Black Cats and Blues CD liner notes

Composed by Craig Vear, professor of digital performance and music at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, the work (to put it very simply) is an interaction between an electronically generated score and an improvising cellist. The initial digital score sends the compositional idea to the player, who can then explore defined boundaries and materials, and introduce rerecorded sound (and in live performance, video). Its various movements are based on the 1949 book Blues for a Black Cat and Other Stories by Boris Vian and aim to recreate in sound the imaginative realm created by the book, influenced also by jazz and the esoteric aesthetic of ’pataphysics.