a cessation of the world of desires.

Andy and I, standing in front of a trade booth at a recent track cycling meet, were confronted by a highly polished vision of another, more perfect world. It was as if we were able to look beyond our present situation where our feet are stuck in the lower realms of animals and hungry ghosts, and have a brief vision beyond our human realm to that of devas and bodhisattvas. We both knew, at that moment, possessing it would still the ceaseless working of samsara. Spooky.

It was a very, very lightweight titanium audax bike frame with the option of fixed or geared riding. So, in short, everything. Gears - or not; mudguards - or not... club runs, forest trails or towpath bashes; long audax runs or light, quick continental touring via magic plastic.

Andy, being a man of the cloth, confirmed my suspicions that the purchase of such a frame would mean my life would be suddenly fulfilled - no more frustrations concerning work, unfulfilled personal goals, male pattern baldness or tribulation in relations with the rest of humanity. And all that for just £899 (I'd still have to fit it out, though; campag?). How often does that happen in life? How rare is it that you can buy happiness and also banish middle-age spread? I rest my case.

So, I've just finished a cello suite for a friend from Slovenia, hopefully to be premiered this year. I have to say that I really enjoyed it, and I'm getting into the idea of writing for particular people. So I've also started working on a solo viola piece for a friend in Sweden - I'm really not sure how she's going to react to that one, as I've specified that she must hum/sing as well as play.... could be wildly embarrassing for all concerned. I still haven't heard back from her after a rough draft; she's probably agonizing about how to be polite, and just regretting she agreed to do it.

I sort of got into it while thinking about double-stopping, and listening to my own tuneless vocal drone as I was messing about at the piano trying to sustain lines. The dog was so not impressed. I had been been spending time juggling a little pitch matrix I had constructed and turning it this way and that trying to see what vertical and horizontal possibilities it might hold, and wishing parts of the line, the third voice so to speak, would just carry on. But, of course, a string player can only really sustain lines on two strings for any length of time; hence the humming. I'll put some bits up next post, although there's an ominous silence from the party it's being written for, so that idea might have to go.

I was down in London at Kings Place to watch my old supervisor, Martin Butler, play with the ensemble Notes Inegales. The entire program was mostly based around Peter Wiegold's compositions which were all based on various improvisational strategies. Martin, a classical pianist, has for some time been heavily getting into Miles in his Bitches Brew phase, and is working hard on becoming a jazz-ish improvisor, filtered through his own composing style. The best part of the day was hanging at the pub afterwards with a group of players and composers. Must do more of that sort of thing (the hanging bit, not the pub...)Anyway, here's a clip of Miles from that era.




Lastly, a beardie guy picture....complete with my own personal doppelgagger, a kind of reverse Dorian Gray thing; it's a painting made of me the last time I had a beard, about the age of 24; unfortunately, I had just lost the braid.



That is now so gone, with the impending start of term....although there was an intermediate stylish goatee phase, after which Jane threatened divorce.

blue suit + brown shoes = dissonance

In the mild mental fug before 7 am every day, after having walked the dog and stood like a tree and so on, there is always a short hiatus before I get organized to nuke some porridge (I discovered this a few years ago, rather than getting a bowl and a pot dirty, 3 and a half minutes, ping: throw in some some raisins and fruit . This has subtly changed my life, but I still haven't worked out how). This brief suspension of motion within the morning usually spent leaning back in the bench, with my feet up against the porch post, drinking coffee and reading the Gruaniad. The same every morning, rain or shine, most of the year, unless the wind is dead on southerly with rain. Then, the other day, I came across an article discussing modes of thought - and in passing, it made a statement something like "...or like music composition, with its chaotic, lateral patterns..."

This suddenly popped back up, bobbing like a stupid, happy, child's toy submarine surrounded by suds, clockwork key still turning, into my head while running scales days later in the evening (admittedly while reading the aforementioned paper again on the music stand - I have always figured that if I could read the paper and do my arpeggios, I had them taped) And I then had my own chaotic, lateral search through the pile of papers reserved for Jane's firings to see if I could find the article again. Nope.

"Chaotic and lateral".. sounds like a reasonable description of my default modus operandi, drifting from one thing to another like a bored six-year-old with the remote. As I mentioned before, I always felt that there should be a deep connectedness within anything I created, but this was never the case in practice. It sprung from my early, self-taught attempts to get to grips with the textbooks Schoenberg wrote concerning harmony, structure and counterpoint - and were disciplined and scary in the extreme. I think if you are self-taught, you often tend to be following models that have already gone out of fashion, as those models have had time to be codified and become part of the canon - but as soon as that happens, they are already passe. But all of this approach is really something that's been fostered on us by a now somewhat-outmoded High-Modernist/Serialist take on what makes an artwork legitimate: the idea of an all-encompassing 'organic' approach, (taken, in a way, from the rationalist project that followed on from the Enlightenment ) that all local and global elements should be contrived from a single unifying concept.

However, what made music prior to the 20th century interesting was the manipulation of dissonance, having clashing sonorities driving the line forward. you could therefore argue that by placing dissonant objects next to each other is a way of creating interest....such as two notes that shouldn't go together make you wait until something happens. This can also be extended to entire structural elements, as Stravinsky did. Brick wall transitions between things which have little in common create a different kind of drama to a slowly unfolding 'line' beloved by the late Romantics. Imagine constellations of color that slowly move around each other, revealing new combinations with each turn; children's blocks that are constantly re-assembled.


And finally, I'm just prepping the fixie up for the yearly Mildenhall 200k tomorrow morning - I was thinking of doing the 300, but I couldn't face the 4 am start. Lots of pasta tonight, couple of cans of beer; all good carbs. Should be good; an excuse to do nothing except ride a bike all day.

k