Mini-Opera-writing (with swordfish sword-fights)

This term I have been working with primary school children at St Saviour's Primary School in genteel Warwick Ave on Handel House's annual opera project. St Saviour's is my old stomping ground (my first job was teaching music there after my PhD), so it's been super-lovely to revisit, and to work with a Year 5 class that were about half the size when I last saw them. Amazingly, I remembered most of their names!

This year, the London Handel Festival are performing the little-known Riccardo Primo (even Handel wasn't that keen on it, and happily re-used about eight arias in later works). So we took this as our starting point and learnt a little about the plot (the usual mix of revenge, despair, fighting, love, etc) through a hilarious freeze-framing exercise. We also brought in a lovely singer from the Royal College, Bradley, who gave them a blast of one of baddie Isacio's arias. I was impressed that the class of 9/10 year-olds were pretty knowledgeable about opera already, from being able to describe that a recitative was a bit like musical talking, to how opera singers sing more in head than chest voice. Blimey!

Since then we've been working on our own mini-opera, featuring Bradley and the class, and using the playground's fabulous jungle/sea murals as inspiration. Cue lots of quite amazing ideas including a trained killer shark chorus, shipwrecks and fights with swordfish instead of swords. More professional operas should feature trained killer sharks! I took these ideas away and came up with a synopsis and simple libretto. This week the Year 5s composed, instinctively and rather brilliantly, I might say, a recitative for Bradley - or should I say, Bradley The Tigerclaw, King of the Land; they were tickled to hear it sung dramatically by him the next day. They also worked on some atmospheric, textural shipwreck music and a chorus, along with body percussion riffs, to accompany the fight scene.

I've now got to take their melismatic ideas - composed in small groups on glockenspiel - and use them in Bradley's aria. Then we'll work on some drama and get them decorating their sea or land animal masks. Can't wait!

Graininess and Sheen

Graininess and Sheen by Kerry Andrew Composer

I have completed my first commission for Handel House Museum! I wanted to bring together some of my recent musical interests - electronica, spoken word, improvisation in composition - and push myself into a slightly new creative direction, but also write something that suited Handel House. I was introduced to Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's Radio Ballads by the artist Ruth Ewan on a previous project this year for Art on the Underground (which you can hear here!); their bare-bones presentation of recorded interviews with people about their lives in Britain in the '50s and '60s had a real impact on me.

I decided to interview some of the volunteers who humbly staff the Museum during its opening hours, and asked them to talk about their personal responses to the House. I then spent some time on a quieter day (well, as quiet as it can be with 3 lanes of traffic outside...) and recorded myself improvising on the three keyboard instruments, which live in different rooms. This included lots of percussion sounds and string-playing on the two harpsichords and the cutely out-of-tune spinet. I also had to record the famous creaking floorboards. Taking all this raw material home, I chopped, sifted, and arranged this into a 9-minute track, adding only a few layers of my voice in addition.

I see this piece, called Graininess and Sheen after a quote from one of the volunteers, as a portrait of the House by the House, with the three keyboard instruments in a trio with each other from the different rooms of the building... Hope you like it!

The volunteers interviewed were:
Steve Murray
Roger Sydenham
Annette Viner
Jenny Atkinson
Jane Whitworth
Guilherme Feistauer
Reiko Fujiike-Stilling
Fabrizio Bignlino
John Gordingly

Composer in Residence Season: Report!

This autumn I've hugely enjoyed curating my 4-part Composer in Residence season at Handel House. It's a lovely addition to workshop-leading and composing and working with other musicians in this way is always something I've loved. What I thought was really successful about this season was how the artists really responded to the atmosphere and character of the House.


First up I invited composer/artist Claudia Molitor to bring her brand of immersive, tactile work to the House. Along with pianist Sarah Nicholls, she installed all sorts of interactive, thought-provoking pieces all inspired by the idea of touch in music (using Handel's blindness as a starting point), from video works to a triptych based around a paper cut-out score; embroidered notation - white cotton on white linen so you had to feel the score rather than read it; music created by eating (popping candy naturally being the highlight); and an exploration of the weight needed to play the main harpsichord, demonstrated through a lovely, slow-burning performance by Sarah and a load of pound coins! Most gorgeous to look at was Handel's bed, festooned with a ribboning score, as if Handel was reclining there with all his musical ideas spilling out uncontrollably.

A week later, improvising demon Leon Michener, along with jazz bassist Olie Brice and wonderful singer Seaming To brought a sense of hushed spookiness to the House, focusing on Baroque-inspired improvisations, ghostly songs and tiny sounds wrought from the harpischord, Leon's wurlitzer and clavichord, sometimes played with an e-bow. Seaming, who possessed a voice capable of whispery flutterings and near-operatic swells, was clad in a stunning high-fashion take on gothic Victoriana, and manipulated Leon's homemade magic lantern music box to project abstract cut-outs suggesting insects and animals onto the wooden shutters. 

The RNIB's talented young composers whom I'd worked with in July returned to hear soprano Juliet Fraser perform their solo songs - see my previous blog for details but here's a photo of some of us!

Finally, a heart-warming folk gig sent us rosy-cheeked into the autumn night. Olivia Chaney, a musician with an assured voice reminiscent of Sandy Denny and something of a Waterhouse's Ophelia about her, sang mostly original songs self-accompanied by muted harpischord (for a lute-ish feel), Indian harmonium or guitar. Sam Lee, who had to dash off on his bicycle to present his own folk series up the road afterwards, had a similarly off-kilter edge with his travellers' songs backed by violin, 'cello, Japanese koto and shruti box. Sam has a wonderful way with words and demonstrated a love of the roots of his songs and a respect for those he learnt them from; he told us he thrived off bringing these rough-edged songs into our intimate, but formal, space. It strikes me that Handel's rehearsal room is the perfect setting for some more acoustic folk...

Composer in Residence Season!

I'm very excited about October's season of concerts curated by myself, bringing all sorts of fascinating and diverse music to the House:


1) Touch and The Barely Audible: October 13th, 6.30pm 
Many of us can empathise with Beethoven’s eventual deafness. What could be more devastating for someone who has been immersed in the sonic all their lives to find themselves unable to dwell in that world any longer? There is a general awareness of Beethoven’s deafness, even amongst people who have never heard his music. Yet few, even those who listen to Handel’s music, know that he went blind in later life.

What would it mean for a composer to lose their vision? Composers not only immerse themselves in a world of sound, their work is also intensely visual. In writing notation we dwell in a predominantly visual experience, one which directly informs the compositional process, in a similar way that drawing functions for artists.

Touch and the Barely Audible, part performance, part installation, will explore music and sound as a tactile, sculptural and material experience with innovative composer and director of Soundwaves Festival, Claudia Molitor.

2) Perilous Toye: October 20th, 6.30pm
New compositions for solo amplified clavichord and ensemble with Olie Brice on Contrabass, Leon Michener on Clavichord and electronics, and ‘mystery guest’ vocalist. Projections from the visual music box by Pianoscope.

The clavichord is one of the most early and expressive of keyboard instruments, and one that the young Handel was very attached to, often stealing away at night to practice in secret. In this recital his instrument is taken out of it's normal acoustic setting and subjected to various means of sound generation and styles of playing, forming the basis for a suite of compositions that move through free Jazz, Hendrixian riffs, Baroque partimenti, Classical composition, and folk music. 

3) Juliet Fraser, October 23rd, 3pm
Soprano Juliet Fraser performs works written especially for Handel’s rehearsal room during the annual week long summer school for young people at Handel House Museum with the Royal National Institute for Blind People. Expect diverse pieces exploring everything from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to ping-pong and the phone-hacking crisis!

4) Sam Lee and Olivia Chaney, October 27th, 6.30pm
Two stunning folk/alt-folk artists for the price of one.

Sam Lee, folk singer, promoter and animateur, was the 2011 Arts Foundation Award winner and is fast becoming accepted as one of the new pioneers defining the sound, sight and texture of contemporary folksong. Likewise his live band carves an acoustic with their homemade and mongrelised instrumentation and unconventional arrangements that challenge any preconceptions of what ʻtraditionʼ should sounds like.

Olivia Chaney is an exceptional songwriter and gifted virtuoso, conjuring original songs from an Indian harmonium and steel-string guitar. Expect to be charmed, moved and entertained by a performer and musician of unusual depth and passion.



All tickets are £9/5, concerts last an hour, and you should book in advance to ensure entry by calling 02073991953 (there's no online booking). I really hope to see some of you there for what promises to be a fabulous season.

RNIB Summer School Part 2

Here's some bits and bobs from the wonderful RNIB Summer School.

An excerpt from Kerry Firth's score of her piece, which explored a range of emotion in just a few short French phrases; James at the RNIB was fascinated at how Kerry (composer), myself (scribe) and Juliet Fraser (soprano, occasional scribe) worked together on generating this score:

Here's Kevin Satizabal and Ben Green with me at Handel House, where we had our first workshop day and where we explored the acoustic and theatrical properties of the space:

The opening of Zoe Moskal-Guy's setting of an Othello speech:

Michael Andrews, moi, the brilliant Sally-Anne Zimmerman from the RNIB, Juliet Fraser and Ben Green, over at the Salvation Army Church on Oxford Street (top lunches!); Juliet came over in the afternoon to workshop the pieces:

An extract from Michael's satirical piece on phone hacking... (with text by Ullrika Johnson):

RNIB Summer School!

I've just finished a wonderful 4-day week leading the RNIB/Handel House's annual Summer School for advanced composers. The brief was to write a piece for solo soprano (Juliet Fraser, co-founder of Exaudi), and the five diverse composers tackled the challenge (and it is one!) with aplomb. Having made them do body rhythms and Bobby McFerrin riffs, bombarded them with a diet of Meredith Monk, Georges Aperghis, Tansy Davies, with obligatory mentions of Berio's 'Sequenza III' every few minutes, our intrepid crew worked their socks off, with occasional rests for biscuits.

Two composers still managed to get my twin vetos of Wordsworth and Shakespeare in but made such leaps and bounds that I had to forgive them: Zoe took some long strides out of her usual rock song territory to write a meditative monologue-like song setting Othello; and Ben, in his own measuredly laconic words, dragged himself 'about 1,000 years into the future' with his powerfully angular, stuttery take on 'Surprised by Joy'. Elsewhere, we had an Aperghis/Berio-esque piece on the theme of temptation (in French) by Kerry, an examination of the inner turmoil of an international table tennis champion (complete with precisely-notated ping-pong ball sounds) by Kevin, and a satirical look at the phone-hacking scandal setting a quote by Ulrika Johnson by Michael. Ha ha! A more eclectic range of works you could not imagine, and they were embraced whole-heartedly and with impressive musicianship and quite genius ping-pong effects by Juliet on our last day.

It was fascinating for me to learn about each of our composers' methods of accessing and notating music, from the scarily-named JAWS programme, to highly enlarged screens and painstaking note-inputting, from voice-recording and transcribing to the version of Sibelius which speaks back to you. The patience with which some of our composers worked was highly inspiring. I'm looking forward to hearing Juliet perform these pieces on October 23rd at Handel House.

Handel rules at Desert Island Discs!

So Radio 4's hugely popular show, Desert Island Discs, granted their listeners' secret wish, asking them to choose their eight ultimate records. They presented the eight most popular votes in a special show which was dominated by popular classics, including, at no. 7 (and no surprise really), Handel's Messiah. So it was pipped by Vaughan Williams, Elgar and Beethoven, but the piece has also been THE top classical choice for the celebrity guests, actors Timothy Spall and Imelda Staunton among them.

So what are your 8 DID? And more importantly, what are MINE? (well, really, I thought you'd never ask...)

1) 'Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus' from Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messaien: heartbreakingly beautiful, tensely-harmonied, this made me weep when I heard a theremin and piano version!

2) Blue Valentine by Tom Waits: one of my favourite songs, for its contrast of grizzly-bear voice and glowing guitar, and for its masterful lyrics.

3) Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered sung by Ella Fitzgerald: Ella's voice is the best of the 20th century, and the lyrics pithily brilliant.

4) Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Leadbelly, sung by Nirvana: A simple blues is turned into a vulnerable, violent version in Nirvana's live MTV Unplugged cover; Kurt Cobain rips his voice to bits on the last phrase and I shiver uncontrollably...

5) Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams: a heart-swelling number with a sense of English history and landscape at its centre.

6) The Art Teacher by Rufus Wainwright: I had to choose something by Rufus, whose turn of phrase (both melodic and lyrical) makes him the successor to the jazz standard writers of the first half of the 20th century. This has a twist in the tale, an unusual subject and a lovely horn solo in the middle.

7) Just As The Tide Was Rolling by Eliza Carthy: I need to have a traditional folk song in there, and this has a gorgeous melancholy about it.

8) String Quartet no. 8 in Csharp minor 1st movement by Shostakovich: Its dark historical context makes the astonishing harmonic writing all the more powerful. I'll try and sneak in the 2nd movement too...

So, lots of brilliant words and wondrously-varied voices, a strange preference for string music and distinct lack of Handel. Whoops!