RIP Trish Keenan

Her unique voice was a force to be reckoned with, and her talent will be sorely missed.
Music that leaves you hypnotized and will last forever.

















Trish on lyrics:
The lyrics to 'America's Boy' were generated by my reactions to a tabloid cryptic crossword. The clues were topically about the war in Iraq, and in general, their stance was one of anti-American occupation. In my frustration at not being able to decipher the clues, I began to react to them, make up my own answers, mimicking back the language of the clues. I was interested then in possible answers. I got on a roll arguing with the clues, asking questions back, taking offence to them and deliberately misreading them. What came back was a sort of celebration of the American soldier. Snap shots of the heroics of American Imperialism, the all out impressiveness of its big achievements. Also something that the British do not have in their culture, a self celebratory nature of Americans towards their own country. The lyrics of Tender Buttons were generated through automatic writing. They are my free falling thoughts. I believe that words have their own life. That if you throw words together randomly, they naturally make sense. Language just wants to be understood.



Succumb to the line
The finishing time
The long distance runner
Has stopped on the corner
But i won't give up
Although i've stopped too

Before the end of me and you
The patchwork explains
The land is unchanged

Interpret the rooms
My tears in the typing pool
The letters are sighing
The ink is still drying
I told you the truth
And now i sigh too

The page turns on me and you
Across that white plain
The land is unchanged

KCO Appointment

Coming up this March 12th will be the performance of my first composition for orchestra (Kingston Chamber Orchestra). The piece is in two movements, taken from the Seven Deadly Sins suite I wrote last year: Avaritia (Greed) and Superbia (Pride). Programme notes below:





















Avaritia and Superbia are two parts of a seven-movement suite: The Seven Deadly Sins. Written for orchestra, both movements explore unusual playing techniques with a focus on timbre and texture, reflecting the influences of Penderecki and Ligeti. Avaritia (Greed) begins in slightly unidiomatic fashion with non-tonal gestures that suggest a natural undercurrent, specifically, rainfall. The music seeks this impression through unconventional timbral effects, and a series rhythm and pitch organizations based on serial tone rows and modes of limited transposition – scales based on intervallic patterns that yields systematic atonality and a controlled high degree of dissonance (conceived by Olivier Messiaen). This animates a linear-harmonic motion; a timelessness that avoids any melodic progression, generating a sense of unpredictability, and a flux of harmonic possibilities.
The same concept is relayed into Superbia (Pride) which resumes in tempestuous manner that precipitates the forming of highly chromatic harmonies and dense textures. This study in texture is evident in the form of tone clusters and micropolyphony – a disharmonious conflict between instrumental lines suggesting that with greed comes selfishness, competition and pride.
The apathetic greed of man’s grip on the natural world is permeated with an ecological crisis that elicits the brutal bite of Mother Nature. The idea of rainwater running down a window is one of the key elements of inspiration that connects Avaritia/Superbia. It is a metaphor for the expanding and contracting textures which are appropriated to Superbia in the themes of convergence, colouration and dissonance. The experimental and idiosyncratic nature of these two passages heralded the induction of a new instrument into the orchestral environment: the Thunder Tube.


Concert details to follow...