A.SC.H
Versions
George W. Welch version (1987)
Shooter’s Hill Road version (1982)
Notes
A.SC.H is scored for vibraphone, marimba, bongos and string trio. It was arranged for this line-up in 1987, but its origins go back to the Autumn of 1981, when the ensemble that was to become George W. Welch first met in a flat in Shooter’s Hill Road, Blackheath, South London. The multi-instrumentalist and composer John Abram came together with myself and my brother, the artist and designer Mark Thomson, to read through this composition. This first version was scored for piano, electric guitar and bongos, which Mark played on upturned ice cream cartons (a recording of a performance of this version exists, but the score has not survived).
The piece was focused on two of my special interests: Schumann's system of ciphers that had been explored by Eric Sams (Sams 1966); and synaesthesia, which I had experienced since childhood. For this composition, I combined some hidden messages with fleeting moments in Scriabin's Prometheus: A Poem of Fire when the colour organ's output matched my own synaesthetic experience of the music. The composition extends and systematically repeats these fragments, separating out their rhythms from their harmonic and melodic content.
(As a postscript, it always struck me as a strange coincidence that the Deputy Vice-Chancellor at De Montfort University who became my line manager when I founded the Institute of Creative Technologies there in 2005, was named David Asch.)