David Bruce - Composer
David Bruce - Composer |
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 David Bruce is a British-American composer, living and working in
St. Albans, UK. This site contains information on his music. Contact David Bruce |
PassionsNew discoveries in the land of music, instruments, the internet and more.Beginners Lessons in Tabla playingPosted on 29 June 2008  How to play tabla [PDF - 17Mb] Many, many years ago, when the internet was just a twinkle in the VIC 20's eye, I took a course in tabla playing. The tutor was of Caucasian origin, but had studied with some great tabla players and clearly knew his Tin Taal from his Keherva Taal. For years since I've had the often hand-written sheets he gave me to learn from and felt they were a fantastic resourse that anyone at my stage of interest in tabla playing (ie just starting out) would find invaluable.  After a question from someone on the Composition Today site, I finally got round to scanning the sheets in, and have uploaded them here in PDF format. Unfortunately I no longer have the tutor's name, as it appears nowhere on the lessons, but if he happens to stumble across this, I hope he doesn't mind, and I'd love to hear from him! How to play tabla [PDF - 17Mb] The implications of Antony GormleyPosted on 26 June 2008  Yesterday I attended a fascinating evening at Antony Gormley's London studio, where the kreutzer quartet played passionately some rich and evocative music by my old friend Jim Aitchison. Looking around Gormley's studio was fascinating - there were plenty of his body casts lying around, and a number of his more recent works that build shapes (often body-related) out of thousands of repeated patterns, like this:  Birtwistle used to sometimes look at a work of art and ask 'What is the musical equivalent of that?' I think Jim went beyond that, using the ideas and structures of the works to inspire his music, and a fascinating response it was. But I couldn't help also returning to Birtwistle's question. What would a piece of music sound like that was so clear and simple in form, yet so new and original, and so thought-provoking. Perhaps Ligeti came somewhere close. I browsed Gormley's website and came across an article mentioning Gormley's 1993 work Field:  What Gormley says about this work is fascinating, especially if you reflect it back on the music world: "It came out of a personal crisis. I went back to first principals and started over. I felt the romantic view of the artist as someone standing apart from and remaking the world, was no longer tenable. It was a betrayal of what art could do. Art is nothing without being experienced and shared. And I wanted to start again on that basis". "In the heroic story of Modernism, artists thought they were emancipating the tools of art from the strictures of representation, making something that could be everyone's. Instead, they ended up being implicated in the institutionalisation of modernity. I think the greatest thing we can try to do now is to take the freedom that art gained in the 20th century and offer it back to the viewer, to make work that really can be everyone's." Musical ClownsPosted on 09 May 2008 Some great violin playing from Wilbur Hall in this video. Hall's version of Pop Goes the Weasal seen in this clip was apparently the inspiration for the 3rd movement of Oliver Knussen's Violin Concerto (not that you can particularly hear the influence, mind). I love the way he keeps hitting an out of tune note, and then doing a quick open-string re-tuning, very funny. Also check out this arrangement of 12th Street rag for 'collapsable trombone' and 'stereophonic bicycle pump' (it gets going after the first 40 secs or so) Estrella MorentePosted on 26 April 2008  There's a big difference between good flamenco and bad. Seeing Jesus Montoya at Ainadamar the other day reminded me of the need for good flamenco (he was on fire). A rather lame hunt through itunes using the keyword 'flamenco' revealed rather a lot of the bad side of flamenco - cheesy, overproduced, cliche-ridden. Then I remembered the incredible singing on Almodovar's Volver - a quick search on that lead me to the voice behind the Cruz - Estrella Morente, who it turns out is the daughter of one of Flamenco's leading lights, Enrique Morente. Anyway, she really has gyspy passion in abundance, and listening to Mi cante y un poema make's the heart sing and weep in equal measure - as only good flamenco can. There's some great lyricism on the album, but I'm always a fan of the flamenco 'Buleria', of which this album boasts some fist-stompingly fine examples. KylismsPosted on 20 March 2008 A very nice collection of quotes by Kyle Gann, collected by his students. My favourites are: One of the ways you know you're developing as a composer is when people start performing your pieces better. - this is so true and I take it to mean that if a piece sounds badly played, it's usually your fault as the composer (OK Maybe not always!) I can write a good piece of music in three weeks. A bad one takes me six months. One can prove by analysis that, in reality, Webern's music is highly unified. But art isn't about reality: it's about appearances. - I love that one. Mystery is easily achieved. It's clarity that's difficult. Subtleties tend to get lost in performance. That's why Beethoven was so successful - he didn't put any subtleties in his music. I don't get this one, though: Stravinsky was the master at sustaining a musical idea. Isn't Stravinsky's success based on the fact that he knows when to stop an idea? One day I hope to ask Mr Gann about that one. Borges QuotesPosted on 18 February 2008  I'm just reading a book of interviews with Borges, from throughout his life and, as much to aid my own appaling memory as anything else, I'm going to write down some of the best quotes from this fascinating fellow. Make of them what you will. "I don't believe that any writer should search for themes or choose them, it's convenient that the themes look for him and find him" "If there's one moral defect that's usually obvious in a work, it is vanity...The reader ought never to feel that the writer is skillful. A writer ought to be skillful but in an unobtrusive way." "I write for myself, and perhaps for half a dozen friends. And that should be enough. And that might improve the quality of my writing. But if I were writing for thousands of people, then I would write what might please them. And as I know nothing about them, and maybe I'd have rather a low opinion of them, I don't think that would do any good to my work." Little TichPosted on 17 January 2008 Here is a video of Little Tich, a musical hall clown whose movements apparently inspired the 2nd of Stravinsky's three pieces for String Quartet. I've just been reading about him in Richard Taruskin's fascinating if somewhat heavy-going Defining Russia Musically MuzsikasPosted on 16 January 2008  For anyone who likes gypsy and klezmer, I just discovered a wonderful CD by the Hungarian folk group Muzsikas of the 'Lost Jewish Music of Transylvannia' The CD features old-time violinist Gheorghe Covaci and cimbalom player Arprad Toni, gypsy musicians who had regularly played in Jewish groups before the war. According to Muzsikas these players are one of a very small number of surviving links to a whole Hungarian-Jewish tradition of playing that got decimated during the war. Together they attempt to recapture what that music would have sounded like. Hungarian folk-music is normally my least favourite of all the Eastern European folk traditions (which means I still like it, but not as passionately as other regions), but probably because of the klezmer influence, this disc has some very special music, of both the hauntingly mournful and the foot-stomping varieties. How to play the lagerphonePosted on 16 October 2007 Here's a great video of Michael from the Groanboxboys stomping his lagerphone: Pokrowsky EnsemblePosted on 28 September 2007 A couple of months ago I attended a concert in London as part of the Ades festival, which included a mind-bending performance of Stravinsky's Les Noces by a stellar line up of pianists that included the Labeque Sisters, and the Russian 'folk-choir' the Pokrovsky ensemble. The gutsy voices of the choir added a fascinating extra dimension to the piece, which drew it closer to its ethnic roots while at the same time maintaining its absolute originality and bizarreness. It was one of the most inspiring performances I've seen in a long time. I went out and bought the CD - the disc contains many of the original folk songs that were incorporated into Les Noces in some form or other, and many of them are trully wonderful. It's let down by a hideous recording of Les Noces with awful sounding electric pianos and a bucket-full of reverb (I hasten to add these were not the same performers as in the concert - the CD doesn't even list the pianists and percussionists who may well have been prerecorded by one player I suspect). The disc is worth it for the folk songs alone though.  Archive 1 | 2 | 3 | |