A coincidence then that Mark and I both started on Travelogue in the last few days. I was expecting the voice to be in worse shape than it sounded on the first run through. It sounds as if the integrity of the interpretation has been preserved. Not much of a coincidence all things considered.

It is triggering thoughts about singers of this generation/age. Just now I am listening to John Martyn reinterpretations and today in the car it was the Bootlegs CD of B Dylan volume 3. The nub of it is that you can�t beat the density of this stuff.

I saw in the paper that Lord Franklin�s route has been completed. Paul�s reinterpretation of this song is in the opening dyad on Plundafonix � its part of his Seachanges album. I had a crack at the Nitesong first thing this morning on the Crafter electroacoustic gutstring � not what�s requested but I thought it would be good for my chops.

Stefan says there was no sign of chops issues when Wynton Marsalis played the Symphony Hall last night.

Yesterday I went to meet Tricia and Peter at his house in Balham � the ideas always fly when the three of us get together and this was no exception. We came up with a year�s worth of ideas and activities quite quickly in about 90 minutes. Trish had to go on to another meeting. Peter and I went across the road to the pub for sausage and mash. I found Area 51 on his new Yamaha keyboard and suggested that he mail Robin about it.

Interesting drive back via Kingston, Thorpe Park, Bracknell and then the usual route � quite quick � faster than last week.

This morning I went to the new digital design studio in Coventry University for a meeting of the Design, Manufacturing and Production Group of Foresight Vehicle. The Dean dropped by for lunch and I surprised him by guessing that the school started as a Normal School. James and I had been discussing the impact of the Reform Bill on design education in the UK. Apparently Coventry had a ribbon industry which was the reason for locating a school there. The leading schools in automotive design schools in the UK are the Royal College, Glasgow School of Art (Macintosh�s), Loughborough and Coventry � that s the aesthetic, sculptural end of business in which the UK excels. Also had discussion about Russian forge modelling software with a professor from Nottingham. This inevitably lead onto a discussion of the T34 and someone said he had once worked for a company which had been asked to make some parts for the Egyptian army�s T34s.

I get to like Coventry more and more - when your are there, there�s no way you could think you were somewhere else but at the same time the University is the hardest place to find your way around.

I also looked into the new Dagenham Centre for Engineering and Manufacturing Excellence on the net and thought a bit more about the Logistics qualification.

I left the CD master of Cleveland with Peter to see whether his ears could get it up to another level

I am thinking about what I might post on www.kwase-kwasa.org about Fifths. This is the draft as it currently stands:

�Fifths grew initially from an exploration of the musical interval � where the ratio between the two pitches is three to two or very close to it. I had been to hear Lamonte Young�s ensemble play live and wanted to see if by using �perfect� intervals I could create the same aural experience � or at least realise some vague echo of the extraordinary sound his band makes.

In parallel with this I was thinking about harmonies that could be built from two intervals of a fifth � such as the major seventh chord ie C/G with E/B. I realised that you could make a cycle:

E B (half step) C G (half step) Ab Eb (half step) E B and so on�..

These six notes made three major seventh chords � on C E and Ab.

A similar set of six notes arranged in the same pattern:

D A Bb F F# C# - would complete a tone row .

This last six notes were composites of the major seventh chords on D F# and Bb

I began to programme intervals of a fifth on my old Casio CZ101 � the instrument developed in response to the Yamaha DX7 and to jam pieces which roughly followed the serial rule of using all the pitches before the first pitch is re-used.

In terms of the musical history of the twentieth century it seemed to me that there was link between doing this and the biography of Lamonte Young who had been taught by a close associate of Schoenberg and then went on to use serial technique to create his string trio which many think is the first ever Minimalist piece. During my explorations I discovered that my music teacher at school in Isleworth, Emile Spira � who had insisted I be a flute player � had been a pupil of Anton Webern.

Eventually I got round to capturing one of these �Fifths� explorations on tape or minidisk and this became the core of the wider fifths project. I had been reading about the New York School and the open form experiments of the 1950s and also about the Fluxus inspired works of the early 1960s where Lamonte Young created pieces around simple instructions which he called algorithms. During this time I had been lucky enough to visit the Detroit Institute of Art where there is a good collection of Fluxus material and documentation including some works from the early 60s by Yoko Ono � and this had strengthened by resolve to find some algorithmic collaborators.

By this time the Robin Frederick and I had been invited by Mark Graham to join his Frakctured site as diary contributors and towards the end of the Summer Mark and Robin used the CDs and instructions which I had sent them to produce the first two tracks of the series of four Fifths pieces included here. At about the same time Gilbert Isbin and I began to collaborate quite intensively and after a couple of months had launched into Ten Short Stories. Several versions of Fifths got produced in the process.

The one which has Gilbert as the lead instrument also uses (without permission) a movement from the Third Piano Sonata of a leading 20th century composer taken from the net as a MIDI file. Other versions were flute and guitar duets but I decided that this particular interpretation is so compelling that it should dominate one of the versions of Fifths.

The final version is simpler in that it is just the basic track with a flute line. You may be able to hear some references back to Debussy�s solo flute piece Syrinx.

All four pieces uses the basic CZ101 track, two of them use Robin Frederick�s musical phrase �You are my unbroken dream� which she created from the piece algorithm and two of them use Mark�s drum loop. Robin�s version also uses some spoken material delivered by her 10 year old next door neighbour in Santa Monica California.

Its probably no surprise that the piece algorithm hasn�t been followed all that closely and I believe that the failure of open-form pieces to govern performers� behaviour sufficiently was a disappointment for the New York School. I couldn�t really tell whether I shared this sentiment until I put the four pieces all together and listened to them as a set. And as a result I have decided that I am the opposite of disappointed.

There is a whole block of modern philosophy that considers what it may or may not mean to �follow a rule� � one important source for this is the Philosophical Investigations which includes experiments with the idea of �game� � all the different things that can count as a �game�. One such passage is a description of a ball game where the players vary the interactions. There are local patterns of similarity but also disjunctions, evolutions etc. I don�t think we need to follow algorithms in the same way computers do � after all we have computers to do that.�