Output details

listen . . . move . . . dance

This composition, commissioned by the Liverpool Culture Company, entailed a crossover project between the Royal Liverpool Philharmonis Orchestra’s contemporary classical ensemble and a Liverpool-based rock and improvising guitarist. Throughout the research process, Gardiner worked closely with the soloist, Carlo Bowry, exploring the palette of extended guitar sounds that he uses in improvisation settings, often employing multiple arrays of loop pedals, delays, signal processing and distortion, alongside some unconventional playing techniques involving the scraping of various objects across the strings.

This piece was built not only around his soundworld but also his preferred stylistic environments – psychedelic and ‘space’ rock, blues, and free improv. As he then had little experience of playing in fixed and highly notated musics, it took a gradual process of reduction to devise a workable solo ‘part’ for him to play from. The compositional research investigated derivations from fragments of borrowed and original compositional material, cast within an intricate postminimal style amalgamating the soloist’s style and genre of performance with contemporary concert music.

A singular constraint was imposed on the musical material: all of the harmony is invariantly formed out of a seven-note aggregate, heard as the mode within the opening guitar improvisation and heard vertically in the opening ensemble chord, itself a transcription of a vertical heard in the album America the Beautiful (1968) by jazz composer, arranger, and occasional vibraphonist, Gary McFarland. McFarland’s blending of contemporary classical textures, psychedelic big band writing, elevator music funk and lopsided Latin grooves (as well as the edited ‘panel’ structuring of some of the tracks) also served as a model for the hybrid style of this piece, with early 1970s studio music language and techniques also built into approaches to orchestration. The composition forms a significant addition to the repertory of music for solo electric guitar and orchestra.