Marginalia.

This demo is part of a developing three-piece project exploring identity and nostalgia through retro computing, instrumental music and electronics, the project takes its name from the 1984 instructional textbook "Cookbook of Creative Programs for the Commodore 64" by Robert Rinder.

This first piece grew out of an unserious program written in BASIC, which built on one of the example programs of the book, exploring ways of producing visuals and sound with the Commodore 64 and its famous sound chip, the SID.

When my program runs, multicoloured hearts fill the screen, while synthesised tones of randomised pitch bubble along. The output has both a dark and unserious quality, and I used it as a starting ingredient and framework around which to build with bass clarinet, drum set, and further electronics including samples and software synths. The resulting piece is a melting pot of conceptual ingredients that include: retro computing, chiptune music, and hearts as symbols of love, cutesiness, and violence.

This piece was written for Plum, Sam and Josie Lomax after a number of happy years teaching Josie violin, and both children occasionally some theory. The Lomax family were generous enough to support my composition study by way of commissioning a piano trio. I taught Josie on Tuesdays at six o'clock, and we would normally start with scales, except when we were feeling especially anarchic. This little piece is about scales and simplicity, about growing up, and about remembering those days.

The title of this piece has triple meaning: the viols play a fragmented Tallis’ Canon; the word “Tallis” is encoded in the music using morse code to determine some structural aspects of the phrases; and it also captures a personal episode of rekindled connection with practical music- making through an introduction to playing the viola da gamba. Susanna Pell kindly introduced me, and we played Tallis.

The mood is nostalgic and sentimental, and the uneven, natural rhythms in the piano material are achieved by having the four pianists play at different tempi, each tempo determined using concepts of circular motion.

I think from my perspective, it’s a piece about memory, history and human connection — ideas that haunt me these days. Thomas Tallis lived — c.1505-1585 — and this canon of his happens to remind me firstly of school, but as a concept, it’s networked in my own mind to so many other musical and non-musical events and ideas.

So grateful to everyone involved in learning, performing, recording & mixing it:

• viols: Mari MacGregor & moi
• pianos: Katie Laing, Daniel Hughes, Qianrui Fei & Naomi Dragomir
• binaural mix: Haoping Zhang

Recorded as part of a recording workshop run by Amandine Pras & assisted by Alex Mackay, at the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York, on 24th April 2024.

This piece is based on a famously simple computer program, which displays the message hello, world!, normally used to illustrate the basic syntax of a programming language, and often the first program written by a computer programming beginner. Specifically, this piece is based on the first known incarnation of that program, written by Brian Kernighan:

 main() {
  extern a, b, c;
  putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n');
 }

 a 'hell';
 b 'o, w';
 c 'orld';

The structure is taken from the binary numbers that produce the variables 'a', 'b', and 'c', which combined with the harmonic sequence that underpins the music, produces a binary musical texture.

Performance below: Tom Pickles @ Samuel Worth Chapel, Sheffield - 25.2.2