Semaphore, October 2014, performance 1, v2 from Richard Hoadley on Vimeo.

Comments from audience members:

“I really enjoyed the performance… it was interesting to watch the dancers ‘create’ the music.”

“I came because of a fondness for dance but … there is so much to take in here that it was useful to have to have two performances of the piece… Another couple of renditions would have permitted me to take in fully the choreography, the score, the text and the interaction of all the elements.”

“It was beautiful”

“Really engaging and interesting… Performance was captivating”

“it was great, and I wish more events had a discussion and then second performance format, that worked well”

“Brilliant!”

– An interesting edit of the day’s rehearsals and performances shot and edited by Krisztian Hofstadter.

– Semaphore at the Festival of Ideas website

‘Semaphore’ works between dance, music and text. It is a collaboration between the choreographer Jane Turner, the poet and writer Philip Terry and the musician, composer and technologist Richard Hoadley.

The primary focus is on live processes, data from the dancers’ movements are used to trigger and modulate text, audio and music notation. This is in turn performed and in some cases fed back to the dancers whose movements are then influenced by the music and text, and so on. Ideally, there is a balance between gesture, whether based on movement, music or text and the resulting translation that is not too trivial but is also not so remote that the origin and its result do not feel connected at all.

Semaphore, October 2014, performance 1 from Richard Hoadley on Vimeo.

automatic music for computers and Yamaha SY synthesisers
1998/9

And for all its breathtaking size and novelty, the biosphere of Jupiter was a fragile world, a place of mists and foam, of delicate silken threads and paper-thin tissues spun from the continual snowfall of petrochemicals formed by lightning in the upper atmosphere. Few of its constructs were more substantial than soap bubbles; its most terrifying predators could be torn to shreds by even the feeblest of terrestrial carnivores…
Arthur C Clarke, 2010, 1988, Grafton

Four Archetypes

for large orchestra

Composed: Cambridge, December-July 1993

Commissioned by the Cambridge-Heidelberg-Montpelier Orchestra with funds provided by Eastern Arts

Performed: Fanfares only – August 1993, West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge

The composition of Four Archetypes was begun immediately following the completion of Three Pieces for Two Pianos. I had first learned about the commission in June/July 1992, so a number of ideas were already in my mind before work began in earnest.

Three Pieces for Two Pianos

1992

Composed: March-November 1992

First performed: Royal Academy of Music, London, 1995; Philip Mead and Steve Guttman, pianos

http://rhoadley.net/comp/in_principio.php

http://rhoadley.org/sounds/in_principio/in_principio.mp3

In principio was written at Charterhouse in 1989. It was highly commended in the Lewis Silkin Choral competition of that year and was later performed by the BBC Singers and organist Darius Battiwalla at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. The recording was made by the Society for the Promotion of New Music and various copyrights remain associated with groups and performers.

2008

A port of The Copenhagen Interpretation, a previous automatic piece of mine to SuperCollider. The piece controls a Yamaha SY77 FM Synthesiser with SuperCollider. In this case it also makes use of a data glove running through the Teabox interface. Many thanks to Scott Wilson for his Teabox class for SuperCollider.

This is my first use of SuperCollider as an exclusive performance tool.

The glorious blob at the bottom of the screenshot is Anoushka, born 9th Feb, 2008.

2007

A meditation on the strange, alien and increasingly ubiquitous world of telephonic communication.

http://rhoadley.net/comp/histrionica.php

Histrionica

a melodrama for ‘cello and gamelan instruments
2006

First performed at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in March 2006 by Anton Lukoszevieze and members of the Cambridge Gamelan Society.

Histrionica is a melodrama for ‘cello and gamelan instruments. The melodrama is abstract, but is perhaps best described as being like an extreme counselling session between a histrionic client and a very calm counsellor. The ‘cello is the client. As might be expected, there is a coming together at the end. I actually wanted to avoid this – I wanted to keep the client and counsellor apart, but I’m afraid the romance of the situation overcame me and we finish with a very nice and gentle chorale.

E.M.Forster expressed it elegantly at the end of A Passage to India:

‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’

But the horses didn’t want it – they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single-file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw the Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there.’

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/r.j.hoadley/sounds/histrionica2.mp3

semi-automatic live performance music for computer

As in all typical studies, material is kept to a minimum (in one sense). The piece is currently constructed from about one hundred recordings of the word hello (hence the title).

Audio purists amongst you will not appreciate the many clicks, bumps and crackles throughout – caused primarily by my current lack of precise knowledge of the workings of one particularly irritating process. I’m trying to appreciate these as the inevitable extra-musical noises created by anyone learning a new instrument: similar extraneous noises are made by anyone playing many acoustic instruments: string noise on a guitar, the action of the keys in a harpsichord…

More importantly, it is highly feasible that the whole performance may end in sudden, unexpected silence when the machine crashes.

Finally and incidentally, if the piece works at all, you’ll doubtless see me frantically poring over my computer trying to sort things out. This isn’t how it’s meant to be. As a composer, ideally, I’d like to be able to relax and fret while others deal with the problems, or even while just the computer deals with it. Unfortunately this is not yet the case with Hello.

automatic music for computers and synthesisers

Produced for the inaugural concert of the APU Contemporary and Electronic Music Society in October 2002. Created by the pSY computer programme (see below) written by myself to control Yamaha SY77/99 synthesisers, the same programme used to create the earlier and more ambitious The Copenhagen Interpretation.

automatic music for four computers and four synthesisers

What happened at 8:00pm, Sunday 20th June 1999, in the Cambridge University Faculty of Music Concert Hall situated in West Road, Cambridge, marked the culmination of about two years’ work.