The performance will take place within the Maritime Museum’s exhibition of Adams’ photographs and the audience will be free to wander round the exhibition while the concert is happening.

Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance have produced a video of each of the finalists talking about their work. This is mine:

My fellow finalists are:

• Sidhant Kapoor: Om Shanti
• Josh Spear: Mater/Matrix
• Will Handysides: Advection
• Edward Henderson: Night on Bear Mountain

You can view videos of Sidhant, Josh and Edward on the Trinity Laban YouTube channel.

They’re all really great pieces and very different from one another – I feel honoured to be in such company! – so if you’re free on Thursday night, you should come along. £7 gets you into the performance and the exhibition. Full details are on the National Maritime Museum website’s page for the From Landscape to Soundscape event.

Full details are available on the Facebook event page.  My piece (which I’m finishing writing today!) is for four improvising pianists and tape and explores improvisation, both through experimenting with my own improvised sounds in the tape part, and comparing the interpretation of a graphic score in the context of that tape part four times by four different performers. The concert will also include experimental music by my fellow Trinity composers Max De Lucia, Hannah Dilkes, Effy Efthymiou, Litha Efthymiou, Theo Jackson and Declan Kolokowski. Hope to see you there!

The evening is part of ICA’s Touring Talks for their Fourth Plinth: Contemporary Monument exhibition, which is showing maquettes of sculptures made for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. The pieces being performed have all been written in response to the exhibition and its consideration of the space and history of Trafalgar Square and are all by Trinity Laban students.

Many of the pieces in this performance are quite experimental, in content or approach to the space, and my piece, Lines of Sight, falls into this category. It’s a graphic score work for three string instruments (violin, viola and cello for this performance but could be any string instruments) which responds to the creation of Trafalgar Square as a mechanism for social control.

The area we now know as Trafalgar Square was once a rather seedy residential area, and the Victorians were keen to clean it up. So they built Trafalgar Square, not merely as a space for grand monuments, but by the placing of those large fountains and grand staircases, they broke up the space with the specific intent to make it difficult for large crowds to gather.

Lines of Sight is designed so that – like the Victorian ideal for Trafalgar Square – the only “perfect” version is one where there is no audience. The players are situated on the same level as the (standing, moving) audience and communicate using visual cues. Additionally, the design of the exhibition means that players 2 and 3 cannot see each other at all, so they are entirely reliant on being able to see player 1 for the piece to proceed with precision.

As the space becomes more crowded or people move around, and the lines of sight become obscured by the audience, the players must use their ears to try to work out where they are in the score and to move to the next section. The aim for a precise execution of the piece as a group effort is thwarted by the obstacles raised by the audience and by the design of the space.

Quite simply, it is designed to fall apart.

The performance is free and runs for about 2 hours from 6.30pm at ICA – you can come and go as you wish throughout the event, and there’s a cafe if you’re overwhelmed with the awesome My piece is on quite early, but there’s loads of interesting pieces being performed throughout the event, so do come even if you can’t get there for 6.30.

I look forward to seeing you there!

If you’re interested in watching this unfold, the posts will be over at my creativity blog One Creative Thing so they don’t clutter things up too much here. See the current Advent Project posts at http://minim-media.com/onething/tag/advent2012/

Any cheers of encouragement are most welcome in the comments

*understatement of the year

The improvements I’ve made include:

• Automating much of the work related to putting up a new piece, including automatically adding in SoundCloud players in both the works list (mini Flash player) and the page for the new piece (HTML5 player)
• Categorising pieces so that, say, from one piece for flute you can easily jump to a list showing all the other pieces that have a flute in them, or to a list of all solo or chamber pieces, giving you new ways to discover pieces that may have escaped your notice before
• A new Projects section (under Music) which lists current projects, along with blog posts pertaining to them, and the details of significant past projects such as Lucky Dip and On Harrowdown Hill
• A new page listing some of my other writing about music, including articles, other website content and even a published book!

So I hope you enjoy the new site – please let me know if anything you expected to be there has gone missing, or if you see something else amiss. Or for that matter, if there’s something you’d like to see in there that hasn’t been there before!

A shameless plug: If you’re interested in getting a shiny new easy-to-maintain website of your own, why not hop on over to Raspberry Blue Ltd, my freelance company and see how I might be able to help you out

For the geeks, who may be interested in what I actually changed, what I’ve done here is to convert the site from its former hybrid PHP/WordPress existence into a 100% WordPress implementation. The design has also been converted so that it is responsive (although I’ve yet to create and implement an alternative design for mobile devices – that’s on the list). Even shinier, I’ve set up WP so that the URL for every page in the site matches the one I used to promote the old page, to minimise the chance of broken links.

And now it’s time to get the chorus happening! So far, I have a chorus of 3 altos and one soprano, so I’ve designed the choral bit to be pretty flexible. The video below (best viewed in HD and full screen to see the detail and be able to read the score) runs through the same music three times and the idea is that everyone will record at least one run through – the first time round everything is on A, the second time on C and the third time on E. If you can sing those notes in multiple octaves, or feel like recording several passes through them, please do – the more voices and pitches we have, the lusher the sound will be.

If you do want to participate, here are some pointers for your recording:

• Please record at the highest quality your equipment can handle – for preference WAV or AIFF files rather than MP3, and the highest bitrate setting you can find (44.1kHz for preference – that’s CD quality)
• Try to record in a ‘dry’ room – if there’s a lot of resonance in the recording it may be hard to combine them convincingly – adding digital reverb to dry recordings can help to make it sound like everyone’s in the same room.
• Please include a good chunk (about a minute) of silence in your recording – this is so I have some ambient sound from your environment in case I need it for the mixing.

The video shows the score playing along in Finale and includes a click track (the snare drum sound) to help you keep track of the beat. Just put on your headphones (volume not too loud! Don’t want it coming through into the recording!), set up your recording gear, play the video and record yourself singing along.

Yes, the accompaniment feels very heavy-handed at the moment. That’s because it’s still a draft and hasn’t had any orchestration done to it And the “Who” chords feel clunky because it seemed easier to just get everyone to record the notes on the beat and I’ll spread them out when I mix it, rather than messing about with odd rhythms when I didn’t even know how many or what voices I’d have

Interested? Hurrah! Tell your friends! Recordings need to sent to me no later than Friday Sunday 22nd July (get in touch and we can work out the best way for you to send it) as I’ll need to mix everything in and prepare the file ready for submission on Monday the 23rd.

Alas, it seems I wasn’t clear enough as to what the chorus needs to sing in this – it’s the line directly above the piano in the video, with the words “Who”, “Who”, “Is it this man?”, “Is it this man?” and each run through is just on one pitch – A, C or E (there are three repetitions of the section in the video)…

Want to download the choral score or get the video offline(warning: it’s about 17Mb!)? You can download them here.

The concert starts at 3pm and is happening at The Hunt Museum in Limerick, Ireland (map below).

Want to get an idea of what they’ll be playing? Here’s a recording of me singing the Three Whitman Songs:

Can’t make it to Limerick today? In London next weekend? Come and hear the world premiere of my brass quintet, Knots and Mirrors!

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22 April sees my first performance in Ireland – CoMA Limerick are performing my Three Whitman Songs at the Hunt Museum in Limerick. I don’t have full details yet, but will post updates here when I know the time and what else is on the programme. This will be a world premiere performance.

27 April is the premiere of my recently completed fanfare for brass quintet, Knots & Mirrors, which will be performed by Riverside Five in London at St Michael’s Church, Chester Square, SW1W 9HH at 7.30pm. Tickets at the door £12/£8 (concessions for students, LCF members). Advance tickets £8. Full booking details are on the London Composers Forum website, under Concerts.

In other news, Carrion Comfort was workshopped by London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra on Saturday, which was a very helpful and enlightening event. It was lovely to meet up with the other composers and hear everyone’s work and the feedback from the orchestra.

I’ll be blogging about the experience of writing 10 pieces for 10 different performers in a (short!) month soon – it’s been incredible and I’ve learned a vast amount from this project which I’m sure will affect the music I write for weeks and months to come.

For everything about the project – to find out more, to listen or download – go to the Lucky Dip page at http://caitlinrowley.com/projects/luckydip

I’m also thrilled to report that my commission project for RPM2012 seems to have met with a great reception and is now fully subscribed. I’ve even written and sent off the very first piece!