Polarities is a piece of experimental music, attempting to combine the forces of the orchestra with multichannel electroacoustic composition.
Within this piece, there are three main elements. Firstly there is the orchestral part about which I shall say little here, but suffice it to say it is central to the music, and my sincerest thanks go to the members of the university orchestra for their forbearance and skill in coming on this journey. From this we bridge the gap into the world of the electronic with a number of orchestral soloists, functioning in musically in a similar manner to those in a more conventional concerto grosso. The sound from these players is audibly transformed in real-time, providing a link between the worlds of acoustic composition and speaker based sonic art, which leads to the third element, that of purely electronic music. Here a wide number of sounds have been collected, transformed, sculpted, and in a very literal sense composed into one or possibly several parts. This has then been broken down into musical phrases or events and program mapped onto a keyboard so as to enable live triggering in performance.

The concept of bridging these worlds works on a number of levels. The first and most obvious in the use of live processing of performers, and for that matter live performance of the electronic part in that the sound files are triggered with (hopefully!) the orchestra rather than relying on a constant click track or metronome. Beyond this, we get into matters physical and musical, in that volume balance and spatialisation need to work just as they would in any purely instrumental ensemble. Growing from ‘classical’ orchestral practice, the movement and exploration of parameters such as pitch, timbre and rhythm between the electronic and the acoustic becomes both a catalyst for musical tension and unifying framework on which to build. Whilst on the surface this piece may appear to be something of a rebellion against the norms of orchestral composition, it is not, rather it is an evolution, broadening the potential spectra and gestural possibilities. This wider potential frees the various elements to work as they do best, rather than limiting a speaker to the tempered scale or for that matter trying to force strange noises out of instruments of relatively fixed timbre and tessitura as so often becomes the case in much modern composition.

I mentioned earlier of a journey, for this is what this is. Polarities is a hard piece to pin down, through the process of writing (in as much as one can be said to fully write a piece such as this) I have often been surprised how the material unfolds. True, one starts with a basic structure, be that motivic, emotional, conceptual, any combination of these, or perhaps none of them but what comes through is not just how shockingly wide a repertoire of sounds these combined worlds afford, but also how intertwined and similar they can become. ..To say this is a completely abstract piece of music would be a lie in that I do not truly believe such a thing is possible, there is always some part of you within a work, and for that matter, the preconceptions and ideas that listeners and performers bring to the piece. Suffice it to say that it begins at the beginning has a slow bit in the middle and gets quicker at the end, or at least that is the plan.

Recorded as 1 track but performed in 3 movements:

1. On points of Departure
2. Cycle
3. Tarantella