Unintended Slipware Music
Music composed by Chris Cundy © 2026
Unintended Slipware Music is a solo piano work written for the album Yaki by electroacoustic music collective Longstone, with whom I have been a key collaborator since 2007. The project takes inspiration from the historic Winchcombe Pottery, established by the pioneering studio potter Michael Cardew in 1926. Combining spoken word, piano music, improvised percussion, electronics and field recordings the album is presented as a patchwork of ambient pieces chronicling different aspects of the site and its heritage.
Further location recordings and archival research allowed us to look more closely at Winchcombe's distinctive industrial processes and to encounter the voices of people who had lived and worked there over the previous one hundred years.
An underlying thread throughout the research was the music of experimental composer Cornelius Cardew (1936 - 1981) who was born at Winchcombe Pottery and spent his early childhood here before the family moved to Cornwall. Alongside playing fragments of Cardew's music, I began to create a series of piano transcriptions inspired by original slipware designs found on early examples of the pottery, including work by Ray Finch.
The piano transcriptions became known as Unintended Slipware Music. Recordings were made on an old upright piano, preserving the acoustic character of the instrument and keeping the music within a domestic setting. Noticing that the slipware trails on the Ray Finch vase resembled a form of graphic notation, complete with uninterrupted horizontal lines, I began by translating them onto manuscript paper using a series of mobile pitch sequences and legato phrases.
Unintended Slipware Music is a solo piano work written for the album Yaki by electroacoustic music collective Longstone, with whom I have been a key collaborator since 2007. The project takes inspiration from the historic Winchcombe Pottery, established by the pioneering studio potter Michael Cardew in 1926. Combining spoken word, piano music, improvised percussion, electronics and field recordings the album is presented as a patchwork of ambient pieces chronicling different aspects of the site and its heritage.
Further location recordings and archival research allowed us to look more closely at Winchcombe's distinctive industrial processes and to encounter the voices of people who had lived and worked there over the previous one hundred years.
An underlying thread throughout the research was the music of experimental composer Cornelius Cardew (1936 - 1981) who was born at Winchcombe Pottery and spent his early childhood here before the family moved to Cornwall. Alongside playing fragments of Cardew's music, I began to create a series of piano transcriptions inspired by original slipware designs found on early examples of the pottery, including work by Ray Finch.
The piano transcriptions became known as Unintended Slipware Music. Recordings were made on an old upright piano, preserving the acoustic character of the instrument and keeping the music within a domestic setting. Noticing that the slipware trails on the Ray Finch vase resembled a form of graphic notation, complete with uninterrupted horizontal lines, I began by translating them onto manuscript paper using a series of mobile pitch sequences and legato phrases.
Unintended Slipware Music (detail of the score) © 2026 Chris Cundy
The resulting score consists of eight measures that can be repeated and rotated in any number of ways, following the circular movement of the ceramic vessel itself. In this way, a visual detail became the starting point for a whole piece of music. The slipware vase and the piano enter a kind of slow dance together, and there is an open-endedness to the way the music plays itself out.
Longstone / Yaki grew from the creativity of the pottery and its surroundings through a process of documentation, improvisation and transformation. Ceramics reveal the physicality of their making, traces of the hand, the movement of the body and the repeated action of the kick wheel. These human impressions became as important to the music as the finished forms themselves.
The music is built from rotating parts. It offers a view into a living place, drawing attention to materials, processes and the people whose work has shaped its history. The music moves through sudden changes of texture and energy, while the piano material that underpins it begins with the simple act of following a line across the surface of a clay vessel.
There is a transformation that takes place in following a sound, a gesture or a line and asking where it might lead. Yaki does not attempt to recreate the history of Winchcombe Pottery, but remains close to its physical and cultural particulars.
The resulting score consists of eight measures that can be repeated and rotated in any number of ways, following the circular movement of the ceramic vessel itself. In this way, a visual detail became the starting point for a whole piece of music. The slipware vase and the piano enter a kind of slow dance together, and there is an open-endedness to the way the music plays itself out.
Longstone / Yaki grew from the creativity of the pottery and its surroundings through a process of documentation, improvisation and transformation. Ceramics reveal the physicality of their making, traces of the hand, the movement of the body and the repeated action of the kick wheel. These human impressions became as important to the music as the finished forms themselves.
The music is built from rotating parts. It offers a view into a living place, drawing attention to materials, processes and the people whose work has shaped its history. The music moves through sudden changes of texture and energy, while the piano material that underpins it begins with the simple act of following a line across the surface of a clay vessel.
There is a transformation that takes place in following a sound, a gesture or a line and asking where it might lead. Yaki does not attempt to recreate the history of Winchcombe Pottery, but remains close to its physical and cultural particulars.
Ceramic vase with a slipware design by Ray Finch, made at Winchcmobe Pottery c.1940's