remember, remember

SWEET SIXTEEN
It was on Remembrance Sunday 16 years ago that TONUS PEREGRINUS first performed live: the music was Arvo Pärt's St John Passion; the venue was New College Chapel in Oxford.  Aside from the music it was an eventful evening - I'd dropped my glasses onto a concrete floor, and so had to borrow a spare pair from tenor soloist Toby Spence which made the score rather blurrier to conduct from than it might have been.  And during the silence before the final, glorious Amen the hour struck loudly with nine chimes - entirely coincidental from our perspective but enough to convince some of the audience that it had been deliberately timed.
Timing of a different kind - the precise lengths of the silent bars - was critical to the recording we made in 2001: anyone interested in the gritty and fascinating detail might like to read an article first published in Church Music Quarterly: http://tonusperegrinus.co.uk/Partwriting.pdf.
Specially slipcased copies of the internationally award-winning Naxos release of Passio are available at £5.99, or £9.98 for two: http://shop.thewelcomestranger.org/index.asp?function=DISPLAYPRODUCT&productid=13.
TONUS PEREGRINUS is now represented by Ikon Arts Management www.ikonarts.com.


AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN HEARD
And it was a decade ago in November 1996 that 'Virtual Strangers', a radiopera and my first serious cut into the ethereal stone, was broadcast in BBC Radio 3's Between the Ears series.  As Martin Spinelli points out about a more recent piece of work ('Walking against the Wind') in his thought-provoking article ('Rhetorical Figures and the Digital Editing of Radio Speech', Sage Publications 2006, http://con.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/12/2/199.pdf) "we are reminded that radio can fool us and can make us confront our assumptions of radio".
'Virtual Strangers' is one of several pieces on the airwaves and in concert impelled by the 14th-century words and music of Guillaume de Machaut ('Je, Guillaume', 'The True Story').  It was also creatively significant for me in that the words (Machaut, Richard Gaskell, Jeremy Summerly's musings on English culture in 2045, etc.) and the music (Machaut, my own, Jonathan Finn's computer improvising, etc.) were deliberately made to operate in each other's domains of sound and sense - with a kaleidoscopic result comparable to a lucid dream.  Remembering and re-remembering is a theme that has coloured many further programmes, from 'By the Waters of Babylon' (with Alan Walker), via 'From the Diary of a Fly' (Adrian Jack), 'Of Sound Mind' (with Christopher Cook), 'Homecoming', 'Golden Rule', 'A Pebble in the Pond' (with Eva Hoffman and Michael Zev Gordon), to, finally, this year's 'Not in my name' (with Gary Watt).
Anyway, enough of that - you can now hear two of the piano pieces played by a computer - 'West' and 'North' from the suite 'Dances in Stone and Glass' - as featured in the original broadcast of 'Virtual Strangers': http://www.tonusperegrinus.co.uk/DISAG.mid.


Happy memories,

Antony Pitts
www.tonusperegrinus.co.uk