Corey Mwamba

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Previous Gigs

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19th Jun 11

I've had a busy weekend re-writing scores: transferring them from Lime to Musescore, which I'm finally getting used to. The process is not particularly difficult as both Lime and Musescore understand MusicXML, but there is a lot of music to send over!

21st Jul 11

Today will be an odd day. It's my last session at the Arts Cafe for the Everybody's Reading project I've been doing with visual artist Sue Clews, Tim Sayers and Lydia Towsey - not as a poet this time but as Arts-in-Health co-ordinator for the NHS.

I've spent the last nine weeks listening closely and watching as people interact and engage with books, each other and themselves. This process was at the heart of the piece I was commissioned to create for the Festival. Since working on Heralds - and that's longer than most people would think - I've been moving towards making map-like scores and "scripts" for the music I want to hear. The older versions of my maps were very directed and quite prescriptive; so there would be a flow from start to finish; the musician was guided to the end point with descriptions as to what I wanted to hear as the writer.

But in this case I was writing for the trio. This is something I have never really had to do, since we neither play "tunes" nor rehearse. We just turn up and create music, through listening and awareness of our environment. So it was a matter of balancing the openness of the group with my intentions for the piece. So I decided to modify process I used on myself for Popular Delusions and Songs for the New Folk, which is more based on emotions and what is said rather than what I think. This is a Flickr set of the score, about 75% finished.

map in full

4th Oct 11

Today will be an odd day. It's my last session at the Arts Cafe for the Everybody's Reading project I've been doing with visual artist Sue Clews, Tim Sayers and Lydia Towsey - not as a poet this time but as Arts-in-Health co-ordinator for the NHS.

I've spent the last nine weeks listening closely and watching as people interact and engage with books, each other and themselves. This process was at the heart of the piece I was commissioned to create for the Festival. Since working on Heralds - and that's longer than most people would think - I've been moving towards making map-like scores and "scripts" for the music I want to hear. The older versions of my maps were very directed and quite prescriptive; so there would be a flow from start to finish; the musician was guided to the end point with descriptions as to what I wanted to hear as the writer.

But in this case I was writing for the trio. This is something I have never really had to do, since we neither play "tunes" nor rehearse. We just turn up and create music, through listening and awareness of our environment. So it was a matter of balancing the openness of the group with my intentions for the piece. So I decided to modify process I used on myself for Popular Delusions and Songs for the New Folk, which is more based on emotions and what is said rather than what I think. This is a Flickr set of the score, about 75% finished.

map in full

26th Jan 12

And - because it failed once again - I'll try it again. Except this time I'll talk about something within the message. Feeling slightly unwell today - not sure if it's something I ate, as I had a quiet night in, but feeling very unsettled. After this relentless coding, I'm going to spend more time on @[the trio] scripts - the scores are pretty much done, but creating parts from the full score is the tricky part.

12th Feb 12

And - because it failed once again - I'll try it again. Except this time I'll talk about something within the message. Feeling slightly unwell today - not sure if it's something I ate, as I had a quiet night in, but feeling very unsettled. After this relentless coding, I'm going to spend more time on @[the trio] scripts - the scores are pretty much done, but creating parts from the full score is the tricky part.

4th Jan 13

Yesterday, I decided to refresh the score to an older song of mine, Bereft. Today, I\'m taking a look at Golden.... You can get the score. Both of these were played in Argentum.

Listen to it here:

oemb::http://soundcloud.com/coreymwamba/golden

Golden... is a piece I\'ve written about before, but it was in a comment on Facebook. What I said then mostly holds true now, so I\'ll re-use: I wrote the song when I was about 18 or 19. I know this because when I found it just over ten years later, it had my handwriting of that time and my name at the top. But when I found it I didn\'t understand it. I am looking at the original now - and I still do not understand it as I wrote it then.

From what I can gather, when I was 19 I was actually much smarter than I am now, and really into connecting harmonies in different keys using web-like structures. When I look at them now they remind me of boron cage structures, and that would align right with my degree days; but I did not know about boron cages at the time when I wrote it.

It took me days to decipher what I\'d first written. I remember writing it down on a scrap of paper and swore I\'d never lose it in case I ever had to explain it again - but I\'ve moved house many times since then. I\'m never going to find that scrap of paper. But I still have the original, so if anyone wants I\'ll try and work through it again!

What\'s really interesting for me was that as I was re-scoring this I realised that it\'d be pretty difficult for me to write like this now - it\'s like a totally different voice... but SOUNDS familiar.

Anyway, when I was putting together the music for Argentum I felt I needed a driving, optimistic song [I think it sounds optimistic, anyway]. I was listening through my old MIDI files and found two work-throughs of Golden... and thought \"wow. how does THAT work?\"

I then searched for my old folder with all the scraps of paper and found my mad teenage notes and just shook my head. But it sounded like the song I needed to finish the gig, so I worked between my notes and the MIDI file to transcribe it in my old notation software. I then handed it over to the group.

I have to be honest, I\'m still not sure if I get exactly how it works in a functional harmonic sense. But I still feel it works from a musical sense.

At some points the different harmonies just reduce to the same chord, but some parts are definitely polytonal.

Anyway, if you feel like playing it, please download the PDFs! I\'ve produced transposed melody parts too.

16th Nov 13

Wow. Musescore's embedded scores work a treat.

21st Nov 13

Satellite, Giant Steps and How High The Moon, stacked together: oemb::http://musescore.com/coreymwamba/scores/143375

3rd Dec 13

As you may have guessed, I like maximal information problems: so here's a score. oemb::http://musescore.com/coreymwamba/scores/146186

18th Dec 13

Vast How High The Moon contrafact stacking: oemb::http://musescore.com/coreymwamba/scores/149578

18th Dec 13

Game-changing site for disseminating Western notation scores on the web: http://musescore.com/

4th Feb 14

Four scores typeset! Had a brainwave this morning and was able to use Libreoffice Math to type up the scores for my main project. Eyes are burning though.

18th Nov 18

Backing up scores and transcriptions to a Keybase private git repo! 500 down, 1700 to go... but worth it!

3rd Feb 19

Printing of scores done!! Newcastle -- THE MIDLANDER IS COMING TO CELEBRATE THE NORTH! @[Andy Champion]/@[Laura Cole]/Johnny Hunter