that the idea of using the same syntagms in various orders to generate a narrative and different meanings had started already then (nº1, 4).
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1. Lemon

White             fallen            bleeding
Concrete         grey              water
Licking           newspaper
Wind
Grey                bleeding
Newspaper  [...]

A Composer’s Notebook (5) – Writing under last summer’s heat: ‘Echo and Narcissus’ for string orchestra

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I received an e-mail from conductor Eduardo Portal at the beginning of last July outlining the possibility of a commission of a piece for the Burgos Summer Festival (Spain), which would eventually be premiered during the Festival by the Antares Ensemble under his baton. I found out in the course of the ensuing correspondence with [...]

A Composer’s Notebook (4) - Kaija Saariaho’s ‘L’Amour de Loin’ at the ENO

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

I went into the English National Opera without knowing what to expect of L’Amour de Loin. I didn’t know that much of Saariaho’s music, but had heard some positive comments on the lead-up to the performance. The subject, that of impossible love and based on Occitan courtesan love poetry of the Middle Ages –a literary [...]

A Composer’s Notebook (3) – Sir Harrison Birtwhistle at the Southbank: ‘Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens’ and ‘The Corridor’

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

It is always very strange to write long time afterwards about performances one experienced, even more if one –that is, me- seemed to rather carelessly not take down notes about it. Nevertheless, I reckon the distance and the forgetting provide an extra filter for the judging of the pieces, as indeed one only carries [...]

A Composer’s Notebook (2) - The Long, Long Summer

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

I come back to this blog after too long a break from it. The always manic end of the academic year was this time spiced up with the further addition of two commissions to be written over the summer, one with very short notice indeed. Hence, I was prevented from writing on these pages [...]