The Norwich Suite

After ‘Lark’, the album of my songs, was completed in 2009, with my lovely and still close friends, I started going off in a different compositional direction. I'd always really wanted to create ‘classical music’ - or better still: ’music with no genre boundaries’ - but just couldn’t write straight onto manuscript paper (that’s what they do, isn’t it?). But I did have Logic on my Mac computer and at that time virtual instruments were beginning to become accessible by anyone. I bought IK Multimedia’s Miroslav Vitous/Sample Tank pack for around a hundred quid, and suddenly I had quite convincing versions of any orchestral instrument or section that I wanted. I also had a Lovely New Girlfriend who lived in Norwich, and she and many of her friends were classically trained musicians. I started imagining music that maybe these people could play, which led me to start creating a number of ensemble pieces on my computer using these new virtual instruments. The idea was always to compose them this way, score them, and then get those or other musicians to play them. The most ambitious of these pieces were Tree Cathedral and Jubiláte, with the first drafts completed in 2014 in 2016 respectively. You can hear others on the albums Piano Pieces, and Ensemble Pieces.

 

All this ‘labour of love’ was going on in moments snatched from a busy life elsewhere, as a maths teacher, and with other (paid!) music commitments and projects (check out the planetzyz.com website!). Including, of course, Solstice. But I was learning a lot working on these pieces of mine. The next phase was to learn how to use the scoring facility on Logic so I’d be able to give something to the classical musicians to play. That took a while…..

 

Meanwhile. it was dawning on me that getting the musicians I needed was a particularly difficult task - finding people who’d be willing to do the work, recording them and PAYING them, was all full of serious challenges, especially as I don’t move in the ‘classical world’ and I’m skint. On the other hand, with the development of such companies as Spitfire Audio and Spectrasonics (Keyscape etc), virtual instruments were becoming far more sophisticated and nuanced, in particular in how they respond to how you play them. So, on my computer, I started to replace the Sample Tank instruments with these much more lifelike instruments and the difference was amazing - my compositions sounded like new pieces of music! Also the technology to create virtual environments (eg a cathedral acoustic) was also developing. All in all, it was becoming possible to create the whole vision I had for my music, all by myself on my computer!

 

Added to that, I stumbled upon Voxengo mastering tools. For a couple of hundred quid I could get everything Voxengo made, so with their products I could set up a very professional mastering chain of my own. So now I had control over the whole production process. Power was IN MY HANDS!! [sinister laughing].

 

Finally, there were the vocals for both Tree Cathedral and Jubiláte. I did have the most amazing singer (Ebony Buckle - check her out!!) lined up for this. But in order to prepare, I needed to make careful demos of the parts first. The bass and tenor parts were in my vocal range, but to accurately represent the alto and soprano parts I needed to use Logic's ‘Pitch Flex’ software to raise my voice by an octave. By painstaking use of this technology  I was able to ‘fix’ the appalling faults in my voice, to better represent the church-choir-like singing I was imagining. I was so surprised by the results! You gotta love tech! I had found my inner choirboy! (so to speak). (Actually I think I resurrected what my voice used to sound like before it broke. 50 years ago.) I suddenly realised the whole point of these productions: that they needed to be entirely my work and not include performances from anyone else. So The Norwich Suite is about as McDaniel as you can get! (Oh dear……)

 

This is the story of a huge learning curve that has enabled me to become the particular music maker I wish to be from now on. Modern computer technology that is accessible by anyone, much in the same way as any musical instrument is, is in fact the instrument I am using to create my music. I’m an ‘Electronic Composer’ able to use the huge pallet of sophisticated ‘virtual instruments’ etc, continuously becoming available, even if it often sounds remarkably like it’s being performed by traditional acoustic instruments. Although that was the initial inspiration for these pieces, they’ve moved beyond that to becoming fully what they are in their own right. Of course I’d love to have them played by an ensemble of acoustic instruments, and I hope that at some point that will happen. It will be a beautiful thing, as good live music always is, but it will be a different thing to the music on this album, as it always is! I’m delighted at last to release this completed work out into the world. I hope you enjoy and are moved by it, as I have been by creating ‘The Norwich Suite’.

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(You can hear previous versions of these tracks in the pipeline.)

 

Steven McDaniel, April 2026