Steamsong is a multimedia poem commissioned by The National Railway Museum (UK).  The work is scored for 12 voices, narrator, child performer, an ensemble of 7 instruments, video projection and digital sound.

“And she jumped to it like a live thing”. With these words, Mallard‘s intrepid driver, Joe Duddington, described how his “lovely blue streamlined engine” responded during its record-breaking run on the 3rd July 1938. Driver Joe’s words (used verbatim in Steamsong) encapsulate one of the opera’s key themes: that inanimate things might possess a life of sorts, an idea echoed in the suggestive, shape-shifting forms of that ubiquitous propellant of the industrial age—steam.

Steamsong‘s narrative embeds several vignettes, thematically linked and brought together in time and space. Associations are made between a piping hot cup of station tea and the morning mist of the Yorkshire dales, between the compressed fist of vapour driving Mallard to glory and those vulnerable wisps of ‘fearful breath’ that, four months later, escaped the mouths of German Jews persecuted during the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom of 9th November 1938 and the children being evacuated from Nazi Germany by train during the Kindertransport effort.

“Who’d dare say lightning never strikes in one place twice?” asks the mucky-faced LNER Chorus, alluding, on the one hand, to Albert Einstein’s famous 1916 thought experiment in which lightning strikes a moving train at both ends ‘simultaneously’, and, on the other, to the twin bolts of coincidence that saw the First World War replayed on the same ground a quarter of a century later. In Part X of Steamsong the Station Announcer conjures a wild-haired Einstein travelling in one of Mallard‘s carriages. And although the iconic scientist may have been inclined to side with German sceptics over the veracity of the British locomotive’s achievement, he would probably have waved enthusiastically (being a pacific sort of chap) to an observer watching from the platform when lightning struck again for British steam culture and driver Joe Duddington and fireman Tommy Bray blasted the A4 locomotive through Little Bytham at 125.88 mph (the first strike having been delivered four years earlier by the Flying Scotsman as it passed through the same Lincolnshire village at 100mph). Einstein might even have laughed at the thought of himself playing a bit part in one of his own fables—racing “end to end, violin in hand, playing tomorrow’s flashy cadenzas”, as the plucky narrator puts it.

Breath-driven and metallic, the sound of brass plays a prominent role in Steamsong‘s twelve brief ‘scenes’. Rendered raw and treated, live and virtual, brass is invoked in the words of the libretto, in the dynamic presence of the tuba—lending weighty tonnage to the antique video images of locomotives, lost property and driving coupling rods. Brass features too in the opera’s accompanying soundtrack, where time-stretched chords form an acoustical backdrop to a duet between the soprano and the violin, creating an appeasingly dreamy rendition of Vaughan Williams’ English pastoral, Serenade to Music, composed in 1938.

Amid the newly-composed material in Steamsong is a small pile of ‘lost property’ to be (re)discovered: British Transport Film Archive footage, fragments of pre and post-war music, ‘Chamberlain’s umbrella’, the sound of an A4 Pacific class locomotive’s chime whistle, the words of the modern-day residents of Little Bytham, and, as already mentioned, the testimony of driver Joe himself. We might wish to add to that list the Kindertransport children, depicted here in live and virtual form.

The last word in the work is given over to the inhabitants of a modern-day Little Bytham, who begin Part XI by giving voice to their thoughts, feelings and grievances about living now. The various ‘re-animations’ in Steamsong lend ironic inflection to past glories (“a well-known tune, time after time”, groans the narrator when relating the adventures of a speck of coal ash). All these elements are represented through a combination of music and sound, voice and language, gesture and action, object and moving image. Thus Steamsong might be thought of as an operatic poem whose structure is not unlike that of an umbrella (there are several in Steamsong)—when open the lines of narrative converge but when closed the fabric and folds face one another and touch.

In creating the piece, I had the pleasure of observing the workings of a railway museum at close quarters. Spending time at Locomotion in Shildon and visiting the National Railway Museum in York on several occasions taught me much about steam culture (including the significance of plasticene and aniseed stink bombs). I talked to visitors, staff, railway artists, train restoration experts and qualified train drivers, and was given privileged access to one of Sir Nigel Gresley’s beauties (Union of South Africa) to make a recording of its distinctive chime whistle (it took over seven hours for the boiler to generate enough pressure for the whistle to deliver more than a mere whisper). I attended a steam gala, took a ride in the driver’s cab of a steam locomotive, shovelled coal using an authentic fireman’s shovel, attended lectures and numerous model railway exhibitions; I searched Ebay for Acme Thunderer whistles and marvelled when, during an early rehearsal of Steamsong at Locomotion, the trains were put to bed to the sound of my music. Much generosity and friendliness was shown by staff at Locomotion and unstinting support came from Durham County Council’s arts team, which, in partnership with the Museum, commissioned the work.

Rehearsals

photos©Frances Anderson

A/V Fit-up @ Locomotion

A Sign in Space is a sound opera commissioned by The Forge in association with Durham Cathedral and Durham Music Service. It forms part of Sounding the Sacred, a participatory arts project exploring responses to sacred space. The new work gets its title from Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics story in which the narrator—a galactically orbiting being called Qfwfq—creates the first ever sign and awaits its return some 600 million years later.

A Sign in Space will be premiered on 21st July at the 2012 Durham International Brass Festival. The work combines choral settings of Isaac Newton’s Principia with a variety of ‘cosmic’ sound treatments and live instrumental music. It does so in an attempt to conflate some of the traditional signifiers associated with the often opposed institutions of science and religion.

Visit the Sounding the Sacred Blog.

Penitence is a new composition for seven bass trombones. Commissioned by Durham City Arts and The Sage Gateshead for Durham International Brass Festival, the work was written in response to the time I spent working with prisoners in HMP Frankland.

These diabetes self-test readings of my blood sugar levels form the autobiographical basis of a new work entitled Glucose for solo piano. The work comprises a collection of preludes and fugues constructed around readings recorded in my diabetes logbooks. The compositional process involves mapping these values, which range between 2.6 and 10.6, onto the piano keyboard to generate musical patterns and motifs.

20/08/11

In Prelude No. 4 the median reading of 5.9 (which translates as C#3 on the piano keyboard) is used as a pedal or “fulcrum” around which a plainsong-like melody moves. The melody is derived from readings 224-261 shown on the chart below.

10/08/11

In Prelude No. 3 multiple readings taken over days, weeks and months, co-mingle with varying degrees of sweetness.

03/08/11

Fugue No. 1 relaxes some of the “rules” adopted in Prelude 1 below. The sequence of notes (readings) remains intact but not their radical distribution across the piano keyboard, resulting in a more ‘contained’, if not melodic, contour. This fugue uses the first 45 test readings from my logbook, the music’s “argument” unfolding through the various transpositions and permutations associated with the fugue form.

18/07/11

Prelude No. 1 presents the first 68 readings as discrete note events. The result is a simple processional in which each note represents a lancet scratch and the sampling of a dot of blood. The pitch of each note (its height/position relative to the piano’s 88 keys) indicates the amount of glucose detected. I’ve annotated the score here and there with comments made at the time of measurement, such as “after cycle ride” and “noodles, bean shoots stir-fry previous eve”.

11/07/11

I’ve set up shop in Room C22 of the International Music Centre, The Sage, Gateshead in an attempt to get to grips with the piece. Part of the compositional challenge is to familiarise myself with and, to some extent, inhabit the note sequences generated by the numbers, which can often seem alien. I’ve settled on a ‘preludes and fugues’ format. This gives considerable scope for working the material and enough latitude to explore its potential as a means of narrating my experience of the condition.

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Afterwards I stood where the Vecrīga (Old Riga) webcam would pick me up and waved to my family in the UK watching me online. Here’s a screenshot (that’s me with arms akimbo).

Click the image to visit the Riga Town Hall Square webcam now.

In October 2010 I gave a conference presentation entitled “Reading Music: Further Adventures in Creative Musicology”. The themes of the 42nd Baltic Musicology Conference were Music and Identities: The Baltic Sea Region in the 21st Century and New Approaches to Music Analysis.

The event was held at the Jazeps Vitols Latvian Academy of Music (below). Composers and musicologists from 12 countries were in attendance.

Research for my second novel took me to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague this July. The photograph shows the view from my 8th floor hotel room window. I sat in on the trial of Radovan Karadzic and a number of other accused war criminals.

The novel (still untitled) is about a TV soap star whose prior involvement in the Bosnian conflict as a member of a touring theatre company brings him to the point of mental collapse. The story is told in part through the eyes of puppet and object “characters”, including an inhumanly cruel marionette.

At a conceptual level, the book explores the status of performing objects as expressions of the darker side of human nature. Other research undertaken for the project includes reading around the subject of puppetry and “object theatre” (The Secret Life of Puppets by Victoria Nelson and Dumbstruck by Steven Connor are examples) and attending the 2009 Suspense Festival and the 2011 Manipulate Festival in Edinburgh.