Monthly Archives: December 2014

Semaphore

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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.

A Continual Snowfall of Petrochemicals

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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

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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.

Concertino

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Concertino

for clarinet, violin, violoncello and piano
1988

The piece is to some extent a reaction to the previous two pieces I had completed: Through the Sharp Hawthorn and Only Connect, both of which had used quite complex and involved compositional methods. Although basically intuitive, they still used rows, matrices and other methods to complete the detail. After moving to Charterhouse in the Summer of 1988, I felt that I wanted to get started in the new environment as soon as possible, and so I wrote Concertino quickly and almost entirely intuitively.

More about the piece

Sound versions available: midi

MIDI

Concertino MIDI File
Concertino Scorch File

Miscellaneous

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Five Pieces for Violin and Viola 1979/1982/1988
Music For Good Friday 8:07 1981
Three Early Piano Pieces 1 3:44 1979
Three Early Piano Pieces 2 2:26
Three Early Piano Pieces 3 1:03
Fanfare 1 (Zone) brass quintet 1:00 1983
Fanfare 2 (Philip Jones) four trumpets, four trombones 1:36 1991
Fanfare 3 (Investiture) four trumpets, two horns, two trombones 2:00 2001
Fanfare 4 (Charterhouse)

In Principio

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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.

Only Connect

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

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

Only Connect was originally written for the Durham University Chamber Orchestra. The title is the epigram of E.M.Forster’s book Howards End, but if a work of Forster’s could be said to influence the piece at all it would be A Passage to India, in which links are attempted between diverse peoples and the individuals’ relationship to the whole. However, the title was not decided upon until well into the composition of the piece, and so neither book played any part in its conception.

One of the original ideas was for a series of fugues for orchestra and a number of solo instruments, (basically, the principals of each instrument (flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, violin, hence the solo violin). Although a set of instrumental soli remain, the element of fugue has gone.

Another early idea that remains in the present score. This came from hearing a radio broadcast of Vaclav Havel’s play Largo Desolato in the translation by Tom Stoppard. The play has many features which can be related to music, quite possibly consciously, and these features give the play an unreal air, rather as if the characters were actually performing a slow, tragicomic dance. Blocks of text repeat, slightly altered in differing circumstances, rather in the way that block type music is composed. One feels that when these blocks recur one is sliding into a nightmarish spiral from which escape is impossible.

The aspect of the play’s performance which influenced Only Connect is a structural device. Each of the seven scenes of the play are separated by a short musical interlude, the music being defined in the text only as ‘impressive orchestral music’. In fact, the first three scenes comprise only the following actions:

SCENE ONE
As the music dies away the curtain rises slowly.
LEOPOLD is alone on the stage. He is sitting on the sofa and staring at the front door. After a long pause he gets up and looks through the peep-hole. Then he puts his ear to the door and listens intently. After another long pause the curtain drops suddenly and at the same time the music returns.
SCENE TWO
As the music dies away the curtain rises slowly.
LEOPOLD is alone on the stage. He is sitting on the sofa and staring at the front door. After a long pause he gets up and looks through the peep-hole. Then he puts his ear to the door and listens intently. After another long pause the curtain drops suddenly and at the same time the music returns.
SCENE THREE
As the music dies away the curtain rises slowly.
LEOPOLD is alone on the stage. He is sitting on the sofa and staring at the front door. After a long pause he gets up and looks through the peep-hole. Then he puts his ear to the door and listens intently. He evidently hears something which makes him jump back…
This seemed an extraordinarily effective and uniquely powerful opening, given suitable music. The contrast between the ‘impressive music’ (as I ‘heard’ it – not the music used during the broadcast), and the silence with the nervous reactions of the isolated figure, in addition to the dramatic action of the curtain, formally isolating the figure seemed an excellent way of opening a piece and giving a powerful image and reference point. Finally, it also shared with a number of my pieces the same form of three similar gestures alternating with a contrasting idea.

Through the Sharp Hawthorn (Blows the Cold Wind)

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for flute and piano
1987

more: http://rhoadley.net/comp/through.php

Through the Sharp Hawthorn (Blows the Cold Wind)

Composed: Durham, November-December 1987
Revised: Charterhouse, October 1989
Performed:
i) Durham Music Society Concert:
flute: Caroline Stockman
piano: Clive Broadbent

ii) (Revised version)
SPNM Concert, Lauderdale House, Highgate, London
flute: Marian Erhardt
piano: Michael Dussek

Through the Sharp Hawthorn was written following a suggestion by Dr John Casken for a piece for the excellent flautist Caroline Stockman, then present in Durham.

The full title is a line from King Lear – Lear’s wits have just ‘been turned’ and he is talking on the heath to ‘Poor Tom’ , the ‘mad’ version of Edgar, who has been forced to flee from his father who believes him guilty of treachery. Rather than leaving the country, and therefore his misguided father to the actual treachery of his ‘bastard’ half-brother, Edmund, he chooses to dress in rags and act as a madman.

This title was considered appropriate for a number of reasons: the storm scene of the play during which the line occurs is one of the bleakest in all Shakespeare, and I consider this piece to be one of the most bleak in mood I have written; the scene represents a ‘turning point’ in the drama: this piece represents a turning point in my composing, (or at least it felt so at the time); the imagery was appropriate: the cold wind representing the flute, the sharp hawthorn, the piano; finally, the inverted nature of the line, (a more common, more modern version might be ‘the cold wind blows through the sharp hawthorn’), represents at least one of the compositional features of the work.