Scott Mc Laughlin - Composer
News and Concerts
News
12-05-12: Update: impulse responses and audio from my glass bowls experiment in Oxford with Shelley James is now up here
04-05-12: My new piece Resonant Systems has been accepted to BEAM Festival at Brunel University, it will be playing sometime between June 22-24th. This piece is the first draft in a series that extends There are Neither Wholes Nor Parts by examining the instrument as a resonant system of interactions. Here, two or more mechanically coupled cymbals are excited with specific sinewaves, matched to the resonant frequency of one of the cymbals in the system. This frequency is overloaded, causing near-chaotic cascade of of sideband frequencies, some of which activate resonances in the other cymbals, allowing a feedback network of oscillating frequencies across the multi-cymbal system. In theory, I'll be testing this with some scientists later in the year.
08-03-12: Very exciting news, I've been selected for the Bozzini String Quartet's Composers' Kitchen event this year, along with the excellent John Lely, and four Canadian composers. This involves a week in Montréal in April, for workshops and a laboratory-concert, and in November a concert at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (23/11/2012).
My piece will be exploring non-linearity in string harmonics. Trying to find those ambiguous places where a note can be on the edge of splitting into harmonics; what was a partial within a note-percept can be coaxed onto the edge of being a percept in its own right, oscillating somewhere between "pitch", "harmonic" and "multiphonic". And who better to work with on this than the fantastic Bozzini Quartet whose Tenney and Frey performances especially are some of my favourite recordings.
11-03-12: Collaborative research in action! I travelled down to Oxford University for a day of recording and informal discussion around Shelley James' resonant glassworks. The meeting arose out of seeing Shelley's work presented at the forum back in January where she was working with composer Christopher Garrard on pieces exploring the resonance of her glass bowls. For my part, I was interested in capturing the resonance of the different bowls as impulse responses, to create convolution reverbs from the sound of the bowls as resonant spaces, also present was Roger Thomas who was testing the bowls as inputs to his SARAH system (Semi-Autonomous Reactive Accompanist Hardware) for hardware generated improvisation using pitch-detection and a feedback system. Special thanks to Alex Harker for his impulse-reponse capture patch (MaxMSP) currently being developed as part of the excellent HISStools package (not yet available online but see here for an interview about it).
I'll devote a separate page to this once I have the content ready: this will include pictures, audio, links, and the set of impulse response files downloadable freely for your enjoyment/experimentation.
08-02-12: Lots of exciting summer plans afoot, currently I'm working on chaotic oscillations in feedback/resonance systems by driving cymbals with transducers: in an Alvin Lucier homage. I'll be taking the cymbals over to the Chaos Modelling and Simulation conference in Athens in June to do a paper and some demonstrations. I'm also hoping to be working with some non-linear dynamics researchers in science/maths in looking further into this.
17-10-11: Just back from the excellent 3rd Third International Conference on Music and Minimalism in Leuven, Belgium. A great four days of new people, new music, and new biers. Did a talk on aspects of minimalism and reductionist aesthetics in my own work, with a focus on Bateson's epistemology of difference; seemed to go down well. I'll write this paper up soon and it'll be posted on the conference site, which I'll link to.
Also, next week Sebastian Berweck plays my new piece for synthist + MaxMSP, Bifurcations in a Continuous System. The originating idea was to write a piece that is pianistic to play but doesn't sound like a keyboard envelope, so this piece maps the duration between notes to frequency; the notes themselves are inaudible, but the time between this note and the next is turned inversely into sustained tones, faster notes equal lower pitched tones and vice versa.
25-07-11: New website for my sax/electronics duo with Iain Harrison, check out Apropos-music. The design is minimal at the moment, will make it more prettierised later in the year, probably...
09-07-11: The wonderful Eric Honour has just released his new CD called Phantasm: Music for Saxophone and Computer, including his recording of my piece Whitewater, which he also toured extensively in 2009. Here's the iTunes link for downloads now, the full release is July 26th on Ravello Records.
26-07-11: Busy day today, Trio Scordatura performed my 'at least two things' this morning at the wonderful BEAM festival, then I performed this evening as Apropos (Iain Harrison - saxophone, me - live electronics) with guest Hervé Perez at a Discus event in Sheffield. I'll put recordings up when they arrive; and will soon have a perfomance section on the site for my iprov things.
24-07-11: My paper for the Word Event symposium on text notation has been accepted. I'll be talking about different sites of interpretation in the scores of Manfred Werder.
18-05-11: Just finished and intense but excellent one-day workshop in Scotland with Mr McFall's Chamber. They're running a 5-day set of workshops on pieces for electric quartet of strings (vln,vla,vc,bass/b-guitar) with live electronics, and blogging the whole thing. It's an excellent idea, both the workshops themselves and the putting of all that material online, I wish more ensembles could do it.
The blog contributions for my day and a recording of the piece are here.
12-03-11: Currently working on expanding my thesis work on chaos theory and indeterminacy. Have papers accepted for this year's Time's Excesses conference in Caen (France), and the Chaos Modelling and Simulation conference in Crete, and now also the 3rd Third International Conference on Music and Minimalism in Leuven, Nov 2011.
20-02-11: From April 13-20th I'll be in New York for talks at Columbia (April 19th) and SUNY Stony Brook (April 15th + concert!) on my game piece Shoals, which is currently being developed as part of a 'Gameplay as Community' fellowship with the awesome Analogous Projects in NYC. See here for the game rules and software. Unfortunately as far as I know these are not public talks but if you're in the area and want to come along then throw me an email and I'll see what I can do.
Upcoming and Recent Concerts
- 26th Nov 2012 - Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
- untitled "metastable"
- Bozzini Quartet
- 22-24th June 2012 - BEAM Festival, Brunel University
- Resonant Systems
- installation
- 15th March 2012 - North American Saxophone Alliance Conference, Arizona State University, USA.
- There are neither wholes nor parts III
- Duo Hevans [Henri Bok (bass clarinet), Ann Eleri Evans (tenor saxophone)]
- 27th Jan 2012 - Rymer Auditorium, University of York, 7pm
- Snowflake
- Peyee Chen (voice) and live electronics
- 1st Dec 2011 - St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield, 1pm
- Nano
- Ann Eleri Evans (saxophone)
- 27th Oct 2011 - Phipps Hall, Huddersfield, 5pm?
- Bifurcations in Continuous System
- Sebastian Berweck (synth + MaxMSP)
- 25th Sep 2011 - InTime Symposium, Ellen Terry Building, Coventry University, 1.30pm
- Nano
- Ann Evans (saxophone)
- 26th June 2011 (11am) - BEAM Festival, Brunel University, Uxbridge
- at least two things
- Trio Scordatura - (Mezzo, synth, viola)
- 25th May 2011 - Ökumenische Jahrestagung der Polizeiseelsorge, Rastatt, Germany
- Music in Two Dimensions no.3
- Duo Contour - (quartertone trumpet and electronics/malletkat)
- 19th May 2011 - Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany
- Music in Two Dimensions no.3
- Duo Contour - (quartertone trumpet and electronics/malletkat)
- 15th April 2011 - Staller Center Recital Hall, SUNY Stony Brook, New York
- Action at a distance ("no one is an island")
- Sarah O'Halloran (voice) and live electronics
- 4-7th March 2011 - Trio Scordatura tour
- at least two things
- Trio Scordatura - (Mezzo, synth, viola)
- 4th March 2011, UK Microfest 4, Vortex Club, London
- 7th March 2011, UEA Norwich, time/venue TBA
- 8th March 2011, 1.15pm, St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield
- 4-5th(TBA) March 2011, UK Microfest 4
- Music in Two dimensions no.3
- Duo Contour (quartertone trumpet and electronics/malletkat)
- 27nd February 2011, 7pm, GEMdays,Phipps Hall, Huddersfield
- Action at a distance ("no one is an island")
- Peyee Chen (voice) and live electronics
- 22nd February 2011, 1.15pm, St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield
- There are Neither Wholes nor Parts (II)
- Jonathan Sage (Clarinet)
- 20th January 2011, 1.15pm, St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield
- There are Neither Wholes nor Parts (Ia)
- Iain Harrison (Saxophone)
- 13th November 2010, November Music Composers Club, s-Hertogenbosch, Holland
- There are Neither Wholes nor Parts
- Iain Harrison (Saxophone)
- 23rd October 2010, 8pm, Project Arts Centre, Dublin
- Primes
- Marja Gaynor (violin), Fergal Dowling (computer)
- 12th October 2010, 8:30 p.m, Karnatic Lab, Amsterdam
- Clockwise Counter-Clockwise
- Xenia Pestova (toy piano)
For older performances please see here.