All of Paris on a Beer Mat

Last night found Simon Atkinson and me enjoying some fine beer in the Castle Inn in Leicester. It’s a wonderful old place, small with perilous wooden stairs curling down the middle. It’s next door to one of the many offices I occupied during my thirty years at De Montfort University. In those days, I was directing the Institute of Creative Technologies, which was a rewarding occupation, but not without pressure. It was lovely to revisit this old haunt in a completely different, and much more relaxed, frame of mind.

Simon is always full of precious insights and amusing conversation. On this occasion, we fell to discussing one another’s compositions. What he said was so interesting that I decided to try to turn it into this blog post. 

His first comment was: “You enjoy permutations for their own sake.” He’s right, of course: I do love their patterns, structures and micro-variations. For me, composing often begins with imagining a set of rules, or a collection of meaningful things that can be combined, swapped, processed or reordered. This initial combinatorial explosion is followed by a challenge: how to make sense of this? The extent to which that question is or is not resolved provides much of the humour, humility and humanity in the work. 

There’s a paradox here. I like to think that even when my music departs from recognisable tonal or formal sense, it somehow retains the legitimacy of more familiar musical arguments. It’s as though I’ve constructed a semiosphere, as Simon (presumably referencing Yuri Lotman) put it, that contains a world of possible meanings, resonances and sign-systems, then compressed it into a piece. The fun is in trying to make sense of it all, and the “ha ha” moments that arise as I do so. 

Simon also said he detected something medieval in my approach, and I think he’s onto something there too. Medieval culture had a love of ordering the world through hierarchies, cosmologies and elaborate systems of correspondence, but it also delighted in play and parody. For every illuminated saint in a manuscript, there’s a monkey playing bagpipes in the margin. 

At one point Simon asked, rather pointedly, how much I really care about how my music sounds in the end. It’s a fair question. I do care deeply, but not always in the way people expect. I care that it means something, that it invites listening, even if it’s the sound of rocks or frogs. But then, what counts as sound, and for whom? That question lies at the heart of the Aural Diversity Project. Going beyond the normative is part of the compositional process as well as a lived experience. After a while, the “abnormal” becomes its own kind of logic.

He also suggested that my engagement with electroacoustic composers might be less about an interest in acousmatic techniques and more about wanting them to share my affection for frog sounds. I think he’s right about that too. I remember Arvo Pärt recounting how, at a time of artistic crisis, he asked a street sweeper what a composer should do. The street sweeper replied that a composer should love the sound he makes. I do love frog calls.

However, my musical compositions are not mere by-products of some kind of process. They are the meeting point where all those permutations, patterns and paradoxes become audible. It’s how meaning appears. It’s not always about beauty, or even coherence. Sometimes it’s about setting irreconcilable opposites against each other, like the grinding rocks and the piano in Pianolith. 

That, perhaps, is where the Satie-like smile creeps in. It’s not irony exactly, more a gentle amusement at the seriousness of it all. Satie had a way of balancing absurdity and precision to which I aspire. There’s a special kind of clarity in being both meticulous and ridiculous at once.

If there’s a unifying thread in all this, it might be the idea of compression. I often feel as though I’m trying to fit an impossible amount of meaning into a tiny place, to see at the whole of Paris in, as Simon put it, a “Perec-ian beer mat.” 

So yes, I do enjoy permutations, but not because they lead to order. Rather because they lead to that place where order and disorder coexist, where rocks can sing with pianos, and frogs can join a human ensemble, where meaning and nonsense meet and raise a glass together.