Iain Cameron's Diary
"Click here to access the Fruitful Album" - Click here to visit Music for the Highveld Project


The Highveld Project

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

2006-11-04 - 8:19 a.m.

There is a tax break which gbrown introduced - and is quite proud of I believe - which I have been encouraging the firm to take advantage of - it is linked to my function within the business. There is been a bit of an upset in another part of the forest and so the prospect of the tax credit suddenly looks very attractive. So I have been spending some time energising colleagues to take this opportunity seriously.

The piece which goes by the name �2and6� has come on a stage. I have taken the base track which is dhorn and drone and added another part using the Casio GM box.. The interesting thing about the second part is the use it makes of a modulation plug-in -the pitch modulation delay unit on �alter hi� setting. There are a number of severe moduation effects which have crept into the software - this one seems to arpegiate and create a rhythm as it moves up the frequency range.

This piece has a relatively simple harmonic structure - but interest is sustained by the dhorn exploration. The Casio part is just a set of inversions of the core harmony - but the modulation effects elaborates the simple chords. I have to confess I havent found my way round the effect and so in a very Stieglerian sense I am using this bit of music technology on trust - trusting it not to violate but to enhance whatever my intentions may have been in the first part of the development of the piece. I am fascinated by these modulation effects and so my intention is not complicated at all - not as complicated as may often be the case.

There s a digital glitch in the piece - not caused by the second part. I need to find an editing workaround for this.

Laurence rang - he has been in Cambridge as he is working at a MOD station not far away. He has managed to hear around 8 Sqs in the last 7 days at the Westside music centre just down the road from Selwyn - Bartok6 Shostakovich8 and a lot of Beethoven. The latter has provoked the question - what on earth is happening - say in Op132? When I was in Woking waiting for Mrs C I dipped into my Cambridge Adorno Companion - the chapter about Heidi and the meaning of music. This chapter refers to Adorno�s uncompleted work on Beethoven - which threatens a version of the answer to the question.

You cant help noticing how Heidi is edging from the periphery to the centre. He lies behind Stiegler�s technology theory - via Derrida - and there he is threatening to help open the mystery of Op 132. I need to develop a plan to get across to Cambs for some of these concerts while Laurence is on this project - it is feasible to leave Birmingham and get to Cambs in a couple of hours in the evening - and then leave a concert and get back to leantown by midnight.

I discussed some of this on the phone with him last night as he threatened to enter a topological anomaly in Milton Keynes. Many think the best route from Oxford to Cambridge goes through MK - but all who attempt this speak of the roundabout challenge. I referred him to the Melvyn Barg programme on the Poincare conjecture. We also discussed the latest papers from James McG - one of which was delivered quite close to the SQ venue in the Summer.

James McG is building an interpretative approach to Sgt Pepper around certain large scale themes - like nation , religion , community/isolation. The material takes this approach very readily - for example in the contrast between Eleanor Rigby and Tomorrow Never Knows which have thematic elements in common but use radically different means - which are within the tradition of popular music, both radical

previous - next