Listen to The Rheingold Trauma

Miscellaneous Instrumentals

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.

© Alan Wrigley May 2016

Purple Skies
This started out as a song inspired by my Classical education, involving Greek warriors and Pythian priestesses, but I just didn't like the way it sounded. So I did an instrumental version and this is a whole lot better. The seagull cries are a relic from the original vocal version ("Where the seagull flies ..... under purple skies").

© Alan Wrigley Apr 2018

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.

© Alan Wrigley Jun 2018

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.

© Alan Wrigley Feb 2019

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

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 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.