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So fell behind on the blogging a bit… and after a few technical problems I’m back! I’m now back in Australia and have been enjoying the scorching Perth summer heat. The last couple of weeks of my study trip were really enlightening. I went to Berlin, Vienna, Graz, then Amsterdam and headed back to the UK for a couple of days before flying back to Australia. I saw some gigs and caught up with a few different musicians and had a lesson with Ed Partyka.

A very cold Tiergarten in Berlin

So from Tubingen I went to Berlin, stayed with Australian saxophonist Andrew Brooks and had a great time. I went to see a few great gigs but the highlight was seeing the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet. They were incredible musicians playing great music. They played the Wind Quintets of Johan Kvandal, Kalevi Aho, Peteris Vasks and Carl Nielsen, so there was a definite Nordic theme to the program. Hearing the concert made me want to hear more music by the composers and I’ve particularly loved Vasks and Aho, especially Vasks Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra: “Distant Light”. It’s incredible. While in Berlin I also went to the Museum of Modern Art (Hamburger Bahnhof) and experienced a great installation by Tomas Saraceno, called Cloud Cities. It was a huge hall with different suspended spheres with plants or other things growing/living in them. You could also go inside some of the huge spheres with the aim of the installation being to explore the idea of where we would live if the planet becomes inhabitable. It was cool!

Not a bad house and land package, Vienna.

From Berlin I went to Vienna, saw some impressive buildings and got hassled by people in Mozart costumes trying to sell tickets to concerts where the performers would also be in costume, needless to say I didn’t go. But I did go to the jazz club Porgy and Bess and see some intense improvised music and some really interesting compositions by Georg Graewe and the Sonicfiction Orchestra. I also went to some amazing art galleries and museums seeing some modern and some classic art and sculpture.

Vienna Cathedral lit up at night.

From Vienna I headed to Graz and had some lessons with Ed Partyka. The lessons were fantastic in that he completely picked apart some of my music and exposed some pretty big lapses of attention to detail in my scores, particularly in orchestration. The lessons were also frustrating in that I wish I’d had more lessons like Ed’s when I was at uni. But I took a lot away from them and am determined to write more music concentrating on some of the points he made.

Canals at night, Amsterdam.

From Graz I went to Amsterdam for a few days and caught up with an Australian saxophone player and also a German composer/arranger who are both doing masters at the Amsterdam Conservatoire. It was really good to talk with other young musicians about different approaches and attitudes to music. Amsterdam was very cool and the conservatory is awesome, brand new, amazing facilities etc. I went to a few museums and galleries like Anne Frank House and the Van Gogh Museum, but the best part of Amsterdam was just walking around the streets and along the canals. There were loads of cool little vintage shops, cafes and little bars, it was a really beautiful city.

So if I try and sum up what I’ve learnt, it would be a bit impossible. One of the things that this trip and all the lessons I’ve had has shown me is that there are a lot of different and almost completely opposite musical opinions, tastes, compositional approaches etc. out there, and a lot of very strong opinions on what is right, and wrong (musically!). But what is important is to take all the information on board, some of it I’ll keep and try and follow, some I won’t because if I took everything I heard in the different lessons as gospel I’d end up going round in circles and never doing anything. I think the right attitude and probably the most universal idea from all the lessons, concerts and conversations I’ve had is make sure whatever you do is convincing, convincing to the audience, convincing to the musicians playing it and just as importantly convincing to you. Not that it’s a particularly new idea or a groundbreaking thought, but I’m definitely going to keep it in mind from now on.

The next month will be spent writing music and trying to digest the piles of notes, and recordings of lessons I have as well as organizing some gigs and possibly a recording. Bring on 2012!

Well it has been a very intense few days, with a very steep learning curve. I’ve had three days of lessons in a row, two with Florian Ross and one long lesson with Rainer Tempel. Both were really good and have given me a lot to think about and made me see my music much more clearly and critically, which will hopefully help me improve as a writer. Not only have I come away with a lot of ideas to improve the music I’ve already written but also a lot of ideas for new pieces, and ways to approach composing in general.

So in Cologne I had lessons with pianist/composer Florian Ross. The two double lessons were very enlightening for me and Florian had some very clear insights and comments on my music, which I will be able to use no matter what style of music I’m writing. We talked a lot about structure and how the music I write always feels very blocky, not just harmonically but rhythmically. So phrases tend to be all a similar length, and rhythmically a lot of the melodies I write tend to be a little bit of movement followed by a long note. So we talked about ways to combat this such as sketching without barlines. We went through some of his scores as well and talked about the structure of them, not just overall structure but the structure of each section, and how all the different ideas link up without being to obvious. Florian had a lot of really specific points on particular parts of my scores, which I won’t go into, but needless to say I have a lot to think about! Florian gave me a few cds as well as a bunch of scores, what a legend! More about Florian here.

Look carefully..how rude!

While in Cologne I stayed with a friend from Australia who is studying jazz trombone there and it was great fun to have a local tour guide. I was thrilled to discover that for the time I’m in Germany there will be Christmas markets in every city, and there was one on practically every corner in Cologne. Much mulled wine and ‘wurst’ of all sorts, as well as crepes, waffles and chocolate in all its forms…So basically it’s a great time to be in Germany!

Me and my lovely host tim in sunny Cologne

Christmas Markets in Cologne

Don't know what these two are up to..

I took a train from Cologne to Tubingen on Tuesday night, arriving very late and would have been later if not for a helpful man who shouted “Hey Australia! Wrong way, get on THIS train!” So thank you to that nice anonymous German guy. My lack of navigational skills meant once I arrived in Tubingen, I got lost looking for the hotel. It was like a ghost town and it felt like I was on the set of an old movie. Tubingen still has its old town intact with buildings dating back to the 12^thcentury. So I was wheeling my suitcase up and down very steep cobblestone streets in the old town until I finally saw another living soul, which, thankfully was a policeman! Who kindly walked me to the hotel. (I was nowhere near it!) Next moring I headed to my lesson with Rainer Tempel. In the light of day, Tubingen turned out to be an incredibley beautiful town complete with lovely river, swans, a castle, and of course, Christmas markets!

Tubingen Christmas markets at night

View over Tubingen old town from the top of the Schloss (castle).

The lesson with Rainer was fantastic. He is a really interesting composer/piano player, who is pretty much self-taught from reading books and studying scores. He’s done everything from small group jazz, big band, symphony orchestra, serial music, and creating pieces from phone numbers and birth dates. All of his music was really cool, and you can find out more about it here.

So we went through of my pieces and scores and he made some really good comments on the structure and orchestration ideas, and changing the different functions of the sections of the ensemble to give variety and keep the listener engaged. We went through a lot of his scores and talked about his compositional process. For each of his pieces he could tell me exactly what he did, where different material came from and how it had been developed or altered. We talked about putting constraints on a piece before writing it, so only using certain pitches or intervals and all the different ways you can use them, horizontal, vertical etc. He has written a lot of pieces like that and a few he explained before hand and some others he didn’t. The ones he didn’t explain before hand, I was listening for trying to work out what rules he had used to compose them or constraints he’d used but they were so well hidden and the music was just great music, rhythmically engaging, strong melodically and everything just worked. It was really cool! So his approach was to use things like 12 tone rows, chance, data etc to generate an idea, or using pitch, scale or intervallic constraints, but don’t shout it from the rooftops like, “CAN YOU HEAR HOW I’VE PUT THE OPENING THEME BACKWARDS HERE? AREN’T I CLEVERRRR???!!”

He also had some interesting points on the use of improvisation, and whether to notate exactly what you want in some areas, or to give the player and idea of how you want it to be with pitch constraints etc. and have them improvise it. We talked about different notations, and he’d used a lot of non-traditional notation as well as extended instrumental techniques in his music. So I learnt a lot, had a great lunch and have come away with a few cd’s, a pile of scores and a lot of ideas and inspiration.

Pretty Tubingen

While the last few days have been pretty challenging and a continuous revelation that relatively, I know nothing about music, it’s also been really inspiring and I’m hearing my music much more critically. I now realize that sometimes I’ve been listening back to recordings of my music searching for things I like, or that sound good, instead of listening really critically and with total detachment for the things that don’t work and sound bad. I have also come away with heaps of ideas for new pieces and how I’m going to approach writing them, and have been doing lots of sketches, and I can’t wait to really get into it when I get back to Australia.

But for now, bring on Berlin! I’m catching up with Ed Partyka and sitting in on a large ensemble recording that he’s helping a composition student of his do, which should be really interesting! Looking forward to seeing the sights, checking out some gigs, and hanging with some fellow Australian musos as well!

Hello again! Trondheim has been wonderful. Arrived late Wednesday afternoon after my flight was delayed leaving London due to typical English fog, and as a result I missed my connecting flight from Oslo to Trondheim. When I finally arrived I went straight to meet Eirik Hegdal and then listen in to a rehearsal he was doing with the Alpaca Ensemble. The Alpaca ensemble is a really interesting group that grew out of the Alpaca trio, which consists of violin, cello and piano. The ensemble that was rehearsing on Wednesday night was the trio plus drums/glockenspiel/percussion toys and Eirik on saxophones, (sopranino, soprano and baritone). They were rehearsing an extended piece of Eirik’s called Tapet Tapet (Wallpaper, Wallpaper). A very cool series of short pieces mostly derived from the same material. Eirik gave me the scores to follow along while they rehearsed and it was really fun. He seems to stretch small cells of melodic or rhythmic material as far as he can and the music really has a sense of humour as well! More about alpaca ensemble here.

Nidaros Cathedral, in the catacombes they had a display of tombstones dating back to the 11th and 12th centuries..

It has gargoyles and everything!

Thursday I met up with Eirik again for a lesson and we talked a lot about his music and listened to a lot as well. It was very inspiring and he has a great attitude towards composing music. His philosophy was basically to always be curious and to always try to do something new. Not necessarily new for the world, but new for him, which I think that is a really good philosophy to have! It was a great lesson and he had some good thoughts on my music as well, about creating more space, not having the material so crowded. Also, he made me a very good coffee and gave me some chocolate cake, which was excellent! To top it off I left with a pile of his cds that we’d been listening to, cool guy, cool music! Eirik composes for many different projects from contemporary classical to his own jazz groups and he also runs the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, a highly creative group that changes instrumentation according to each different project.  More about Eirik here and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra here.

Red House

Blue House

Street of many houses.

Thursday night I went to a performance the Alpaca Trio did at the Trondheim Art Gallery. The concert was two new pieces, one for solo cello by Lene Grenager and another for the full trio by Jon Oyvind. Both are Norwegian composers and Jon spoke extensively about his piece before it was played but in Norwegian, so I couldn’t understand any of it. I liked the piece though! Both works were really interesting and engaging to listen to and used some extended techniques for the instruments. I really like going to concerts in art galleries, if you don’t know anyone, and can’t speak the local language you can spend intermission and pre-concert time looking at art instead of standing around feeling awkward. Would like to do a concert with Ecila in a small art gallery..hmmm if anyone thinks of one in Perth let me know!

Old buildings on the river

I’ve spent the last couple of days being a tourist, a few art galleries, a huge cathedral, a museum and walking around the streets taking happy snaps. I’ve also been writing music! It is very cold, though apparently it’s actually quite warm for this time of year, and my AU$ is not taking me very far. Am surviving on spaghetti and pesto sauce, and by stuffing myself at the free youth hostel breakfast. They eat some weird stuff though, such as fish eggs on bread for breakfast. It is kinda like caviar but cheaper and you squeeze it out of what looks like a toothpaste tube and spread it on bread or crackers. I decided to stick to toast and jam…

Walking in the park

Cold in the park!

View from the top of the park

Flying to Cologne tomorrow and meeting up with Florian Ross!

 Autumn. Something you really miss out on I think living in Australia.

After 8 days in London, several concerts as part of the jazz festival, a great lesson with Hans Koller, some art and design galleries and exhibitions, catching up with some old friends and family, and a lot of wandering the back streets getting lost, I’m off to Norway tomorrow!

The first concert I went to was one of my musical heros, Kenny Wheeler and the London vocal project singing a piece of his called ‘Mirrors Suite’. While the concert was really disappointing for several reasons I won’t go into, I did get to see and hear Wheeler play which is something I will cherish, as it is unlikely to happen again. On Friday night I saw Gretchen Parlato and her band which was fantastic and Sunday night I saw Bill Frisell and the 858 quartet. This was awesome, it was very subtle music with a lot of thought going into every note it seemed. The instrumentation was just guitar, cello, violin and viola and each of the players were incredible. It was very ‘Frisell’ in every aspect. The Scottish trio NeWt opened for Frisell and they were really interesting. Led by Australian trombonist Chris Grieves it was free and improvised and Grieves was using electronics with his trombone as well as whistling (so good!) and the drummer was using a lot of different sounds and toys in his playing. A good review/description of the concert can be found here. I was meant to go and see Magnus Ostrom and his group play and had bought a ticket and everything, however I fell asleep at 4pm and missed it. Damn Jetlag. So I’ll have to settle for listening to the album and hope he comes to Australia some time soon!

Whilst in London I also had a lesson with Hans Koller (German pianist/composer based in London for the last 20 years). Hans has studied with Bob Brookmeyer amongst others and had some fantastic insights into some of the music I’ve written as well as thoughts on compositional approach and working on the craft. What was particularly interesting and really resonated with me was the idea of ‘practicing composing’. At one time or another most instrumentalists will really ‘shed’ dedicating huge amounts of time to practice and improving skill and technique. While I have always tried to focus on improving my compositional skills, it was usually ‘on the job’ learning, so writing a piece and learning from mistakes or trying to use specific techniques in the compositional process. Hans emphasised the idea of practicing writing, particularly through counterpoint exercises. I’ve this a little in the past but when I consider the kind of practice I once did on my instrument it is an insignificant amount. Of course, time is always the enemy and people can’t necessarily just dedicate huge amounts of time to counterpoint and harmonic exercises, and never write any pieces, but I’m going to try to find more of a balance between ‘practicing’ and ‘doing’.

Hans pointed out a few specific things in my music and made some suggestions. One being orchestration and how to create tension with orchestration, and the over-use of unison. Now I love unison and will continue to use it but when he pointed it out that there was an awful lot of it in my music, I had a bit of a lightbulb moment, realising perhaps I have been overdoing it and therefore reducing its effectiveness as a sound. He suggested colouring some of the melodic lines with other tones/intervals rather than leaving melodies as unison, giving the opening of Evanescence by Maria Schnieder as an example of how effective it is. He also talked about tension and release on a very ‘micro’ level, so having every note within a melodic line, and the accompanying chord to that melodic line creating either tension or release as well as the overall melody and the whole piece consisting of tension and release. The other point he made was about contrapuntal writing. I always try and write contrapuntally but have never really studied it in detail. I guess I write a kind of bastardised version of counterpoint where I write a lot of countermelodies that I hear and like, but Hans suggested that formally studying counterpoint would really help polish this style of writing. He suggested the book The Study of Counterpoint: from Johann Joseph Fux’s Gradus Ad Parnassum (translated by Alfred Mann, which I have looked through before but never thoroughly) as a good starting point for my contrapuntal improvement..It is a very famous and old book that Bach and Beethoven studied, so I should probably get around to reading it.

Hans also suggested a couple of pieces to listen to; Quiet City (Copland) and Dumbarton Oaks (Stravinsky). I love getting specific listening recommendations as otherwise I find my music library completely overwhelming and tend to stick to what I know while gradually building up a huge amount of music I have yet to thoroughly listened to, but purchased when someone or other told me to “check out this record/person”. So specific pieces are good I guess! Overall Hans gave me a lot to think about and he came across as an great musician and deep thinker about music, so I’m really glad to have met him!

Aside from the musical experiences described above, I went to the Tate Modern which I love, especially the surrealism and realism collection. In the entrance hall of the Tate Modern there is always a rotating installation project. Last time I was there it was a giant spider and this time it was a hand made analogue film by Tacita Dean.

Tacita Dean FILM. See the people sitting in front of the film image to judge its size!

I also went to an exhibition on Postmodernism design at the Victoria and Albert museum. This made me realise I don’t know anything about Postmodernism in the architecture, art and design sense, and also made me want to know more!

So that was London. Whether I write as much about my future lessons I don’t know but I’m looking forward to meeting Eirik Hegdal in Trondheim tomorrow! Possible snow on the weekend and expected high of 3 degrees…should be fun!

*Apologies for lack of image rotation, wordpress and I have been having some disagreements..

New cramming around old.

The Shard, another interesting piece of modern architecture going up in London

Blogging in the Qantas Lounge bar at Changi Airport, Singapore.

So it has been awhile..but in the last few months I’ve listened to, read about and written lots of music. I’m currently sitting at Changi airport in Singapore about to jump on the plane to London to start my 6-week study trip around the UK and Europe. But before I go into that excitement, a quick few words about what I’ve been up to in the last few months.

I had another couple of lessons with Iain Grandage in September while he was visiting Perth and they were fantastic usual. He had some great insight into the music I had written since July and he also set me onto something really quite cool, Free Scores by everyone from John Adams to Stravinsky!  Boosey and Hawkes have put up a lot of scores that they publish online that you can view for free! There are scores by hundreds of incredible composer both dead and living! Go here and create an account and start score reading!

In October Jim McNeely (jazz composer/arranger extraordinaire) was in Perth to do some concerts with the West Australian Youth Jazz Orchestra and I managed to get a lesson with him while he was here. He had some little pearls of wisdom to offer:

“Listen honestly to your music” Be critical and learn from every piece you write.

“An idea is just an idea” It is what you do with that idea that matters

On finishing a piece: “I’m not done with it but it’s done with me”

On using programs like Sibelius: Don’t go to the score to soon” Sketch, plan and really think through your ideas before going to the Sibelius score.

I got to listen to a lot of Jim’s pieces played live several times during his time in Perth and had a realisation as to one of the reasons why they work so well. The rhythmic section writing is fantastic. There is always a really interesting and solid grounding rhythmically and harmonically and always something interesting in the groove. I guess because he has played in so many great big band rhythm sections, he knows what works and how important it is! But it has definitely encouraged me put more emphasis on clear writing for the rhythm section and not too many slash marks!

October also contained an exciting concert and recording for me. Cal Squared, (a trumpet and vibraphone duet containing two very good friends of mine Callum Moncrieff and Callum G’Froerer) commissioned a piece from me and it was recorded for ABC Classic FM and also performed live in concert in Perth. I really enjoyed the experience of writing the piece which was a new challenge for me in that there is no rhythm section and surprisingly, the less instruments there are, the harder it seems to be to compose a piece! I also had a great time rehearsing and workshopping with the Callums and it was generally an overall great musical experience! Hopefully I can get a copy of the recording to put up here or keep an ear out for it on the ABC!

In my July lessons with Mike Nock he suggested a few books to me and I recently got a great big fat book called Contemporary Harmony by Ludmila Uhela. It is like a detailed course in contemporary classical harmony that I am slowly working my way through. I also got Techniques of the Contemporary Composer by David Cope, which is a great compact book on harmony, notation and extended instrumental techniques in contemporary classical music.

I recently got a grant from the Australia Council to write some new music for Ecila, which is very exciting! I have booked a gig in late January so I have a deadline, which will hopefully induce a manic amount of speedy music writing. I have a few new pieces for Ecila, one of which is an extension of the material I set the Haiku from the previous post to. I’m really looking forward to hearing it played when I return to Perth and have some rehearsals in January.

So in about 14 hellish hours I will be in chilly London! I am there for 8 days before heading to even chillier Trondheim in Norway and then onto Germany and Austria. I’ll be blogging here with photos and words about concerts, music, museums, art galleries and travelling in general here so look in every so often if you’re interested!

Well, I’ve just arrived back in Perth after spending a week in Melbourne and Sydney having lessons with Iain Grandage and Mike Nock, listening to some great music, eating some amazing Thai food and being really really cold. I’m now looking forward to spending a few months writing music for Ecila and digesting the vast amount of ideas, reading/listening suggestions and harmonic concepts discussed in my lessons (in the slightly warmer environment of Perth).

I really enjoyed Melbourne, the food is great, the coffee is great and riding around on trams and trains is really relaxing and gave me the time to really listen to music. I was in Melbourne to have lessons with Iain Grandage, and we looked at putting words to music. This involved setting a Haiku poem to music, the Haiku I choose was written by Izumi Shikibu (a japanese poet born in the year 974! That’s a long time ago..apparently she was quite the lady and had several marriages, affairs and subsequent divorces). The Haiku is as follows:

The world rushes on

And now spring is over

It seems that only yesterday

Everything that I saw

Was in full flower

Setting the Haiku to music was a great exercise and really quite fun. The words, and the meaning of the poem inspired particular harmonic, melodic and textural sounds. I’ll definitely be using poetry and as a compositional tool for generating material in the future!

We also looked at using All Interval Tetra-Chords, (which is a chord that includes all the intervals), as a harmonic tool and also at ways of developing initial ideas and extending pieces. Some key words:

Cross-Fertilisation

Reverse Engineering

While in Melbourne I caught awesome big band ATM 15 doing their thing and then it was off to Sydney! It was great meeting Mike Nock and getting some ideas from him. We talked about using more space, changing texture and more sudden dynamic changes to maintain the listeners interest. Also discussed diatonic polymodality to create ‘sounds’ rather than chords. Mike also gave me a huge list of books to read and albums to check out as well as reiterating to me the following pearls of wisdom:

“Never strive to avoid the obvious”  (Nadia Boulanger said this I think)

“Sometimes the most important thing you can do as a composer is to cross stuff out. Be ruthless!”

After the first instalment of lessons in my artstart journey I have learnt so much and have so many new ideas and inspiration that I can’t imagine how much I will have learnt by the end of the 12 months! Now to write some music..ruthlessly.

So, I’m about to embark on a 12 month project through the Australia Councils ArtStart program. I’ll be studying with and meeting composers and musicians in Sydney, Melbourne and all across Europe and the UK and it’s all very exciting! Tomorrow I’m flying to Melbourne where it will all begin and I’ll be regularly writing about my experiences during the 12 month program here so stay tuned..!

Right now I’m writing a duet for Trumpet and Vibraphone for Callum G’Froerer and Callum Moncrieff to perform and also writing music for Ecila..aiming to record an album early 2012!