Bristol Major - A Series of Compositions by MBD | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This new website provides a home for my six series of one-part Bristol Major peal compositions, presenting them roughly in the order they were produced, with the rationale and methodology behind each set. I had dabbled in Bristol composition before, but only in 2004 did I find the targets and techniques to bring forth something new from the method. It is not possible to machine-search for general one parts of Bristol - the range of possibilities is astronomically high - but by the end of 2003 my composition engine SMC32 had been enhanced to support "linkage search". This allowed the computer to be used as a composer's tool, taking blocks produced by human ingenuity and linking them into full touches. With this capability to hand, I made the first steps into the great wilderness of the one part. My goal? To create a new type of Bristol Major composition, different to what had come before. The infamous composer's notes from one of my first creations, 5026 no.1, sets out my agenda:
All six series presented here follow this manifesto; together I call them the "short-course genre". (The courses are really normal length, of course - generally 7, 8 or 9 leads long - but are much shorter than the fat, course-end heavy courses of traditional Bristol compositions). The compositions in Series 1, 2, 5 and 6 are all tenors-together, and follow an evolution of increasing sophistication in composing techniques, and increasing richness of musical output. Series 3 and 4 include tenors-together courses in the same vein, but also introduce split-tenors music in the form of a diversion to cyclic courses. All, I would claim, are good! Click on the links below to explore each series.
Finally, if you're new to the business of conducting peals of Bristol, don't discount these compositions in favour of boring multi-parts. For example, the classic 5056 no.1 from Series Two is ideal for a novice conductor: it is simple and nicely structured, so easy to learn, and the coursing orders follow each other in a natural, unavoidable sort of progression; one might almost say it calls itself. I've written a short postscript explaining how to learn and call it if it's your first peal of Bristol as conductor, or if the conducting duties have landed on you with short notice, and you just need to learn a composition quickly. A complete index of every composition, sorted by length, is given below. The music counts in the second column list 5678/8765 rollups (front or back), 6578 rollups (back only), and 4-bell little-bell runs ("LB4"), with a + sign giving the numbers of 4567/7654 runs, if present in significant numbers.
Note that all these compositions are also available at http://www.compositions.org.uk/. 2013 update: I have a new series of Spliced Surprise compositions based on the 5056 no.1 Bristol calling. See my spliced page for full details. |
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MBD July 2010
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