I'm very happy to have been chosen for the 4x4 Composer Residency at the Lake District Summer Music Festival with the Kuss Quartet this May. This will be a good chance to work on my string writing technique, which I've been meaning to do for a while now. Hopefully it will result in new piece for what is one of the most challenging of mediums.
The Berimbau is a great instrument from Brazil. It has a raspy, earthy sound and can produce some great rhythms which oscilate between a buzz sound and two pitched sounds - the open string sound and the 'stopped sound'.
Here's a couple of guys busking with their Berimbau's. I particular like the way the end is not the definitive bang you might expect, but a kind of shuffle-to-fade.
I know quite a few musicians who've sent me details of their myspace page. Although I've never understood how something so horribly designed can be so popular, the fact that everyone's on it these days gives it a real sense of purpose, particularly as an initial contact with people you don't know so well. So I figure if you can't beat 'em:
Having finally cleared the copyright on the text I'm using with the Fundacja Juliana Tuwima, I can now officially declare my new song cycle for soprano, baritone and ensemble finished. You can read more about it here. The premiere is in April at Carnegie Hall, but I'm happy to let people have a copy of the score in advance - just get in touch.
It's quite a brave new step for me this piece, but I think it should be a lot of fun, not least because it uses two of the techniques I've been talking about on the passions blog
The violinist in Taraf de Haidouks sometimes uses a special effect which took some detective work to understand how it was created. Here's how it sounds when the Taraf do it:
It turns out what is happening here is you take bow hair and tie it to the G string of the violin about a centimeter awawy from the bridge towards the fingerboard (I used a reef knot "left over right and under, right over left and under" and in the recording below I didn't tie it tight to the string, but I don't think it matters either way).
You then get loads of rosin all over your fingers and wipe it on the string a few times as well - really saturate everything. Then just pull:
Incidentally if you tie too near to the bridge I found you couldn't change the pitch and just get a more rasping effect:
Update
I used this effect in my piece Piosenki. Unfortunately I only exploited its cruder qualities, using it in the opening of the song 'Smelly' (it evokes flatulent imagery). You can hear it on the Carnegie Hall website where it is the forth song, about 5 mins in.
I was visiting my inlaws in Poland over Christmas and the plan was to punch holes in the lager tops we'd collected with a help from the metal worker who lived next door (Romek). Now Romek was very enthused by the whole project and promptly found us a huge bucket full of metal discs that were left overs from bird cages he makes. We punched holes in about 500 of them with his drill - 5 at a time, so took about an hour.
Cleverest of all, this may be the world's first portable lagerphone - we used three shovel handles and cut the head of a large screw, so each part screws together like a long curtain pole. The portability was a requirement because a) I had to get it back from Poland and b) I have to take it with me to the states in April, where it will feature in the last of my Piosenki.
Incidentally, research I did into the lagerphone recently suggested a whole army of other names for it, and indeed it's ancestory, or at least related instrument in the Turkish 'Jingling Johnny' or Turkish Crescent, where it was used to scare the living daylights out of the invading Westerners. Oh, and amongst others, Haydn used one in his Military Symphony (though I guess his didn't have a boot).
OK call me a proud dad, but isn't he a beaut:
Update
My lagerphone has now had its premiere in Carnegie Hall! Here's a shot of baritone Yang Yang holding it after the premiere of my piece Piosenki. My daughter helped decorate it further with some colourful tassles which danced and waived delightfully during the performance.
and here during a further performance, also in the Weill Hall at Carnegie, with baritone Kyle Ferrill in full flow:
You can hear the full recording of the first Carnegie performance on the Carnegie Hall website - the lagerphone is featured in the very last song, about 18mins in.
Update 2
As this page is visited regularly by people interested in the lagerphone, I thought I should add something about the inspiration to build the lagerphone. During the Carnegie workshops for my piece Piosenki I met Hyper-Accordionist and one half of the Groanbox Boys Michael Ward-Bergeman. Somehow we got talking about his lagerphone which is used in the Groanbox Boys duo, and I knew I had to make one. Visit their page dedicated to 'the boot' on the Groanbox Boys Freedom Boot page.
I am now thrilled that I have passed this inspiration on to my friend Clive Batkin who is planning to build his own 'heavy metal lagerphone'!
Update 3
Piosenki has now been taken up by world-famous soprano Dawn Upshaw, who has performed it in Minneapolis and at Carnegie Hall. Here's the latest picture, together with Baritone Evan Hughes and the composer.
Update 4
Kyle Ferrill playing the lagerphone at a recent performance by Chroma in Hammersmith:
and a video (the lagerphone clip from Piosenki is about 3 minutes in)
The Cajon is a wonderful percussion instrument, found in flamenco music and Peru. I've been enjoying browsing Cajon clips on Youtube recently, and wondered how difficult it would be to build one from scratch. Thanks to the joys of the internet I found this article [PDF 461kb] which describes the process in great detail - now all I need is time.
Meanwhile, great progress on the largerphone front, of which more soon..
In Classical Music Magazine's round up of the year's operatic premieres, Ashutosh Khandekar says :
"My own favourite of new opera of the year though, was PUSH! the latest offering by the ever enterprising and imaginative Tete a Tete Opera. Composer David Bruce and writer Anna Reynolds gave us a night to remember, full of zany wit and wisdom, as the cast played out the roller-coaster ride of giving birth with all its pain and joy."
Update
Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph also awarded Tete a Tete his 'Best of 2006' award "for producing, in Push! and Odysseus Unwound, two new operas of musical charm and theatrical originality"
I've just signed the contract to develop a new opera with the Royal Opera House's ROH2. It's not a full commission yet, I've basically been funded to do the first stage of development work and will give a private workshop performance in about a years time, before everyone decides where we go next. It's so exciting to be back in the opera world again, and thrilling to have such a prestigious backer for the first stage of the project.
I should mention that this part of the ROH2's work is backed by the same people who supported Push! - now calling themselves OperaGenesis. The Genesis Foundation appears to have done a great job at taking all the best features from the old Genesis Opera Project and developed a new 'rolling' scheme where each project is allowed to develop in its own way and on its own terms, rather than the old-style competition approach.
I'm just back from BART in New York State where we workshopped the first few songs from my Carnegie commission. There were quite amazing musicians involved, not least of which being my two singers Melissa Wegner and Yang Yang (pictured)
Osvaldo Golijov (with me below) and Dawn Upshaw led the process and provided lots of helpful advice.
I also met crazy accordion man Michael Ward-Bergeman - here doing a bit of composing:
Michael had some great Romanian music he introduced me to (he's played with Taraf de Haïdouks), including the extraordinary voice of Dona Dumitru Siminica. Read more about Michael's zobstick on my Instrument Blog
