Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-05-08 - 10:14 a.m.

Yesterday I went to the University of Herfordshire at Hatfield - one of the "new" universities that has grown rapidly in the past few years. I was with Peter Bullen who heads up Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering there - an incredibly nice man. He gave me a lot very useful information about engineering education and the various courses they have developed there.

We dropped in on the music department - very thoughtful of Peter and met the deputy head who described his composition style as "postmodern psotminimalist". Thats a funny coincidence I said. They have a complete gamelan set on loan. We played some notes to get an idea of the timbres. I realised that the gamelan scale is the one used by Debussy on the flute line which opens Chanson de Billitis - also used by Vaughan Williams in "We'll to the Woods No More". Useful finding.

On the way back through London I tried to track down a "quelque chose" for Vita and her bass guitar - her birthday is on Friday. Not that easy - even those shops did not stock a vast range and some of the products are a lot more expensive in the bass variant relative to the six string. I eventually got one in the same shop I got her amp and guitar from.

I am quite enjoying listening to the set of recent pieces I have strung together. Kind of wondering whether to despatch to other diarists.

Following Robin's example, I went back into the old tapes. At the point when I was interested in the concept of "drum and bass" I took to making Bach basslines on the Amiga using the MED synth rather than the samples.

The thing about the synth instructions is that they are written in low level code and so they are implemented with no significant latency. This means you can vary the timbre of the bassnote in the line - if you like make note a different timbre.

I have some recordings from Bach's Em flute sonata - the first and last movements which are just the flute line and the bass line rendered in this way. I did this as a practice device when I performed that sonata at the Guildford URC Music Society. Maybe that same recital I also did The Poulenc Flute Sonata. It was after that I decided not to push myself so hard on that repertoire. Having performed those two and lived to tell the tale I thought I'd proved my point.

Anyway I liked the sound of the last movement of the EM put through the enhancer and the Behringer and I think I might develop it.

Another project lurking in the vaults is something called "An Alphabet of Beatles". The Idea was to a do a set of Beatles covers - one for each letter of the alphabet. Never completed but a third to have a half got done. As I went on the covers got more experimental. I listened to "All I Gotta Do" which I did with a loop on the Amiga. The "version" was based on an "instruction" to the performer:

Start playing the tune

At any point loop back to an earlier point in the tune

Keep going until you finish the tune

I have always liked this as a composition/improvisation concept and it can yield a variant of the piece which links to the sentiments of the song. Anyway I am wondering about taking this on a bit.

On the train this morning I read about TS Eliot and Desolation Row. Yesterday I read about Mr and Mrs TS.

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