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I perfomed the Vaughan-Williams Tuba Concerto this evening. It went well and the audience responded enthusiastically.

I’ll have to work out what to do with my evenings now I don’t have to practice… hmm… how about reading my backlog of books starting with Searle’s “Speech Acts”, “Programming Erlang” and various Python related materials.

Too much to do but so little time…

On June 14th 2008 I’m going to be the soloist in a performance of the Tuba Concerto by Ralph Vaughan Williams. As well as preparing the piece for performance I’ve written two sections of the programme: a description of the piece and a short musical biography of myself. Both of these are reproduced in this post.

I’m right in the middle of re-discovering my tuba and loving every minute of it. I’m to perform the Vaughan-Williams concerto in June so I’m playing most evenings (much to the surprise of my neighbours, the local cats and my children).

When I play the tuba I imagine I am singing and try to make the tone of the tuba reflect the character of the voice in the music I’m playing (and hearing with my inner-ear). I love being able to do this.

In addition, I love getting it “right”: nailing a technically difficult passage that at first sounded wrong but revealed itself through repeated (often slow) practice and experimentation.

Finally, I just love the feeling of playing the tuba. The tuba is a very physical instrument in the sense that it takes a lot of physical effort to play, blow, hold and carry! I always feel like I’ve just been for a good session at the gym!

Interestingly, this re-immersion in all things tuba led me to Øystein Baadsvik who has only emerged as a tuba player since I left the tuba world for philosophy, teaching and computing. This video of him playing his own composition “Fnugg” knocked my socks off:

What most impresses me about his performance is the virtuosic ease with which he communicates his playful sense of fun and experimentation on such an awesome instrument. His audience are all undoubtedly die-hard tuba fans as a result. What a great performance.

As a result I immediately found and ordered a copy of the music over the internet! What I’m especially looking forward to is showing off some dijeridu based techniques (they’re also tuba techniques, but I suppose most people associate them with the dij).

(In case you didn’t know, I’ve been having a lot of fun on the dij after Mary had one shipped over from Oz for my birthday two years ago.)

Both my wife and I play with the Northampton Symphony Orchestra, a very good local amateur group.

Every season they include short (often humorous) biographies of selected members of the orchestra in the programme notes. The selection criteria for this changes each year but is currently families who play in the orchestra.

This is the biography we submitted to be printed in the programme for the next concert.

I am fascinated with creativity and artificial intelligence.

This article, based upon an unpublished academic paper, is a very short summary of my work completed so far.

An exploratory model of creativity is demonstrated by implementing a genetic algorithm that attempts a type of musical creativity called species counterpoint (see my guide to species counterpoint).

Initial results are of comparable quality to counterpoint composed by humans. I conclude by describing areas and techniques for further development.