Some people wanted to add a few words…

Paul Roberts

I have no means of producing anything to a high studio-like quality, but I wanted to contribute some fragments which I reckon Alistair will appreciate. The point is, after all these years, probably working almost exclusively with electronic means I want to remember Alistair as a performer! You’ll remember those first Barber Festivals, and at one of the very first ones didn’t Alistair conduct a performance of Mahagonny? I remember it as a favourite of his, so the ‘live’ extract will certainly make him sit up in surprise.

The other snippet is a sort of joke. Alistair liked to sing the “Schöner Grüner” phrase [from the opening number] with a Geordie accent. Well, he’ll certainly recognize that fragment, but he probably doesn’t know that Weill, poking fun, quoted it from Weber’s Der Freischütz.

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Douglas Doherty

The sound of the Metro I recorded on his portable DAT for Heart of the City.

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Matthew Whiteside

Some sample recordings he helped me make while at RCS. Remember hitting and flicking a can and then bursting it, just missing the mics!

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Tim Cooper

Some cool bassy riffy loops I made out of the recording we did of Ali’s Scatter last year.

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Adam Stanović

I re-listened to the whole of his cabinet, and remembered Wunderkammer. I don't recall where/when I heard it, but my sound relates to that. My sound is also hopefully quite a contrast to what everyone else sends. It is static and non-explosive. I remember D.E.N.I.S. - where everyone sent something impactful. And that was a problem in terms of composing, I imagine. So this is a sustained material... (Thanks, Adam - it was a great help! PS)

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Simon Emmerson

I searched for Alistair's voice but he keeps himself well clear of his environmental recordings - but then I chanced upon the next best thing from Dreel - must be him surely blowing up the balloon - we all did our own studio recordings solo in those days! So here is my sound called 60 particles for Alistair.

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Pete Stollery

Ahooha…that’s all. x

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Juliette MacDonald

‘Bellows breathing’ is a yogic practice that energises both physically and psychologically. Seemed to me to be a perfect fit with Ali’s boundless energy and enthusiasm.

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Rob Worby

None of your acousmatic elegance from me, I'm afraid; it's a recording of a musical birthday cake candle that went horribly wrong as the battery eventually failed.

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Phil Mason

Alistair’s You Bastard Curry (Phil Mason, 2022)

Mason’s first composition for prepared piano and voice is a playful Nostalgie-Stück, recalling youthful rounds of culinary experimentation with a palette of spices and miscellaneous vegetables in rural Norfolk with Alistair MacDonald in the early 1980s when he was doing his Masters at the University of East Anglia. Weekly, the pair of questing cooks would collaborate (or compete?) to prepare ever more spicy dishes. Success in fulfilling the objective would elicit gasping expostulations of incredulity and pain from the diners.

In its brief 11 seconds, Alistair’s You Bastard Curry portrays the human emotional adventure, from pleasure and wonder, through surprise and terror, to the realisation and resignation that, in mere hours, one’s bowels shall be aflame as if pricked by Satan’s own blazing poker. The piece culminates in a cry (“You Bastard!”), directed at the chef (MacDonald), but the listener is left to decide whether it is a cry of enraged denunciation or, rather, of fraternal complicity. The work endeavours to commemorate the commonalities in MacDonald’s creative process that underpin those early voyages to the limits of edibility and his more widely celebrated explorations of novel sound worlds.

The stirring melody and bold harmonisation follow in the footsteps of Ravel’s Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn (1909), with the letters of the Roman alphabet ascribed to notes of the scale (following the German system, natürlich). While thunderous bass notes underpin the piece, spelling out the name A L I S T A I R, we hear the yearning lilt of the tune comprising the encrypted letters of the moving proclamation “A A A A A G H ! ! ! Y O U   B A S T A R D ! ! !”.

The piano, a Steinway Model O, chosen for being constructed during the period recalled here, was prepared with fresh and dried ingredients — bird-eye chillies, Scotch bonnets, root ginger, garlic, chick peas and basmati rice. “Although they were not readily available in late 20th Century East Anglia, I opted for fresh rather than ground spices for this piece as they not only made more interesting noises but also did not damage the piano so badly. I hope this does not detract from the authenticity of the work,” says Mason.

In essence, Alistair’s You Bastard Curry is a weak and frivolous idea, ineptly executed by a musically clueless non-composer/performer. As such, it unwittingly but unavoidably serves the purpose of standing in the starkest contrast to the acclaimed oeuvre of Alistair MacDonald.

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Pete Batchelor

Alistair examined my PhD and passed me (for which of course I’m very grateful), and entirely true to form has always been kindly supportive of my subsequent compositional (and professional) efforts. So I thought I’d provide a squeezed version of my final PhD piece (from 8 minutes to a few seconds) which will (mercifully) take a good deal less time to listen to than it would have done when marking.

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Simon Waters

Thanks for incorporating my sound, chosen because a lot of my memories of Ali are of live stuff. It was a clip of me playing double bass from a rehearsal with George Lewis in Bruges a couple of weeks ago.

HAPPY 60th BIRTHDAY ALISTAIR