Postcard From The Lorelei

Disc One

All music and recordings copyright © Alan Wrigley

	The Eyes of Tapio
	My starting point was this painting by Sue Cordingley, which I see as a dark mysterious forest. The black 'holes' are portals into the inner soul of the forest. Or perhaps trombones. Or perhaps the eyes of Tapio, the Finnish god of the forest. I set out to interpret the painting in music as a static object, but in the end it turned out to be an exploration of how the image might evolve if it was alive. The music starts in a restless and mysterious forest in the middle of the night. After a while in the early hours of the morning the forest quietens and becomes more peaceful. Then suddenly the portals open with a fanfare, followed by a short period of nervous anticipation, before the inner spirit appears and the forest is bathed in light. Finally the music ends in a riot of colour, incorporating some of the soundscapes heard earlier in the piece. I first learned about Tapio when I bought an LP 50 years ago of the tone poem Tapiola by Sibelius. Recently while listening to Tapiola I realised that it had subconsciously inspired this piece. The basso profundo, the swirling strings and the outbursts of raucous brass in Tapiola all find echoes in The Eyes of Tapio.

The Eyes of Tapio

My starting point was this painting by Sue Cordingley, which I see as a dark mysterious forest. The black 'holes' are portals into the inner soul of the forest. Or perhaps trombones. Or perhaps the eyes of Tapio, the Finnish god of the forest. I set out to interpret the painting in music as a static object, but in the end it turned out to be an exploration of how the image might evolve if it was alive.

The music starts in a restless and mysterious forest in the middle of the night. After a while in the early hours of the morning the forest quietens and becomes more peaceful. Then suddenly the portals open with a fanfare, followed by a short period of nervous anticipation, before the inner spirit appears and the forest is bathed in light. Finally the music ends in a riot of colour, incorporating some of the soundscapes heard earlier in the piece.

I first learned about Tapio when I bought an LP 50 years ago of the tone poem Tapiola by Sibelius. Recently while listening to Tapiola I realised that it had subconsciously inspired this piece. The basso profundo, the swirling strings and the outbursts of raucous brass in Tapiola all find echoes in The Eyes of Tapio.

	The Phantom Zephyr
	This idea simmered in my head for quite a few years. It's inspired by two somewhat insignificant notes in John Adams' Hoodoo Zephyr, and more substantially by Terry Riley's Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band. It features yet another experiment with time signatures. In the middle of the piece, and again near the end, a saxophone plays in 7/8 time over the track's regular 3/4.

	Caliadne
	In 2016 I wrote a short 30-second piece of music to accompany a sylvan interlude in the film A Humble Station?, shot at Willow Hall Dam in Sowerby Bridge. As I wrote the music I saw naiads playing beside a woodland stream. This is an extended version of that piece. I have subsequently turned this into a multimedia work by adding visuals and a poem. You can view this on YouTube.

	Dixie Sketches
	This has nothing to do with Dixie as understood by most musicians, but started out as incidental music for a short film about an art workshop in Dixie Woods. However, it soon developed a mind of its own and went in directions I could never have envisaged. It's no longer suitable for the film, so here it is as a stand-alone piece of music. It's my first attempt at an idea which has been germinating in my head for a while, which is to write music with ambiguous time. Although the piece has a steady rhythm throughout, it also has two separate syncopated bass lines and several of the instruments disregard the time signatures and the bars within it completely and just flow almost randomly through time.

Dixie Sketches

This has nothing to do with Dixie as understood by most musicians, but started out as incidental music for a short film about an art workshop in Dixie Woods. However, it soon developed a mind of its own and went in directions I could never have envisaged. It's no longer suitable for the film, so here it is as a stand-alone piece of music.

It's my first attempt at an idea which has been germinating in my head for a while, which is to write music with ambiguous time. Although the piece has a steady rhythm throughout, it also has two separate syncopated bass lines and several of the instruments disregard the time signatures and the bars within it completely and just flow almost randomly through time.

	Occam's Stubble
	This piece has been in my head since 1996, when I bought a Yamaha DB50XG synth card and played with it for a while. This started as a doodle based on a riff from Soft Machine's Facelift and expanded in my head into a complex piece of music built on overlapping tempos of five and seven beats to the bar. Occam's Razor suggests that you should not choose a complex solution if there is a simple one that meets the criteria. I prefer to not choose a simple solution if I can find a more complex one, so this piece therefore stands in the way of Occam's Razor, hence its title. It's in several sections. The first has 5-beat and 7-beat themes overlaid with equal beat lengths, so that the bars are of different lengths and the downbeats are only in sync every 35 beats. Section two is mostly in 7/4 time with a few brief bars at the end where again the two time signatures overlap out of sync. The third section is nominally in 5/4 time but there are several places where a 7-beat theme is overlaid, but in this instance the beat lengths are changed so that 5 beats of one equals 7 beats of the other. This leads to some complex juxtapositions of notes which can sound strange if you don't know what's going on. The fourth section reprises the first starting with a slow variation on the theme, and the finale is one long bar of 70 beats, which is of course a multiple of both 5 and 7. I had great fun doing all this. I hope I've blunted the Razor.

Occam's Stubble

This piece has been in my head since 1996, when I bought a Yamaha DB50XG synth card and played with it for a while. This started as a doodle based on a riff from Soft Machine's Facelift and expanded in my head into a complex piece of music built on overlapping tempos of five and seven beats to the bar.

Occam's Razor suggests that you should not choose a complex solution if there is a simple one that meets the criteria. I prefer to not choose a simple solution if I can find a more complex one, so this piece therefore stands in the way of Occam's Razor, hence its title.

It's in several sections. The first has 5-beat and 7-beat themes overlaid with equal beat lengths, so that the bars are of different lengths and the downbeats are only in sync every 35 beats. Section two is mostly in 7/4 time with a few brief bars at the end where again the two time signatures overlap out of sync. The third section is nominally in 5/4 time but there are several places where a 7-beat theme is overlaid, but in this instance the beat lengths are changed so that 5 beats of one equals 7 beats of the other. This leads to some complex juxtapositions of notes which can sound strange if you don't know what's going on. The fourth section reprises the first starting with a slow variation on the theme, and the finale is one long bar of 70 beats, which is of course a multiple of both 5 and 7.

I had great fun doing all this. I hope I've blunted the Razor.

	Cleopatra's Teeth
	This is an instrumental that was inspired by a short riff from the Soft Machine track Teeth, and with a recurring theme adapted from the opening of Florent Schmitt's Antoine et Cléopâtre, hence the title. It has a jazzy feel to it.

	Poseidon's Secret
	This is unlike most music I've written up to this point. It's a slowly-evolving soundscape inviting you into the mysterious domain of Poseidon.

	St Ursula's Rapture
	I've always been fascinated by the number 11. This fascination was enhanced when I lived in Cologne in the early 1980s and discovered that 11 is woven into the legends of the Rhineland. Carnival season officially begins at 11:11 on the 11th day of the 11th month. Allegedly in the 4th century St Ursula sailed down the Rhine with 11000 virgins who were all massacred by the Huns. I don't buy this - imagine the number of boats that would have to be commandeered for that many people, at a time when barbarians were rampaging in the area, not to mention whether it's likely that the society of that time could support 11000 unmarried women. An alternative version of the legend says 11 virgins and I think that is infinitely more plausible. This piece is predominantly in 11/8 time, though it is polymetric. I've adopted that technique before, in The Phantom Zephyr and Occam's Stubble, but whereas they only had fairly short sections of two competing meters, in addition to the main meter of 11/8 this has 2/4, 4/4, 8/8 and 5/8 running through it for much of the piece, sometimes all at once. It's probably the most complex thing I've attempted yet.

St Ursula's Rapture

I've always been fascinated by the number 11. This fascination was enhanced when I lived in Cologne in the early 1980s and discovered that 11 is woven into the legends of the Rhineland. Carnival season officially begins at 11:11 on the 11th day of the 11th month. Allegedly in the 4th century St Ursula sailed down the Rhine with 11000 virgins who were all massacred by the Huns. I don't buy this - imagine the number of boats that would have to be commandeered for that many people, at a time when barbarians were rampaging in the area, not to mention whether it's likely that the society of that time could support 11000 unmarried women. An alternative version of the legend says 11 virgins and I think that is infinitely more plausible.

This piece is predominantly in 11/8 time, though it is polymetric. I've adopted that technique before, in The Phantom Zephyr and Occam's Stubble, but whereas they only had fairly short sections of two competing meters, in addition to the main meter of 11/8 this has 2/4, 4/4, 8/8 and 5/8 running through it for much of the piece, sometimes all at once. It's probably the most complex thing I've attempted yet.

	River
	This is a kind of sister piece to The Eyes of Tapio in that both are about nature, but whereas the former was a journey through time in an awakening forest, this piece is a journey through space along the course of a river. It's in four contiguous sections: 1. Source 2. Whirlpool 3. Calmer Waters 4. Towards the Sea