Output details

Crosstalk

For improvising electric guitarist and string quartet. Commissioned by Sligo New Music Festival for Simon Jermyn and the Smith Quartet and first performed in Sligo on 17 April 2010. It was broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on “Hear and Now”, 8 May 2010.

This commission offered an opportunity to investigate the under-explored combination of electric guitar and string ensemble (Gavin Bryars’ “After the Requiem” and Steven Mackey’s “Troubadour Songs” are two rare examples).

In “Crosstalk” I set out to examine how individual characterisation of the instruments and development of narrative between them could articulate the form of the piece. This is achieved firstly by careful management of the interaction of the guitar with the string quartet, wherein the guitarist as ‘outsider’ often enters into ‘conversation’ in a duo with one of the other instruments to signal the start of a section leading to more engaged interaction with other quartet members; and secondly by assigning particular interval class sets to specific instruments defining their harmonic character in different sections of the work.

Another key area of enquiry concerned how interval class sets may be used in the realm of improvisation to replace the standard ‘jazz’ approaches based on the relationship of modes and scales to chord changes. In “Crosstalk” the guitarist is frequently directed to improvise melodic lines and chords using only notes from relevant sets of interval classes used in that particular section; for example at letter M the guitarist is asked to ‘improvise jagged lines using i.c. 4 and 5’ whilst harmonic and melodic material in the composed parts is constructed using only major thirds, minor sixths, perfect fourths and perfect fifths.

Methods of expansion of the sonic palette combining extended acoustic techniques with electronic processing are examined throughout; collaboration with the soloist during the compositional process yielded a number of original sounds created by novel performance techniques; for example using industrial hardware such as nuts and bolts and kitchen utensils to excite the strings and by using stomp-box electronic effects such as delay and chorus to process the sound in real time.