A World in Yellow
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"A World in Yellow" was one of the descriptions given by Marcel Duchamp to his Large Glass. Duchamp used yellows a great deal in his paintings. The yellows are generally quite pale and verging on brown at times.
In 1976 I composed a piece called "A World in Yellow" for four harmoniums and voice that was never performed. This piece was strongly synaesthetic for me, partly through the association with Duchamp, and partly through the musical materials used in the composition. These comprised a short melody by Scriabin (whose synaesthesia was associative, as is mine) and a short phrase by Granville Bantock, setting the words "Ah! A hue as honey", that is place within a yellowed context.
This piece takes some of the same material, reconnecting and re-contextualising my auditory experience to reveal the consistency and persistence of synaesthetic memory. It is a piece of frozen time, a kind of delay which holds you in a never-endingly yellow world. Once again, this echoes Duchamp, who called his work "a delay in glass". Towards the end, you hear the sound of a spinning bicycle wheel, another Duchampian allusion. The piece has an obsessively repetitive quality as every element is minutely examined.
Compositional Process
This piece began with a discovery which shows the persistence of my synaesthesia. As I began thinking about yellow sounds, an inescapable image of Marcel Duchamp began to assert itself. I remembered that he had called his Large Glass "a world in yellow". Somehow, that combination of muted yellows (that he used in his early paintings) with glass and metal had lodged in my mind. This led on to a forgotten memory that sent me scrabbling around in the backs of cupboards, where I discovered this: 
It seems that, back in 1976 when I was aged 19, I had composed a "yellow" piece called 'A World in Yellow'. The image on the cover is a silhouette of Marcel Duchamp. The piece was scored for four harmoniums and voice. The harmoniums play a fragment of Scriabin over and over again at different speeds. This is repeatedly interrupted by a short phrase from a piece by Granville Bantock, setting the words "Ah! A hue as honey". This 'A World in Yellow' was never performed, and was fantastically obsessive in a way that I now recognise as typically autistic.
The astonishing thing was that, when I played these fragments of musical material, they immediately filled my mind with yellow. The colour was as strong as ever after all these years. I knew that I had to use this material. I also knew that Simon Allen would be the right person to work with. He and I used to play together in an ensemble called George W. Welch, back in the 1980s. "George W. Welch" was one of several pseudonyms used by Marcel Duchamp. Furthermore, Simon works regularly with an array of self-built percussion instruments that remind me irresistibly of Duchamp.
The notations provide prime materials, some derived from the original piece and some new. The initial discussion with Simon was about how to interpret these given the various constraints and possibilities available to him. He is living in New Zealand currently and under lockdown has limited access to instruments and studios. He can record at home, but there are ever-present insect and animal sounds. These are welcome, but may create continutiy issues, given that I want to assemble the piece form many small fragments of material.
I was also keen to accommodate his hearing (along with mine) so it was important that he had complete control over the sounds to be used in the piece. The only sounds that I insisted upon were the bicylce wheel and waterfall, both iconic sounds from the (imaginary) soundscape of the Large Glass. The discussion about the various possibilities was fascinating, as we went through the score, breaking down every phrase, sometimes every individual note, into unique sounds. These included a large metal sheet with a resonating string, a metallophone, tuning forks, a self-built instrument containing springs, wires, and other bits of machinery, and more.