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This CD is the result of a gift: Peter Swann sent me the score of his piece Prelude & Fandango in 2004. Originally inspired by my friend and colleague Chris Houlding, Peter asked me if I would be interested in performing the piece, and Chris kindly gave me his blessing to give the premier if I could find an opportunity to stage it.

I immediately decided that in order to do Peter's piece justice, it would be necessary to find other music which would enable the performers to explore the potential of this wonderful but completely untried combination. However, although there is now a small but very fine repertoire for trombone and string quartet, harp and trombone duo, and also for harp and string quartet, we could find no other examples for the complete sextet. The challenge, therefore, was to generate a completely new repertoire - and this CD is one of the results of that project.

The booklet notes for this album are quite detailed, but one important element had to be omitted, due to lack of space: the story which comprised Andrian Pervazov's program notes for his piece /dev/jam so here it is in full:

Andrian Pervazov: /dev/jam (duo for trombone & harp)

This piece would have been very different, were it not for a recent mild emergency that changed my initial plan.  An old server forgotten in its rack got apparently infected by a rootkit and the ensuing forensic examination uncovered a strange stealth device by the name of /dev/jam that had been added to the kernel and used by the unknown hacker to communicate with a remote server via an encrypted session.

After some heavy massaging of the salvaged data streams using vigorous interpolation and brute force approximation I was able to recover a good-sized chunk of the communication logs. Breaking the code written in an obscure lisp/assembly dialect was no small feat by itself, but now I was left with numerous segments of what turned out to be a bastardized mix of diastematic neumes and 19th century gemshorn tablature liberally peppered with text fragments in contemporary English.

Lo and behold, the participants in the illegal /dev/jam session had exchanged musical ideas, had jammed on them and had even supplied their own comments and opinions - what a self-fulfilling, self-sustainable paradigm, what a nice, clean fun ex machina, utterly unexpected from a stealth intruder. This derivative, planted artefact, a true Ding an sich as Kant would put it, was so fascinating in its home-grown aesthetics that my natural response was to attempt to resurrect some of the musical experience frozen in the log and to present it to the public in a more listener friendly fashion, arranged sparingly here and there so as to fit better in the humanly perceivable range of sounds - and this is how /dev/jam was born.

Particularly inspirational were the text snippets - profuse instructions which might have also served as comments on the meaning or interpretation of the jam process, some of them more or less music related, such as nonlinear perfectionist ... incredulously cadenced ... consummately arranging ... addictive arduousness ... outgrow repetitive strengths ... Mandelbrot refracted ... predefined agitation ... drummers uncontrollable ... vacant paraphrases ... tracking non-transparent instincts ... uninterrupted interpretations ... bold quietness, besieging candidness ... fervently guarding statistical appearances ... hesitates occasional and such, whether or not they had much in common with the underlying musical quodlibet.

Then there were the weird little gems for which "bordering on the absurd" is an understatement. Indeed, what do you make of phrases such as eavesdropping on unmarried locomotives or masts regenerate awfully? And ... educate traditionally, rent heuristically (a half-baked slogan for an advertising campaign perhaps?) or Vista Bernstein, dusting Toynbee, relenting Heinlein? Were they teasers intended to jumpstart a bout of improvisation or merely the by-product of semi-successful decryption? It should be pointed out that the forensic body of evidence yielded a whole little poem as well, a pungent double haiku in its own right that deserves to be quoted here verbatim:

subtracts maverick

rerouting securities inconsolable Cheney

stirringly majored courtrooms

delightfully untapped directives

***

thereupon plagiarist

artifices Christian feminist

intermingling Cypriot cum Trotsky Bolshevist

Hmm, some eerily looking political humour for sure, but could this also be industrial-strength cipher for clandestine operations (another opera as they say in Bulgarian, or, in today's cold verbiage - a broadcast I was not authorized to intercept?) On second thought, the presence of Cheney in close proximity to eavesdropping and courtrooms alludes to some rather grave homeland security implications ... so life must be tough indeed for unmarried locomotives nowadays.

Yet, in case someone overlooked it, the salient word here is plagiarist - and it takes us to the most disturbing part of our forensic textual research. Yes, I must admit that some of the phrases contain ill concealed criticism - self criticism as it were - yet one can argue who is the "self" here as they could be construed as a skilfully staged bait for the lame author. From the harmless, lukewarm, "objective" remarks such as disconnected vindication ... piggybacked absurd treatment ... infinitely half-hearted reciprocation ... misshapen dialogues etc. etc., which are no strangers in the vocabulary of many a learned music scholars, they escalate rather effortlessly to a level of caustic innuendo and outright joyful derision - pseudo instructions risking altercation ... welcomed aggravation ... joker with amputated imagination (and who would now that be - the programmer, the local /dev/jam device, the remote /dev/jam device or the gullible composer) ... technology pervert exploited altogether ... range bound plagiarist squatting ... programmer's sickness cabal erected ... at times becoming unspeakable and unprintable, breaching all community standards of decency, causing sheer embarrassment (perhaps inflicted quite intentionally by the black hat coder)... and Mark Twain's anonymous letter/pig signature routine can hardly be used as an excuse, oh my!!! Yet we shall stop the madness here, as reading through the list of obsessive-compulsive invectives would take us longer than listening to the piece itself, degrading the music to a bland side dish - a mere lateral victim of the rambling textual analysis (not that it never happens in the realm of new music). Instead, we shall better listen to the jam, we shall better try to enjoy it if only humanly possible. And, should we ever come across an unmarried locomotive, we shall be very, very careful!

We are greatly indebted to the Scottish Arts Council, Northern Junior Philharmonic Trust, Hope Scott Trust, Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust and the Britten Pears Trust for their financial support towards the costs of commissioning, touring, and recording this project, and also to the Glenfiddich Artists in Residence scheme which gave me the time, space, and inspiration to compose my own piece during 2007. Finally, special thanks to Ivaylo Hristov of Edition ELM, Bulgaria, who has taken the courageous decision to publish ALL the pieces on this CD as a collection, to ensure that this music is available to future interpreters.

John Kenny

All the music presented on this CD can be purchased for study and performance from Edition Elm: www.EditionElm.eu to order direct: order@editionelm.eu

P.O.Box 32, Sofia 1231, Bulgaria.

Fax +359 2 9344644