News

Tapping Piece at the Hansard

Posted on by btjameson

On 3 March I took part in a fantastic concert at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton. The evening featured electroacoustic and amplified music by various different composers, including several great pieces from my some of my colleagues at the university. These were performed across two rooms within the gallery, which proved to be an excellent space (a shame they are moving off campus soon!). We had a really great turnout and I think most of the audience enjoyed the music.

My contribution to the night was performing two solo electric guitar pieces-Morton Feldman’s The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar (1966) and Christian Wolff’s Another Possibility (2004), and a performance of my Tapping Piece, for four electric guitars, to close the concert. This piece involves an unusual method of playing the guitars, striking the bodies of the instruments with drumsticks to produce a droning effect, and varying the harmonies produced by using volume pedals. The piece seemed to go down well, and I’m grateful to Joe Manghan, Harry Matthews and Máté Szigeti for helping to perform the piece (a task requiring both mental and physical stamina).

Here is a short taster clip of the piece that I produced to promote the concert (I hope to make a full recording soon!):

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Construction in Metal

Posted on by btjameson

On 2 November, Mark Knoop and I premiered my piece Construction in Metal (I’m rather proud of the John Cage pun in the title!) in Plus Minus Ensemble’s concert at the Turner Sims, Southampton. The piece is scored for electric guitar and a Guitar Hero Xbox controller triggering samples from various classic rock tracks via a computer set up. The piece also involves various choreography based on stereotypical ‘air guitar’ moves. This was quite a departure and a challenge for me as both a composer and a performer, as I have not previously incorporated visual elements into my work, but it was also a lot of fun! Mark’s expertise in performing this kind of repertoire, and in developing the computer set up for the controller was invaluable and much appreciated.

Tempo

Posted on by btjameson

My article ‘Rock Spectrale’: The Cultural Identity of the Electric Guitar in Tristan Murail’s Vampyr! is published in the October edition of Tempo. It is based on my PhD research about the influence of the electric guitar’s popular cultural identity within contemporary music, and focuses on a piece for solo electric guitar composed by Murail in 1984. This is my first time publishing in an academic journal, and I found it to be an interesting, although at times rather scary(!) experience. Going through the long process of drafting and re-drafting my work, presenting at conferences, and finally going through the editorial and production process was tough, but rewarding, and has helped me developed valuable skills as an academic musician.

My article can be read on the Cambridge Journals website here:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0040298215000340

Ensemble Fractales visit Southampton

Posted on by btjameson

Following successful premieres in Brussels, Ensemble Fractales came to Southampton to play postgraduate composers’ works in a lunchtime concert at the Turner Sims concert hall on the Southampton University campus. This concert was the culmination of this year’s collaboration between the Southampton composition deparment and performers studying the manama advanced masters programme in contemporary music performance in Brussels. My piece Construction in Metal received its second performance, alongside works by Olly Sellwood, Martin Humphries, and Enno Poppe’s fantastic Gelöschte Lieder.

You can read more about the project on the music department blog here:

https://blog.soton.ac.uk/music/2015/05/15/cross-channel-collaboration/

and hear my piece here:

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Conference in Bowling Green OH

Posted on by btjameson

At the end of March, I travelled to the USA for the first time, to take part in the Electric Guitar in Popular Culture conference at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. I presented my paper on Tristan Murail’s Vampyr!, gaining valuable feedback as I prepare it for publication, and heard many fascinating papers.

I wrote a post about my experiences for the Southampton University music department blog (I am grateful to the Faculty of Humanities and AHRC for helping fund my travel expenses):

https://blog.soton.ac.uk/music/2015/04/21/electric-guitar-conference-in-bowling-green-usa/