"(the artist, Beckett,).. views his task as moving in an infinitely small space toward what is effectively a dimensionless point."

As anyone proceeds along the path of slowly evolving self-awareness that is part of an artistic discipline, there is always a sense of unease that accompanies any feeling of progress: it is always so easy to tear apart any art-object created with the question "why this particular X here instead of Z?" Often, there is also the suspicion that there are profound difficulties in justifying any particular aesthetic standpoint for an individual's artistic decisions, a self-consciousness that can become crippling. Should a shrug suffice?

Following a series of projects to explore the uses of improvisation within compositions, the direction of every piece has led to areas not envisioned when I considered the possibilities thrown up by each successive piece. The idea of improvisation as a concept diametrically opposed to pre-composed material was soon superseded by the view that it embodied a collection of varied processes, with differing degrees of structure. This idea of process and particularity within an improvisation then led to insights into the organization of both local and global conceptions of overall structure within a more traditional through-composed format. This all stemmed from the recognition that improvisation is essentially a process. The problem was as to how to encompass these processes in a more traditional format to allow them to contribute to the overall structure and avoid the danger that the improvisation can become a bit featureless.
I realised that improvisation takes place in real time and is effective in revealing the particular, and, more importantly, within a given improvisation between individuals there will always be a number of disjunct particular processes at play. These are not always entirely intentional, yet they combine to create an apparently coherent whole. What that insight in turn inspired was the next (and admittedly tangential) inductive leap, that the incorporation of a number of simultaneous and divergent processes could also be used within the pre-composed material. What's more, it is a way of further opening the piece out to the particular as a reflection of the world around us, which for me is a vital component of an artistic object. And so, as the apparent clutter of our everyday experience is still underpinned by unseen physical laws, the pieces possess their own internal structure.

Selected List of Works:

Textile Lunch - (CD) Settings of Beat poetry with the Flanagan-Ingham Quartet.

Like Miles - Trumpet concerto for soloist and orchestra, SPMN commission Performed London Claygate Festival '01 by the London Metropolitan Orchestra with soloist Gerard Prescenser

Pmood - Digital composition for Csound program

Hootie - Digital composition for Csound program

Gashi Dojo - for male chorus, brass wind and percussion; a setting of Shomyo chant, '00

Two Poems by Gary Snyder - a setting for baritone and chamber group.

Not Sextets - piece for orchestra performed APU Sinfonia, Cambridge, '01


RipRap series - For spoken voice and jazz quartet, in collaboration with the American Beat Poet Gary Snyder This has been an on-going project since '01, performed at a number of festivals and venues around the UK. This has also resulted in two CD recordings which are both have been released on the AMP label:
Riprap part I (CD) '06 - settings of poetry texts in collaboration with Dave Gordon, Andrew Brown, Russ Morgan
Riprap part II (CD) -'07 - settings of poetry texts in collaboration with Dave Gordon, Andrew Brown, Russ Morgan

Mode For Joe: - commissioned by Damain Rayonaiss for saxophone and piano, performed at the UK Saxophone Congress in Cardiff '02, and Mumford Theatre, Cambridge in '03

Mode for Joe II, - commissioned by the SPNM for the Homemade Orchestra and Tim Whitehead at the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the London Jazz Festival in Nov '03.

Double Concerto for Viola, Cello, and String Orchestra - Feb. 06

Newset for Violin and piano, for Mifune Tsuji. Performed , March 07.

Duet: Violin and Piano, no. 2 Performed November 07

The Ten Thousand Things- opera/oratorio for two soloists, choir, and chamber orchestra, based on the life of Matteo Ricci, with libretto by the poet Malcolm Guite , '06, performed in West Road, Cambridge, November 07.

Riprap/Text collaborations 2007 - onwards. This is a series of explorations of the interaction between partially improvised backing realised by the Riprap Quartet, (Kevin Flanagan, Dave Gordon, Andy Brown and Russ Morgan)to various types of texts; the first being a series of performances with the poet Malcolm Guite.

RIPRAP
Kevin Flanagan Quartet

This is the first section of an extended project exploring music/text collaborations.
The music was primarily inspired by the poetry of Gary Snyder, and recorded in 2005. This is being continued with a series of settings with the poet Malcolm Guite, which will form the basis of a new release. The above three free tracks with Malcolm were recorded June, 2007 in the Mumford Theatre.

all of the Riprap tracks recorded Mumford Theatre, ARU, Cambridge, by Roger Chatterton

see RipRap CD

S C O R E S   ( produced using Sibelius midi. To view score download the latest version of Scorch plug-in )

Like Miles

Like Miles was inspired by a performance by the Britten Sinfonia of some the Miles Davis/Gil Evans collaborations with Guy Barker on trumpet. It started as a gathering of fragments from the solos of Miles Davis to be transmuted and used as motivic material in a trumpet concerto. The material was then utilised for the parts of the soloist and orchestra as both rhythmic and melodic cells. The idea being to combine a Miles Davis inspired trumpet line floating above the orchestra, which must maintain a forward impetus and metricality to contrast with the freer nature of the trumpet part, not unlike the role of a rhythm section in small group jazz. The orchestral part comments, opposes, or wraps itself around the soloist, but always creates the ground pulse and occasional tonal centricity necessary to allow a soloist to create gestures toying with the listener's expectations such devices might raise.

Mode For Joe ( cut1 )
Mode For Joe II

The project is a re-working and deconstruction of a sonata I wrote last year for a saxophonist friend in France, Mode for Joe, which was written after hearing of Joe Henderson's death last year. It utilises motific and rhythmic material lifted from transcriptions of Henderson's work, but not presented in any kind of outwardly 'jazzy' fashion.
I wanted to present the material in a more 'open' format, for a larger ensemble, with the opportunity for sympathetic players to extend the form and feel free to improvise. Since the piece can be divided into discrete textural blocks, I try to use these as the basis for the form and improvisation, each new texture giving a shape and direction in terms of timbral colour, pitch classes, instrumental combinations, etc. Each soloist(s) has the option of beginning with assigned, pre-composed material to give some shape to their episode, which would have a particular relationship (either complementing or opposing) whatever the rest of the ensemble was up to. The pre-composed sections begin, end, underlay various sections, or serve as pivot cues, as John Zorn calls them, to set up the next change of section. Some of the motific material is used in the sort of controlled aleatoric fashion that Lutoslawski often uses, with material assigned and cued to differing groups within the group, but played in a loose, atomised fashion to create developing textures for a soloist(s) to move through. These episodes would still allow a certain amount of differentiation of texture, as there is still some control of the prevailing pitch series and density of a given texture.

Biography
Kevin Flanagan comes from Lowell, Mass., USA. He initially studied music and philosophy at the University of New Hampshire, and was part of Antares, a free improvisatory group that toured the Northeastern U.S. through the mid-70s to early 80s. During this period he was also involved in jazz, blues, and popular music, both recording and performing. He settled in the UK in the mid-80s, and worked on the London jazz and pop scene, playing and recording with members of Pink Floyd, Ben E. King, the Sex Pistols, Jools Holland, Led Zeppelin, B.B. King, Portishead, and many others. By the late 1980s he was primarily involved with jazz, playing with his own group or with musicians such as Dick Morrissey, Alan Barnes, Dave Newton, Gerard Precenser, Don Weller, Dave Cliff, Mark Edwards, Adrian Utley, and the Tommy Chase quartet around the festivals of the UK and Europe: such as Brecon, Edinburgh, Soho, and Bath in the UK; and festivals in Milan, Paris, the North Sea festival, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and others. He has put out two successful CD's with Chris Ingham as the Flanagan-Ingham Quartet, and is presently collaborating with Dave Gordon in a series of poetry settings of the Pulitzer-prize winning Beat poet Gary Snyder and others. This has resulted in a pair of recordings, Riprap parts I &II. As a graduate of Goldsmith's University, he specialized in analysis and post-1945 music. This was followed by an MA in composition at ARU with Richard Hoadley, which resulted in the first SPNM commissioned performance of 'Like Miles' by the London Metropolitan Orchestra. The most recent commission was 'Mode for Joe II' for the Homemade Orchestra Performed at the Queen Elisabeth Hall in London last year. He has recently completed a PHD in composition at the University of Sussex with the composer Martin Butler.

see web site : kevinflanagan.net