Back in 2016 I was developing some pieces for solo instruments. I was trying to do something different; a challenge to make me think of new things. I realised that I was fairly reliant on chords and music working in multiple layers. A single instrument on its own was a big challenge!

At the same time, an idea had been in my head for some time and wouldn’t go away.

All those times I’d been teaching in a room with a drum kit in the corner, and being distracted by it occasionally joining in with certain notes I played on the piano. With the snare left held against the drum, it would rattle sympathetically every so often. I loved how it ‘joined in’ with some notes and not others. I loved how a sound came from another part of the room from the source sound. It was a kind of call and response. But it was playful and unpredictable.

What if I could manipulate this in some way and get it to join in with a solo instrument with the choice of drum and the choice of notes? It might help me spice things up sonically.

So began my exploration of getting things to rattle, buzz and hum along with a solo instrument.

I ended up composing a piece for prepared piano with resonating drum kit, a piece for viola with ringing wine glasses and bass drum, and a piece for bass clarinet and household objects set in motion by the notes played.

The overall project was called Made to Resonate (M2R). Each piece was successful in its own way, and each piece has morphed and adapted following its initial premiere.

The last of these three pieces is Songs of Coiled Light’. Firstly, there is no singer. No actual ‘songs’.

When it was premiered, the premiere took place in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary as part of Sound Scotland Festival. Patients, school children and the general public came to experience the piece. Other performances followed and things changed.

When we performed the piece live the stage would be set with all manner of household objects which took the sound of the bass clarinet and fed it to a transducer which would be stuck to these objects. The objects acted as a kind of speaker and so the sound of the clarinet was passed around the room in a ghostly way, but the objects also started vibrating and making their individual sympathetic buzzings.

This transference of sound was also used to set objects in motion in unpredictable ways. Ball bearing on a metal tray worked well. Best of all were ping pong balls dancing inside large glass jars. I thought of it very much as both a serious piece, but also slightly childish too.

The piece was inspired by a poem by American poet Michael Rattee which is all about him struggling to remember his dead grandmother. The imagery of the poem connected with me in a visceral way with extremes of emotions and with strong references to all five senses.

I used lines of the poem as titles for each of the six movements of the piece and they provided me with a different ‘scene’ to make use of particular vibrating materials, and to paint a mood.

The bass clarinet became the centre of a storm of swirling music triggering the objects and also setting electronic manipulations in progress.

As with all the pieces of ‘Made To Resonate’ the experience is one that I came to think of as music ‘seen and felt as much as it is heard’.

I became very interested in how this notion might change what I created, and how far it could be true. Other version of Songs of Coiled Light for example, involved coloured light globes which ‘sung’ the notes of a mantra even when the sound has stopped.

The new EP just out is a version of this piece that has made it to recorded form, but without all the trappings of the visuals and the objects. A new incarnation, suitable for the album format. This version doesn’t use sympathetic objects or colour globes, and it leans towards its more serious side.

The wonderful bass clarinettist Gareth Davis for whom the piece was composed, suggested that we complete the recording and make ‘a version’ of the music as a collaboration. His contribution was already hugely important as the piece is a tightrope between fully-notated scored notes, and instructions for improvisation; (something taken from the ideas around remembering things).

He brought in a long-time collaborator and sound artist Rutger Zuydervelt to be the third point of the collaborative triangle.

With a light-touch (and lots of trust) I let Rutger simply get on with what I knew would be a fresh response to the music, taking suggestions about this from the score and processing the bass clarinet freely to suit each ‘scene’.

I’m very pleased with the results.

You can listen here:

There’s also a short film about my ‘Made to Resonate (M2R) Project: