In September, 1967, I was one of a small group of students who gathered in a room off the stage of the Concert Hall at the Royal College of Music for the first session of a new course in Electronic Music. The teacher was Tristram Cary, one of Britain’s earliest pioneers in the field. At that stage the studio, which was being built by BBC engineers, consisted of a tantalising array of boxes and partially connected wires. It was not until well into 1968 that the studio was fully working, so the first couple of terms consisted of lectures by Tristram and visits to his studio in Fressingfield, Suffolk, Peter Zinoviev’s pioneering computer music studio in Putney, south London, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. During 1968 the studio came on stream gradually. New pieces of equipment would appear one by one, and we would all pounce on these new opportunities and explore them to the full. By autumn 1968 we had a fully working studio
Later in 1969 I was able to purchase a VCS1 synthesiser (also known as the Don Banks Music Box), one of the first products of the nascent EMS Ltd. The VCS1 was subsequently donated to the collection of electronic instruments, founded by Hugh Davies, at the Gemeinte Museum in The Hague. I was already forming ideas about a live performance instrument. I built myself a mixer (in those days the only real option) and also built amplifiers and speakers from kits of parts supplied by the company Heathkit. Finally I purchased a second-hand Revox tape recorder from my friend Adam Skeaping. This basic kit provided the performance environment for my first live electronic piece, "Solos, Commentaries and Integrations", and it was the germ of my idea of an electronic instrument.
During one of my visits to Peter Zinoviev’s studio I had created on the computer some sounds that I really liked. Creating these sounds was an interesting adventure in itself; I was accompanied by my fellow student Malcolm Fox, and together we battled to understand the complexities of Peter’s system. Computers were not very user friendly in those days, and one had to do exactly what they required - and we were novices. However, we quickly began to create some really nice sounds that would be difficult to create in any other way. These became the basis of the tape part in "Solos, Commentaries and Integrations".
I had also been exploring clarinet multiphonics with Howard Davidson (composer, clarinettist and fellow member of the Electronic Music class), based on the book New Sounds for Woodwind by Bruno Bartolozzi. I conceived the idea of a piece where the clarinet would be a protagonist, the computer-generated sounds (played on tape after further processing in the RCM studio), would be an antagonist, and a percussionist would act as a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the action. Part of the idea of the piece is that the clarinet takes on an electronic “armour” in order to “defeat” the tape; at the end the clarinet music tries to return to the serenity of the opening, but can’t completely cast off the electronic armour; s/he has been changed irrevocably by the experience. This idea of electronic transformation representing some kind of journey became a constantly recurring theme in my music.
There are nine sections of the piece which overlap extensively: three Solos for clarinet with increasing use of electronic processing; three Commentaries for drums, woodblocks and metal percussion, respectively (the woodblock and metal Commentaries overlap for a short time); and three tape sections. Each of the “characters” takes its own parallel journey through the three sections.