NEWS (back)

22 April 2013
Copies of the colophony CD with Jon Rose and Meinrad Kneer have just arrived. Another elegant piece of design by Carlos Santos at creative sources.

12 April 2013
A very quick update: people seem to like listening to music on Soundcloud, although personally I'm not impressed by its sound quality (on the other hand, downloading from Soundcloud gives you the original file back, and I recommend doing so), so I've uploaded a few rare recordings, some complete and others in excerpts, which can be accessed on the works page or (together with some FURT material) here.

6 March 2013
Belatedly the score of lens was finished a little while ago, and is now almost ready for upload (once Tristram and Daryl have had a chance to find any inadvertent impossibilities lurking in it). The next component to be completed will be entitled rift, for piccolo trumpet, percussion and lap steel guitar (which in this case is optional if rift is performed on its own), now in progress concurrently with codex XII and XIII, which will both be presented in April, in Belgrade and The Hague respectively. Performance materials will appear here when they are ready of course.

An "issue" which has recently been brought to my attention is that the score of CONSTRUCTION does not all display properly in Preview, some pages (specifically some of the "earlier" ones scanned from my manuscript rather than typeset) remaining blank. This is not intentional! I understand that the problem is caused by more recent versions of Acrobat Pro (used to compile the pdf score) producing documents which in some ways aren't compatible with current versions of Preview. So blame Apple for not updating their software (they force the rest of us to do it often enough, after all) and please open the score in Acrobat Reader instead.

17 January 2013
For various reasons work has had to slow down on my current compositional project, lens for flugelhorn and lap steel electric guitar, so that it won't be premiered next month by Tristram Williams and Daryl Buckley as originally planned. Nevertheless I expect it to be ready in two or three weeks. It will then be incorporated into a larger (half-hour) structure for solo lap steel with flugelhorn/trumpet, percussion and electronics, which itself will eventually be expanded in both duration and instrumentation. Otherwise, the final master of a new CD of improvised music, colophony with Jon Rose (violin and tenor violin) and Meinrad Kneer (contrabass), has now been sent to creative sources for release in the coming months. This is a studio recording made last July in Berlin following our first appearance as a trio at Miss Hecker, one of the city's most attractive (and smallest!) venues.

22 November 2012
Finally the score of life-form, revised after the first three performances, is available here for download, as well as all the sound-materials used in performance.

18 November 2012
New additions here: the score of dying words, and a link to an interview with Stephane Ginsbergh about life-form. Both new works were premiered in the last eight days - thanks to Arne Deforce and Ute Wassermann for their performances, to Patrick Delges for programming work on life-form; to Marie-Isabelle Collart, Bert Palinckx, Frans de Ruiter and Jeroen Vanacker for organising the commission and performances of life-form, and to Initiativ Neue Musik Berlin for commissioning dying words and making possible Ute's voiceXtensions evening (to be expanded and toured in the coming period we hope) with Michael Vorfeld's light-performance which also featured compositions by Cathy van Eck, Matthias Kaul, Andrew Noble and Michael Maierhof. The score and electronic sound-materials for life-form will be uploaded here as soon as some revisions and corrections have taken place.

22 October 2012
With the score of life-form still not quite finished I shouldn't be wasting time here but I thought it might be worth mentioning that the release date for the CD of DARK MATTER (recorded over a run of live performances in Oslo in 2005) is November 12.

5 September 2012
New items: my contribution to the "Stockhausen: a Festival of Light" symposium in Birmingham is available under "writings". Added to the worklist is dying words, a new composition for flute-playing female vocalist commissioned by Ute Wassermann. The score will be posted there as soon as Ute and I have settled on a definitive version, which may not be until after the first performance in November. It uses a text from 1799 by Friedrich Hölderlin ("Mein Eigentum") and will eventually be combined with adrift for piano and electronics and vale for solo flute, together with some additional material for combinations of between two and four of the performers, to form dying words (resistance & vision part 2). In the meantime, work continues on life-form with almost all of the electronic parts and a considerable proportion of the score now complete.

19 July 2012
The electronic parts for the first and last of the ten parts of life-form are now complete, and a stereo mix of arboreal is available under "works" for listening (although this music is more than usually dependent on being heard in 8-channel format for the layers to be resolved more clearly!).

5 July 2012
The electronic part for the third of the ten parts of life-form is now complete. After the first performance of the complete work it may also be presented alone as a fixed media composition entitled arboreal, with a duration of 8'30". It incorporates most of the material of quasicrystal, mentioned in the previous post, but mixed quite differently (in 8 channels rather than 6) as well as being split into several fragments and immersed in a much more complex "cloudforest" of sound.

26 June 2012
Since the site first went online, I've added mp3s of stereo mixes of the three most recent multichannel fixed media pieces, expanded the "writings" page with external links to various essays and interviews, and updated the concert diary with some new items.

The diary includes performances beginning in November of my current work in progress, life-form for cello and electronics, a commission for Arne Deforce from Concertgebouw Brugge, Centre Henri Pousseur (Liège), November Music ('s-Hertogenbosch) and the University of Leiden, which will have a duration of around one hour. Work on the sound materials has also produced a three-minute electronic composition entitled quasicrystal, which may be heard in stereo form under "works".

5 June 2012
Welcome to this new site. It's looking a little spartan at the moment, to say the least, but I didn't want to wait any longer with making the information available. More content will be added soon, and I expect eventually I'll also get around to making the site look more attractive.

Anyway, this is the place to visit for the most complete and up-to-date information on my musical work and to download scores. (All of my new scores from 2011 onward will be available here as free pdf downloads.)

Please get in touch - richard (at) furtlogic (dot) com - if you have any comments about or suggestions for the site.