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Go Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke by Nonsemble
Dear friends, this is out today!
This piece is without a doubt the biggest compositional task I’ve ever undertaken… although I’ve written long stuff before, this is far more detailed, intertwined, and unified than any other large-scale work I’ve written. I’m going to write a little bit about it here because I feel like it, but it’s VERY LONG and VERY SELF-INDULGENT. You’ve been warned.
Before I get into the self-indulgent part, I really want to thank a bunch of people for making this happen. Firstly, the members of Nonsemble: K-dawg, FloWo, B-Lutz, Hik (かっとばせ！ひかる！), Smitch and Samdrews. Holy crap, the time these guys put into this thing is crazy. I’m not some independently wealthy artist who actually pays people for their time - these guys believed in it and enjoyed it enough to bring their considerable talents and creative input to the rehearsal room, unpaid, week after week. In particular, Kieran was the person who had such faith in the work that he programmed it for a concert before I’d even finished it, and put blood, sweat, and tears into putting on that gig. I probably would never have actually finished it otherwise. That gig also began our relationship with Jaymis Loveday and Ben Fitzpatrick - two dudes who have helped make our shows sparkle with visual goodness ever since. I was also grateful as always to have Robert Davidson’s mentorship and support leading up to the premiere.
We all owe a massive thanks to Thomas Green who put considerably more work into this than we paid him for, and I can’t imagine the recording and mixing of this could have been placed in better hands than his. Jim Perkins and the team at Bigo and Twigetti have been tireless in organising and promoting the release, and it is an absolute honour to be featured on a label of such excellent quality. My dear friend from my days in Japan, Naoya Kobayashi, generously did the exquisite brushwork you see on the cover (Next time we drink in Japan, I’m paying).
There have also been so many supportive friends and fans - those faces we see at just about every show (you know who you are!) - we couldn’t have done it without you.
Finally, my wife Helen has been amazing. What a sweet deal to be married to someone who is not only a considerably better musician than I am, but is also constantly ready to lend some critical ears or a little encouragement. And with our baby Sebastian a month old now, she’s been surprisingly tolerant of the time I have given to my other, somewhat less precious musical baby.
And with that aside, some reflections on the work:
Nonsemble originally came together to develop and perform what became Practical Mechanics, our first release. Looking back, it feels like it was about learning - I was learning to write for classical players, and as a group we were sort of getting to know each other and figuring out how to work together, finding a sound. A pretty big chunk of what I know about composing I owe to the members of Nonsemble, to my supervisor Robert Davidson, and to those early Nonsemble rehearsals. Being for my PhD, it was also hard to ignore the fact that it was to be assessed; as much as I tried to forget about pleasing the gatekeepers of the institution, it’s hard to avoid adjusting your writing to appeal to academic musical values.
In a way, Go Seigen vs Fujisawa Kuranosuke was a chance to freely compose something that I really wanted to hear, and to make something really ambitious for the sheer joy of sounds and patterns and form. It felt like an opportunity to bring to the table everything I’d learnt from PM, and all the progress we’d made as an ensemble. We’d become more collaborative - everyone had a better sense of what I was trying to achieve, and likewise I had a better sense of everyone’s strengths and what kinds of challenges they enjoyed. As I wrote parts I had each individual in mind, and would be thinking “oh man they’ll really love playing this.” So in hindsight, it almost seems like PM was a training ground for us, and Go was the real deal.
Having said all that - the process of writing Go was still a massive learning experience. My vision for it was a piece that had no fat on it at all - something completely unified from start to finish. Needless to say, that meant that so, so much of it was scrapped in the process, and there were points where I really felt like I didn’t have the skills to finish it. Like maybe I need to go do another PhD and then come back to it. I guess that’s why it took so long. I had very high expectations of it - I wanted every moment to be excellent, and I felt that the ensemble were equally invested in making it great.
As some may know, the piece is based on the moves of a 1953 game of Go. People often ask about the Go game and how it possibly could be translated to music. An important point that I sometimes find difficult to explain is that the game wasn’t all that important really. It really could have been any game. It’s not like I believe there was some mystical aesthetic beauty locked in the numbers which I just had to decode. What the game held was a wealth of interesting abstract patterns, and manipulating interesting abstract patterns is sort of how I come at music.
So rather than decoding those patterns directly into music, what I was really trying to do was throw them into the pond of my mind and see what ripples they made. If something interesting emerged, I kept it. Once I had that material it was much like any compositional process - using a mix of skills, logic, and intuition to develop those formal abstractions into something musically satisfying.
So here it is, world. Do what you wilt with it. i guess it’s a drop in the ocean of the masses of music being made in the world, and by no means the greatest or most important.. in fact, a work about abstract patterns seems almost irresponsible in a time of such social and financial inequality. But sometimes I think that the composition itself is the least significant of what we contribute. If we, as an ensemble, got to enjoy that weird connection that only happens when playing music together; if anyone involved got to learn something or feel the satisfaction of making something cool; if you met a new friend at our shows or had a great conversation; or if in some way this makes someone somewhere smile, that’s the real success.