Process music

My good friend and student Roberta shares with me a certain fascination with numerology – an occult study of number patterns (limited to their applicability in music, in my case). There is even a reproduction of a magic square (an arrangement of numbers where rows, columns and diagonals add up to the same sum – the “magic number”) on one of the walls in her house – the square that appears in Melancholia , an engraving by Albrecht Dürer.

In July 2015, the composer Nicholas Peters and I were organising a concert as part of our ongoing series 840 that featured the recorder quartet BLOCK4 and I was to write a piece for them. The ensemble had numerous instruments in their disposal – the usual sets of medieval and renaissance recorders as well as a set of Paetzolds – large, modern, box-like instruments that look like something from an Ikea flat-pack. The musicians wanted the composers to mix and match the instruments from the different sets and I was happy to oblige – I picked two renaissance tenor recorders and two Paetzold basses. The piece was going to be premiered in St James' Islington – an Anglican church. I found it curious that I, an atheist living in the 21st century, was writing music for medieval instruments to be performed in a church. The resulting composition was an attempt to reflect on these circumstances.