'Madness For Alice' - Recording on short notice and composing for marking
Recording one’s music is not always an easy task and can often incur a lot of time and money. I am very fortunate to have access to the studios at the University of York free of charge and to study with people dedicated to bringing the work of composers such as myself to life. However, one cannot be expecting the people who graciously give up their valuable time, for free, to spend hours every day practicing the music. This is something that composers in this day and age have to accept; fork out and get a perfect recording or be satisfied with a recording of with some imperfections and be grateful that there are people willing to help you out. As I fall in the latter category, we had to make some compromises with the written parts of my latest string quartet piece.
"Madness For Alice" is a new work for string quartet which I submitted as part of my MA in Composition and recently had recorded by the fantastic Jaiden Muschett. Writing music for assessment is a difficult task that presents its own world of problems. One example in this piece comes with a mere two bars which are repeated indefinitely. My intentions for this were to create a dense wall of atonal sound - but can one just write such a comment in a notated score for an academic submission? This composer is inclined to say no as there is nothing to mark other than what the marker can gauge of the auditory image in my head. Now, the actual written material in this section included sporadic glissandi from a violin and cello along with fast triplet semiquavers from the viola and other violin. This proved remarkably difficult to execute in a studio setting (on minimal rehearsal) and whilst rehearsing, I came to a realisation - I simply did not care how the effect was executed, as long as it was executed effectively. This led me on a train of thought regarding just how much I actually cared about the notation of a lot of auditory effects in many of my more recent spatial works. There are a number of sections in “Madness For Alice” that resulted in me telling the ensemble “ignore what I have written and do X/Y/Z” and this worked really well for the recording but would have looked terrible in a score for the purposes of academia.
This degree of almost improvisatory performance for specific effects is an area that I will be looking into in more detail and seeing to what extent performers would want to see this, rather than a difficult and intricate passage that is notated purely for effect and could be achieved in a variety of different ways. Seeing how this integrates with submitting scores for academic assessment is also looking to be an exciting and interesting avenue to go down.
“Madness For Alice” can be heard at the following link:
https://soundcloud.com/ollie-pickup/madness-for-alice
Once again, I would like to express my eternal gratitude to the performers and engineer who made this recording possible.