hcmf// 2015 programme

Friday 20 – Sunday 29 November 2015 Box Office 01484 430528

www.hcmf.co.uk

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In partnership with the University of Huddersfield

music contemporary electronic improvised Inside AMM Jürg Frey Klangforum Wien George Lewis Zbigniew Karkowski La Monte Young Jagoda Szmytka Arditti Quartet Jakob Ullmann Księżyc The Riot Ensemble Maja S K Ratkje London Sinfonietta

Music and Music Technology Inspiring tomorrow's music professionals • Superb studio, concert and rehearsal facilities • Nationally and internationally-recognised teaching staff • Innovative courses in performance, technology, composition and musicology • A wide variety of visiting musicians and performers Tel. 01484 472003/2007 Web: www.hud.ac.uk Email. musicadmissions@hud.ac.uk

huddsunimusic @Hudds_Uni_Music

FESTIVAL DIARY DATE

NO

EVENT

TIME

VENUE

1 2

Pre-concert talk: Agata Zubel + Jagoda Szmytka Klangforum Wien The Riot Ensemble Bailey / Stockhausen

5pm 6pm 9.30pm 11pm

St Paul’s Hall St Paul’s Hall Bates Mill Blending Shed Bates Mill Photographic Studio

3 4 5 6

Talk: Composition as Ethnography: George Lewis, Columbia University London Sinfonietta Richard Uttley United Instruments of Lucilin Bailey / Sikorski / Frey

10.30am 12.30pm 5pm 7.30pm 10pm

Phipps Hall St Paul’s Hall Phipps Hall St Paul’s Hall Bates Mill Blending Shed

7 8 9 10

Meet the Composer: Jürg Frey Quatuor Bozzini: Jürg Frey Ensemble Phoenix Basel + Robert Piotrowicz Afterword, an opera The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble: La Monte Young

11am 1pm 4pm 7pm 10pm

Heritage Quay St Paul’s Hall Bates Mill Blending Shed Lawrence Batley Theatre St Paul’s Hall

Family Event: Music at Play – Graphic Scores for Under 5s Shipping: Part 1 Family Event: Up in the Mountains scapegoat Ensemble CEPROMUSIC Stephen Chase: Part 1 Family Event: Up in the Mountains Ensemble Anomaly CHROMA Stephen Chase: Part 2 Via Nova Dominic Lash: Jakob Ullmann Shipping: Part 2 Stephen Chase: Part 3 Ensemble Interface Księżyc Noam Bierstone Kasper T Toeplitz: Zbigniew Karkowski Reciprocal Structures Shipping: Part 3 Shipping: Part 4

10am – 11.30am 12.01pm 12.30pm 12.30pm 1.30pm 1.50pm 2pm 2.10pm 3pm 3.45pm 4.10pm 5pm 5.54pm 6.20pm 7pm 8.45pm 10pm 10.50pm 12.10am 12.48am 5.20am

Heritage Quay Creative Arts Building Atrium Hudawi Centre Phipps Hall St Paul’s Hall St Paul’s Hall Hudawi Centre Creative Arts Building Atrium Phipps Hall Phipps Hall St Paul’s Hall Phipps Hall Creative Arts Building Atrium Creative Arts Building Atrium St Paul’s Hall St Thomas’ Church Bates Mill Blending Shed Bates Mill Photographic Studio Phipps Hall Creative Arts Building Atrium Creative Arts Building Atrium

Konus Quartett: Jürg Frey Talk: Zbigniew Karkowski’s works for solo instruments and electronics Karkowski / Xenakis Ensemble CEPROMUSIC Jakob Ullmann

12 noon 2.30pm 4pm 7.30pm 10pm

St Paul’s Hall Bates Mill Photographic Studio Bates Mill Blending Shed St Paul’s Hall Town Hall

Composition Masterclass: Jürg Frey British Music Collection Tours Erik Drescher Auditory Recollections Pre-concert talk: Jonty Harrison Jonty Harrison Biliana Voutchkova reductive journal FOUR: the book launch tour #1

10am – 11.30am 11am 12 noon 1pm – 3pm 3pm 4pm 7.30pm 10pm

CAM G/01, Creative Arts Building Heritage Quay St Paul’s Hall Heritage Quay Phipps Hall Phipps Hall Bates Mill Blending Shed Bates Mill Photographic Studio

Open Workshop: Ensemble CEPROMUSIC Diego Castro Magaš Eddie Prévost’s Workshop hcmf// @ British Art Show 8

10am – 12.30pm 2pm 4pm 8pm

St Paul’s Hall Phipps Hall Bates Mill Blending Shed Leeds Art Gallery

22 23 24

British Music Collection Tours Ensemble Grizzana: Jürg Frey Film: AMM / Action Space / Inflatable Film: Cornelius Cardew 1936 – 1981 Talk: AMM: the birth of a new music Berlin Splitter Orchester + George Lewis Philip Thomas: Jürg Frey Apartment House: Zbigniew Karkowski

11am 12 noon 2pm 2.30pm 4pm 7pm 9pm 11pm

Heritage Quay Phipps Hall Heritage Quay Heritage Quay Heritage Quay St Paul’s Hall Phipps Hall Bates Mill Blending Shed

25 26 27 28

Just a Vibration Quatuor Diotima Eastern Waves Apartment House @ 20 Splitter Music

11am 1pm 4pm 7.30pm 10pm

Bates Mill Blending Shed St Paul’s Hall Phipps Hall St Paul’s Hall Bates Mill Blending Shed

Arditti Quartet Sound System Culture + Pop-Up Art School Later During a Flaming Riviera Realm of Nothing Whatever AMM

12 noon 1pm – 4pm 5pm 7.30pm

St Paul’s Hall Creative Arts Building Atrium Phipps Hall St Paul’s Hall

Fri 20

Sat 21

Sun 22

Mon 23

Tue 24

11 12 13 14

Wed 25 15

16 17 18 Thu 26 19 20

Fri 27 21

Sat 28

Sun 29

29

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CONTENTS

Funders

page 04 Director’s welcome page 05 Festival Diary FESTIVAL PARTNERS page 06 BBC Radio 3 page 06 University of Huddersfield page 07 PRS for Music Foundation

Project Funders

page 07 Adam Mickiewicz Institute page 08 Pro Helvetia page 08 Austrian Music Export page 09 Goethe-Institut London PROGRAMME page 10 Profile: JĂźrg Frey page 12 Exhibitions & Installations page 13 CeReNeM Workshops page 14 Talks & Films page 16 Friday 20 November page 18 Profile: Agata Zubel / Jagoda

Trusts and Foundations The Hinrichsen Foundation

Szmytka: Poles apart

page 23 Saturday 21 November page 26 Profile: Mauro Lanza

In partnership with

Media Partner

Broadcast Partner

page 29 Profile: Derek Bailey page 33 Sunday 22 November page 36 Profile: The AACM and American

Festival Partners

Experimental Music

page 42 Monday 23 November page 54 Learning & Participation page 56 Tuesday 24 November page 59 Profile: Pierluigi Billone: Forging

the scales of justice

page 63 Wednesday 25 November page 68 Thursday 26 November page 72 Friday 27 November page 76 Profile: Zbigniew Karkowski page 79 Saturday 28 November The Festival also gratefully acknowledges support from Festival Members Dr Mick Peake

page 86 Sunday 29 November

PATRONS Pierre Boulez Sir Ernest Hall OBE DL Sir Simon Rattle CBE BOARD OF MANAGEMENT Dr Mick Peake (Chair) Mark Bowden Prof Martin Hewitt Lizzie Hunt Andrew Kurowski Prof Liza Lim Mirjam Zegers FESTIVAL TEAM Graham McKenzie Artistic Director and Chief Executive Roisin Hughes Festival Manager Sarah McWatt Learning & Participation Officer Harriet Richardson Festival Coordinator Sheralyn Bonner Marketing Director (Bonner & Hindley) Faith Wilson National PR Manager Tim Garbutt and Adam Long Production Managers (Tim Garbutt Events) Alex Richardson Front of House Manager Lewis Ryan Front of House Assistant

The Festival would especially like to thank the following for their service and support: Barry Hynes, Bob Cryan CBE, Craig Monk, Rachel Cowgill, Adrian Lythgoe, Adele Poppleton, Kath Davies, Victoria Firth, Nigel & Richard Bates, The Cedar Court Hotel, The Central Lodge Hotel, and The Elm Crest Guest House.

HUDDERSFIELD CONTEMPORARY MUSIC FESTIVAL Room CAM1/10 University of Huddersfield West Yorkshire HD1 3DH UK Tel: +44 (0) 1484 472900 Email: h.richardson@hud.ac.uk www.hcmf.co.uk Charity registration number 514614 PROGRAMME BOOK PRODUCTION Abi Bliss Editor David Mercer Designer Marcus Netherwood Advertising Sales MUSO Communications Ltd Tel: + 44 (0) 161 638 5615 Printed by AXIS Printing Ltd

Welcome to the 38th Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival!

T

© John Bonner

he act of listening is the underlying pervasive theme at the core of this year’s Festival, working outwards from the wide, quiet sound spaces of Swiss composer Jürg Frey and the impossible silence in Jakob Ullmann’s work, to the extreme registers of noise artist Zbigniew Karkowski.

Listening as a political force is here too, with the only UK performance of American composer George Lewis’ opera Afterword – which takes its libretto from Lewis’ acclaimed book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. The AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) this year celebrates its 50th anniversary, while the concept of art and politics as a challenge to established structures is never far away from the music of AMM – also celebrating their 50th anniversary year. While this most important of British groups perform in a classic line-up for the first time in 10 years, the long drawn out notes and sounds created by La Monte Young are designed to take us – through the act of listening – to a higher dimension!

The guttural, wordless sounds in Polish composer / vocalist Agata Zubel’s award winning NOT I challenge our understanding of listening to the human voice, as does Mauro Lanza’s playful but intelligent manipulation of the vocals of celebrated soprano Donatienne Michel-Dansac in his hcmf// commissioned The Kempelen Machine. Also pushing musicians towards the extremities of performance is Jagoda Szmytka, who reminds us that today the act of listening is almost inevitably conducted within the context of a highly sophisticated visual culture!

British composer Naomi Pinnock references American painter Agnes Martin’s ‘exquisitely simple’ paintings as the inspiration behind Lines and Spaces, written for pianist Richard Uttley and premiered in Huddersfield this year. Writing this brings me back full circle, reminding me that it was while attending an exhibition of Martin’s work earlier this year that I decided to install Jürg Frey as Composer in Residence at hcmf// 2015. Martin’s work has often been defined as an ‘essay in discretion, inwardness and silence’ which resonates perfectly with Frey’s approach to composition.

All of the above is only possible with the support of our core partners and funders, and I would like to thank Arts Council England, Kirklees Council, the University of Huddersfield, and the PRS for Music Foundation. The international programme is made possible through support from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme, Austrian Music Export, Austrian Cultural Forum London, the Polish Cultural Institute in London, Goethe-Institut London, and the Royal Norwegian Embassy, while the British Council continue to support the dissemination of hcmf//’s particular brand of British New Music throughout the world. My thanks of course go to all our partners, and full details can be found throughout the programme.

The Festival this year marks my tenth as Artistic Director and it remains an honour and privilege to be the custodian of this important British festival. The challenges however for non-mainstream arts and culture in the UK have never been greater as public sector funding continues to come under unprecedented pressure. The support therefore provided by loyal audiences and new listeners is more vital than ever to the presentation of live music of the highest standard. My thanks go to all of you who are taking the time to read this programme. I look forward to welcoming you to Huddersfield in November.

Graham McKenzie Artistic Director

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FESTIVAL SUPPORT

BBC Radio 3

BBC Radio 3 is very excited to be once again here in Huddersfield, a revered land in the world of new music. We really value our relationship with hcmf// which has developed over many years as part of BBC Radio 3’s commitment to supporting the new music sector as one of the most significant commissioners of contemporary works.

As ever, this year we’ll be broadcasting extensively from the Festival both in live transmissions and recordings of works to be broadcast later in the year, all in our Saturday evening new music programme Hear and Now. And, as the beguiling sounds reverberate in hearts and minds of Huddersfield audiences long after the Festival is over, so they’ll reverberate in HD quality on the airwaves and on the BBC Radio 3 website for 30 days after broadcasts!

Hear and Now continues to be the go-to radio show for contemporary music in Britain. As well as hcmf// we travel the distance around the country to gather even more of the best, most innovative new music around. Some highlights on the horizon are a complete performance of the 4 Regions of Stockhausen’s Hymnen, incorporating London Sinfonietta’s December performance of Region 3. That’s on New Year’s Day, part of a week-long celebration of new music under the title New Year New Music. The composer Emily Hall has travelled to Unst, the most northerly inhabited island in Britain to soak up the sounds which she has then used as a starting point for original compositions. Those recordings will be part of the new music response to Radio 3’s forthcoming Magnetic North festival dedicated to music and culture of the far north.

And Hear and Now is far from the only place to hear new music on Radio 3. Programmes like Late Junction and Jazz Line-Up are also geared specifically to the new, while the BBC Proms, as ever, provides and generates a powerful contribution to the new music world - this year’s festival featured 21 world premieres (13 of which were BBC commissions) and 11 European, UK or

London premieres (of which four were also BBC commissions or co-commissions). And, of course, as well as new music Radio 3 provides the widest possible historical background to modern music with around 90 operas, hundreds of live concerts, recitals and documentaries covering 500 glorious years of music. hcmf// is a barometer of the creative dynamism of our times. Judging by this year’s Festival line-up the outlook is good!

Paul Frankl BBC Radio 3

University of Huddersfield

As the Dean of the School of Music, Humanities and Media at the University of Huddersfield, I am delighted to affirm the University’s continued support for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. The Festival is one of the high points of the cultural year for both town and University – an unparalleled opportunity for students, staff and the community to hear some of the best and most innovative of contemporary music not only from Britain but from around the world.

The relationship between hcmf// and the University goes back many years. Indeed we are now looking forward to celebrating the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Festival at the University. Over the years the Festival has grown and established itself as an independent cultural organisation, but the links with the University have remained strong. Our partnership was renewed for another five years in 2014, at which point we took the opportunity to enrich further the already strong links between the two, and extend the very manifold benefits that are brought to both organisations in their commitment to what is new, contemporary and cutting edge. We are delighted that the hcmf// team now have a permanent base in the Creative Arts Building which houses staff in Music and Music Technology. For 10 days each year the CAB Atrium is a meeting ground, an

hcmf.co.uk

international market place in which to conduct the business of contemporary music. The benefits of such a partnership both for a modern progressive university and the UK’s leading contemporary music festival are perhaps undefinable, and certainly unquantifiable, but they are also pervasive and undeniable.

The School of Music, Humanities and Media seeks to offer all its students ‘space to release your creativity’, and its partnership with hcmf// certainly does this. Our students and staff gain enormous benefit from listening to or participating in events during the Festival and it is the high point of our concert calendar. Music is at the heart of the University of Huddersfield’s activities. Since the last Festival, the results have been announced of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, the UK’s periodic evaluation of university research.

The outcome was a triumph for Music at Huddersfield. Its research environment, of which hcmf// forms such a prominent part, was given the highest 4* grade, as was much of the ‘impact’ work, and a substantial proportion of the individual compositions and other research outputs.

Especially through CeReNeM, the Centre for Research in New Music, the University continues to attract some of the brightest and best doctoral students in music from around the world, and now probably has the largest cohort of PhD students in Music in the country. We aim to develop the musical curiosity of all our students and open them to the widest range of new music, and what better way to do it than to have Europe’s foremost contemporary music festival not merely on the doorstep, but also in our front room.

Professor Martin Hewitt Dean of the School of Music, Humanities and Media, University of Huddersfield

FESTIVAL SUPPORT

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PRS for Music Foundation

We are proud to support Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival as one of the UK’s leading contemporary music events. hcmf// offers a great opportunity to discover new music and festival-goers can look forward to an outstanding line-up this year, with performances from UK groups including The Riot Ensemble, London Sinfonietta, CHROMA and Arditti Quartet.

We also look forward to performances of work by many UK-based composers, including Bryn Harrison, Dai Fujikura, Emily Howard, Matthew Sergeant, Laurence Crane and Naomi Pinnock.

To find out more about our work, please visit www. prsformusicfoundation.com. We wish the best of luck to all involved this year and hope that you enjoy this year’s event.

James Hannam Senior Manager, Grants, PRS for Music Foundation

Adam Mickiewicz Institute

If there was one word to best explain the reason behind the extensive presentation of Polish music at a festival as prestigious as Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, it would be: relationship. At the Adam Mickiewicz Institute we seek to build relationships rather than just promote Poland. Therefore, the presentation of Polish music at hcmf// didn’t happen by accident.

Our cooperation is the result of a long running relationship with Artistic Director Graham McKenzie. A relationship founded on trust, knowledge and meetings with artistic milieus in Poland.

British audiences are well acquainted with contemporary Polish music. Lutosławski, Górecki, Penderecki have become a staple in the repertoires of artists and concert halls around the United Kingdom. Still, the Festival goes a major step further and presents new generations of composers, trends and phenomena. This year’s

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FESTIVAL SUPPORT

focus on Polish music is a case in point. Next year will see a continuation and widening of the Polish music, again as part of the Polska Music programme. I would like to think that this is just the beginning of the Polish journey for hcmf// audiences and your own long-term relationship with Polish music.

Ewa Bogusz-Moore Polska Music Manager, Adam Mickiewicz Institute

Pro Helvetia

‘Sometimes I feel as though my music is trickling into the world in its own, distinct way’. With this idea, Jürg Frey neatly sums up his music – for it is making itself felt in the world unobtrusively, yet with dogged persistence. And it can fascinate us with its inner calm: the musical material is slimmed down, seems uncomplicated and yet is the result of a patiently conducted process of search and reflection. Most of all, it is deployed with an impressive degree of precision.

In Jürg Frey, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival is engaging with a man who is one of the most undogmatic musicians and composers in Switzerland. In the quiet yet determined manner in which he consistently shifts from one genre to another, this clarinettist-cum-composer embodies something that is characteristic of the Swiss music scene. This little country in the midst of Europe, whose population is less than that of London, is a conglomerate of the most varied cultural biotopes. It has four national languages and alternates between displaying a spirit of cosmopolitanism and a reclusive isolationism.

This paradox is reflected in the multitude of Swiss music scenes that are characterised less by any dominant streams and more by individualists and mavericks.

Choosing Frey as Composer in Residence is emblematic of the curatorial policy that has been displayed by Graham McKenzie in his past nine years as the Artstic Director of the UK’s

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largest, most important international festival for new and experimental music. Huddersfield’s independent, unconventional and unbiased view of the different European scenes make this Festival an indispensable event on Europe’s festival landscape. hcmf// holds up a magnifying glass to the most exciting developments in contemporary music – and it is precisely this that makes a multi-year collaboration with Huddersfield so worthwhile for the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

This year’s focus on the Swiss music scene is not restricted to the residency of Jürg Frey. The comprehensive programme also features works by the Swiss composers Dieter Ammann, Alex Buess, Beat Furrer and Heinz Holliger as well as Jakob Ullmann, a German composer resident in Basel. Furthermore, two Swiss ensembles will be performing in Huddersfield – the Konus Quartett and Ensemble Phoenix Basel, altogether giving this year’s edition of hcmf// a real Swiss focus.

We are at the same time proud and delighted that this programme focus has become possible, and we are looking forward to exciting, inspiring concerts.

Andri Hardmeier Head of Music, Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Austrian Music Export

What makes the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival so special is not only the tremendous stylistic range, offering many new and unconventional listening experiences, but also the international direction and the promotion of transregional projects – all reflected in the programme and in the possibilities of personal exchange. We are therefore particularly pleased that this year’s opening weekend will commence the cooperation between hcmf// and the Austrian Music Export with a varied programme.

A special focus of Austrian Music Export lies in the promotion of young composers and musicians.

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In this sense, we are happy to see that the opening weekend of hcmf// not only features works by the already renowned composers Beat Furrer and Pierluigi Billone, but also two works from emerging composers from the younger generation: both Peter Jakober and Manuela Meier were selected by Georg Friedrich Haas for the second edition of our CD series Austrian Heartbeats, which we will present at the Festival. The fact that their works are performed

by Klangforum Wien and the Luxembourgian Ensemble Lucilin only testifies to the immense quality of the performances and solidifies that international cooperations are being initiated.

Particularly for young composers, opportunities like this are an important incentive for their careers. We want to thank hcmf// and especially Graham McKenzie for the cooperation, and we also want to thank our funders for their support.

Doris Weberberger Contemporary Music Consultant, Music Austria

Goethe-Institut London

Contemporary classical music is as much emotionally rewarding as it is thought-provoking.

Looking at the history of this fairly young genre we also look at the nature of music itself, the role it plays within our multi-polarised world, which sees us faced with many ubiquitous new realities.

Music does not exist in a vacuum, it thoughtfully reflects the world in its pluralism, all its joy and hardship, in both senses of the word reflection: as much as it absorbs, it contemplates and beams back contemporary society’s fears and hopes.

The Goethe-Institut, Germany’s cultural centre in the UK, is entering its eighth year of collaboration with Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, a consistent beacon in the contemporary music calendar, which delivers year upon year.

In an inclusive atmosphere, which sees the local community join music appreciators who find their way from all over the world into

FESTIVAL SUPPORT

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this small Yorkshire town, members of the audience immerse themselves in an outstanding programme.

The Festival also allows composers, musicians and other music professionals to congregate and forge enduring, sustainable relationships with each other which further international cultural exchange – new ideas are born in Huddersfield as much as they are presented in this distinctly international heart for contemporary classical music within Europe.

One such international cooperation this year is the presentation of avant-garde minimalist composer La Monte Young’s work by The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble, the UK premiere performance of a new work by George Lewis by the Berlin-based Splitter Orchester as well as Ensemble Interface’s debut concert in Huddersfield.

It is our pleasure to be able to contribute to this coming together of artists through the support of German-based creatives, who with all their international peers devote themselves to stimulating our senses and intellect alike.

Eva Schmitt Head of Culture Department, Goethe-Institut London

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PROFILE

J

Jürg Frey: (per)forming sound and silence

Jürg Frey © Elisabeth Frey-Bächli

ürg Frey the performer is inseparable from Jürg Frey, composer. To understand his music is to know that underlying each event, each phrase, each rest, each relationship, is the beating heart of a performing musician. Frey’s sense of pitch is that of someone who knows pitch. That is, someone who knows what it is to make pitch sound, and to make sounds live and breathe, who knows how it feels for two sounds to collide in space and time, and who knows what it is for sounds to appear and then disappear, to be articulated in time. And to hear Frey make those sounds – to hear the clarinet both as an instrument communicating across centuries (how I would love to hear him perform Mozart’s clarinet quintet) and as an entirely fresh sound, emerging from nothing, barely present yet imbued with a radiance that makes a nonsense of the reductionist label at times assigned to his music – is to recognise that his composed music is abundantly affirmative.

Like the music of his older friend, American composer Christian Wolff, his music is to be played and to be understood through playing. It is discovered only through the act of performance and through experiencing the sounds made alive.

Unlike Wolff, however, whose unique performance strategies result in a strange, at times fragmented music, Frey’s flexible treatment of older models, such as canons and chorales, is easily perceptible yet entirely fresh.

To those readers and listeners who know of Frey (born Switzerland, 1953) as part of the ‘Wandelweiser’ group of composers, and who consequently characterise his music as reductionist, concerned only with silence and minimal sounding events (possibly somewhat austere), the description of Frey’s music above may come as something of a surprise. But, as with all groupings and labels, the story is far more muddied than the generalised perception. Frey has been associated with the Wandelweiser group – including founders Antoine Beuger and Burkhard Schlothauer, Eva Maria Houben, Carlo Inderhees, Radu Malfatti, Craig Shepard, Thomas Stiegler,

PROFILE

Manfred Werder, Michael Pisaro, and many others, some who have come and gone, and a host of younger composers, many in their 20s and 30s – almost since its inception as a movement (founded in 1992, Frey joined the following year). His music is published by Edition Wandelweiser, which has also released a number of recordings of his music, and he plays with the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble.

His music shares with many of these composers an emphasis upon quiet, sometimes extremely quiet, sounds, is generally fairly slow moving, and embraces the totality of the sounding environment, whereby the physical space and time within which sounds are situated and between sounds is fundamental to the musical discourse.

Shared influences might include John Cage, Christian Wolff, George Brecht and others within the Fluxus movement. Yet each of the composers listed above pursue their own compositional and aesthetic interests. Pisaro’s recent work, for example, is characterised by textural multilayering, field recordings and noise. Werder’s work navigates a route between a conceptual, poeticised text-based work, bordering on the non-event, and (live) sound installation. Jürg Frey’s own work is diverse, including sound installations, works for electronics and electric instruments, and a number of scores for undetermined instrumentation. Some hcmf// regulars might recall his Un champ de tendresse parsemé d’adieux, premiered by the edges ensemble in 2011, comprising the sounds of falling dried leaves and very small stones and the faint whistling of the performers dispersed around the performing space. At the same time he has written some of the most harmonic and melodic music of all the Wandelweiser composers.

The works which feature in hcmf// 2015 tend toward pitch-based compositions. There are exceptions, most notably the second string quartet, performed by its dedicatees the Bozzini Quartet. (To hear this live will be a rare treat for those of us who first encountered their recording

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of it, released in 2006, and were stunned by the extraordinary sonority and intimate physicality of the music.) Often familiar tonal material hovers curiously between the states of being and progressing. But lest the music becomes too familiar, too ‘understood’, one can sometimes sense the composer consciously rubbing out what’s gone before, through repetition or silence, or change, so that what was heard becomes forgotten.

Recent works foreground sound over silence, in contrast to earlier works. At the same time one might argue that what we hear is not ‘speaking’ but merely being; that the music tends toward silence through its ‘not-speaking’. It is in no hurry to go anywhere nor say anything. In Frey’s own words: ‘Silence can also be present in the sounds.

In order to have silence in sounds, one must let go of everything which gets in the way of this silence. This sound is a sound without the idea of what it can mean or how it should be used.’ Frey’s music calls upon both listener and performer to surrender expectations, to give themselves to the present whilst allowing what was to colour what is. All that is known is what is experienced – sound and silence, both physical, both performed, both temporary, emergent and relational, alive. © Philip Thomas

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EXHIBITIONS & INSTALLATIONS

Friday 20 – Sunday 29 // November

Saturday 21 – Sunday 29 // November

Jürg Frey: sound installations

AMM: the Inexhaustible Document

Please see www.hcmf.co.uk or ask at the hcmf// info desk for details of venues and times I call them ‘sound installations’ but actually these are compositions with long durations for loudspeakers. The pieces are very soft, but maintain their presence in the space. The appearance is ephemeral. The works are light, phenomena of intimations, they take up a space for a short time, some hours, half a day, and then disappear. The material is easy and plain: low budget cardboard and plastic loudspeakers, accumulators and batteries, sounds of harmonica, melodica, sounds of stones, wind noises, pitches of pianos, single words, casually instruments.

Sensitivity, carefulness and respect for the low level material are the basis on which I compose these sound installations. © Jürg Frey Produced by hcmf// supported by the Swiss Arts

AMM

Council Pro Helvetia

Heritage Quay Monday – Friday 8am – 8pm Saturday 9am – 5pm Sunday 10am – 4pm

An archival exhibition of memories, reflections, and observations provided by the various members of AMM to mark the 50th anniversary year of the group. Includes private photographs, rare original posters and AMM’s own vintage wine label!

Listening room also available.

Produced by hcmf// in partnership with Heritage Quay

CeReNeM WORKSHOPS

Wednesday 25 // November

Thursday 26 // November

Composition Masterclass: Jürg Frey

Open Workshop: Ensemble CEPROMUSIC

10am – 11.30am, Creative Arts Building, CAM G/01

A public composition masterclass with Jürg Frey and PhD students from the University’s Centre for Research in New Music.

Produced by hcmf// supported by CeReNeM, Centre for

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10am – 12.30pm, St Paul’s Hall

Beavan Flanagan Fields (2015) Pablo Vergara Al Otro Lado (2009) Alexander F Müller Arisen From (2015) Cristian Morales Ossio La lírica violencia serénica (2007 rev. 2015)

Research in New Music, University of Huddersfield; also supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Responding to the need to support the remarkable vitality of contemporary music creation in Mexico, the National institute of Fine Arts (INBA) created the Centro de Experimentacion y Produccion de Musica Contemporanea (CEPROMUSIC) as a venue dedicated to the creation, performance, and dissemination of new music and sound experimentation. One of the first projects was to respond to the need for a professional, full time group for new music. The result was Ensemble CEPROMUSIC. As part of their short residency at hcmf// the 20-strong group, led by José Luis Castillo, has partnered the University of Huddersfield’s Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM) to present a window into the creative process with a public workshop showing off four compositions by PhD students from the University.

The workshop is open to the public as part of the Learning & Participation Programme at hcmf// 2015.

Produced by hcmf// supported by CeReNeM, Centre for Research in New Music, University of Huddersfield; also supported by the Government of Mexico as part of Year of Mexico in the UK 2015 and also supported by the British Council, CONACULTA and INBA; Beavan Flanagan is the hcmf// CeReNeM scholarship holder

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TALKS & FILMS

hcmf// hosts a series of free keynote lectures, talks, and discussions throughout the Festival with some of the world’s most distinguished artists.

Friday 20 // November Pre-concert talk: Agata Zubel + Jagoda Szmytka 5pm, St Paul’s Hall

The next wave of Polish music! Composer / vocalist Zubel discusses her dual role ahead of the UK premiere of her award winning work NOT I, while compatriot Jagoda Szmytka explains the importance of social media to her practice.

Produced by hcmf// supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme

Saturday 21 // November Composition as Ethnography: George Lewis, Columbia University

10.30am, Phipps Hall

This talk places pressure on the border separating creative work from academic research, through an examination of a number of cases from Lewis’ own work as a composer and interactive artist. The works he discusses range from computer music performance and interactive installations to opera, and were all developed through a combination of ethnographic method, historical and archival work, and analysis of musical and social practice.

Produced by hcmf// supported by CeReNeM, Centre for Research in New Music, University of Huddersfield

Sunday 22 // November Meet the Composer: Jürg Frey 11am, Heritage Quay

Sound and silence. In this talk we explore Frey the composer, performer, and sound artist – looking closely at the rich diversity of his work, and the sounds that we can expect to hear over the course of the Festival.

Produced by hcmf// supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Tuesday 24 // November Pre-concert talk: Zbigniew Karkowski’s works for solo instruments and electronics: aesthetics, techniques and influences of Iannis Xenakis

2.30pm, Bates Mill Photographic Studio The second Karkowski / Xenakis concert at hcmf// 2015 will be preceeded by a talk with the performers; Daniel Buess and Aleksander Gabryś, and animated by the manager of the Karkowski / Xenakis project, Stanisław Suchora.

It will be an occasion to cast a light on Zbigniew Karkowski’s Fluster, presented on Monday 23 November, and to hear the performers speak about their collaboration with Zbigniew Karkowski, whose works were dedicated to them.

Produced by hcmf// supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme and the Polish Cultural Institute in London

TALKS & FILMS

Wednesday 25 // November Pre-concert talk: Jonty Harrison

3pm, Phipps Hall

Composer Jonty Harrison discusses the influence of travel on his work ahead of the world premiere of his large-scale acousmatic work Going/Places.

Produced by hcmf//

Friday 27 // November AMM / Action Space / Inflatable 2pm, Heritage Quay

This short film, directed by Huw Wahl, shows AMM performing inside an inflatable structure built in 2015. It is part of a larger project, a feature length film about Action Space, a radical 1970s art group that used inflatables to take art into the streets and directly engage with the public.

Mixing the rich Action Space film archive and a unique AMM performance, the short derives from a section of the final film about Action Space, which is still in production and due for release in spring 2016. The final film will feature music from AMM, Phil Minton, Simon Connor and the Action Space archives. It is funded by The Henry Moore Foundation and The Michael Davies Charitable Settlement.

Cornelius Cardew 1936 – 1981 2.30pm, Heritage Quay

The 1986 film, directed by Philippe Regniez, exploring the life and work of controversial British composer, Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981), and his contribution to avant garde music and to political song-writing.

17

AMM: the birth of a new music 4pm, Heritage Quay

Drawing on his writings about AMM for The Wire magazine, music-writer Philip Clark talks to percussionist and AMM founder Eddie Prévost about the pioneering free improvisation group’s evolution, from the birth pangs of its 1965 beginnings to today. What defines AMM music?

How has the group weathered various political and personal schisms? What legacy has AMM bequeathed improvised music 50 years on?

Produced by hcmf// in partnership with The Wire magazine

Sunday 29 // November Later During a Flaming Riviera Realm of Nothing Whatever: the convolutions of AMM 5pm, Phipps Hall David Toop presents a personal account based on 49 years of paying close attention to AMM but most of all a listening session in which whatever is said is either confused, contradicted or denied by the music.

Produced by hcmf//

18

EVENTS

Friday 20 // November

1 Klangforum Wien St Paul’s Hall, 6pm Tickets £22 (£19 concession / online) Klangforum Wien Clement Power conductor Agata Zubel soprano Pierluigi Billone Ebe und anders UK PREMIERE Agata Zubel NOT I UK PREMIERE Beat Furrer linea dell’orizzonte Peter Jakober Substantie UK PREMIERE Austria’s leading contemporary music ensemble opens hcmf// 2015 with a programme that highlights Klangforum Wien’s continued links with some of Europe’s foremost composers – including the ensemble’s co-founder Beat Furrer.

Furrer’s work is featured alongside Polish singer and composer Agata Zubel’s NOT I – top award winner at the UNESCO International Composer’s Rostrum in May 2013 – and UK premieres from Pierluigi Billone and Peter Jakober.

Pierluigi Billone (1960, Italy) Ebe und anders UK PREMIERE (2014) 22’ This particular ensemble (trumpet, trombone, 2 percussion, electric guitar, piano, cello) offers the possibilities of various hierarchies and musical rules. The trumpet and trombone act as leading soloists and together build a unique instrument, as often happens in my ensemble music with soloists.

The piece develops as a ritualised sound, travelling through the (known and unknown) expression possibilities of both instruments and appears beside experimental techniques with frozen traces of jazz. Ebe und anders is dedicated to my friends, the trombone and trumpet players of Klangforum Wien, Andreas Eberle and Anders Nyqvist. © Pierluigi Billone

Agata Zubel (1978, Poland) NOT I (2010) 21’

UK PREMIERE

am_I_to_start_speak-ing? ( ) these_are_thousands_of_words ( ) as_in_a_play, or_the_thea-tre, but_near-ly_no_time_for_ges-ture ( ) these_are_ thou-sands ( ) these_are_thou-sands_of_words ( ) near-ly_like_ thea-tre_is_to_start_play-ing_ Klang-fo-rum_Wien? ( ) the_first_per-for-mance ( ) out © Agata Zubel Beat Furrer (1954, Switzerland) linea dell’orizzonte (2010) 11’ ‘What interested me was the phenomenon of doubling, but also the distortion into a shadow and the creation of the process-related resulting from this intersecting of voices into each other,’ says Beat Furrer.

In linea dell’orizzonte, his composition for the Ensemble ascolta, this principle of transformation is applied to a heterogenous group of instruments of piano, violin, cello, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, percussion and electric guitar and realised in a rich, diversified material. Out of the intertwining of the voices emerges a study of distorted shadows. © Marie Luise Maintz (Publisher, Bärenreiter, Alkor) Peter Jakober (1977, Austria) Substantie UK PREMIERE (2015) 17’ ‘By substance I understand what exists in itself and is conceived through itself; that’s to say something the concept of which does not rely on the concept of another thing for its formation.’

Baruch de Spinoza The concept of substance, as formulated by Spinoza, is a central aspect of this piece, which examines the question of what elements can in fact create something of substance and what their mutual relationship might be.

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Agata Zubel © Tomasz Kulak

Friday 20 // November

Several levels of sound happen simultaneously as well as autonomously – muted, fragile progressions of sound from the woodwinds, which are distorted by live electronics; moving, finely chiseled sounds of the strings and a continuous, silent pulse from the cymbals, exploring the facets of sound of which this instrument is capable.

However, the juxtapositions of these sound-events cause seeming correlations and connections. The autonomous strands are set in relation to each other and in the process lose their independent character. Substantie is a failing attempt at autonomy, as can only become apparent through comparison. © Peter Jakober

Produced by hcmf// supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme; also supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia; Austrian Music Export; Austrian Cultural Forum London and the hcmf// Patrons Klangforum Wien is kindly supported by ERSTE BANK Parts of this concert will be broadcast

by BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 26 December 2015

20

PROFILE

Agata Zubel / Jagoda Szmytka: Poles apart

I

n terms of glib categorisation, Agata Zubel and Jagoda Szmytka are both young, female and Polish. But musically they’re two very distinct voices. What they do share, however, is a boldness, an ease with mixing artforms and a refusal to be defined by traditional notions of where composer ends and performer begins.

Hailing from Wrocław in western Poland, Zubel is both composer and singer, with a soprano voice and a mastery of extended techniques. For her, sitting on both sides of the score brings a deeper interpretive understanding of a piece: ‘As a composer, I write for living musicians – not only for paper, but for people who have to play or sing it,’ she says. ‘This is important, because the music should be alive and not just on the paper.

As performers, we have to try to find out what the composer wanted to say, what’s behind the score.’

Zubel specialised in percussion at music school – she cites its sonoristic, untampered qualities as a strong influence – and only started singing seriously when her own composition Parlando required an end-of-term performance. Soon, other people started writing for her voice, which she sees as an endlessly adaptable instrument.

Depicting words bursting forth from the lips of a traumatised, previously mute elderly woman, her NOT I reimagines Samuel Beckett’s notoriously demanding 1972 monologue of the same name as a visceral Lieder, to which Zubel adds a prologue of guttural, wordless sounds. ‘I started thinking about the situation in the text, how it would be if you’re 60 or 70 and have never spoken, but suddenly start to speak,’ she says. ‘For me, it was very important that her voice is born. It’s the first sound that comes from her mouth in her life;

you feel your body resonating before you start to speak.’

Pushing musicians to the limits of performance is familiar territory to Jagoda Szmytka, too; yet this nomadic daughter of Silesia, currently based in Frankfurt, also thrives on different kinds of tension. For her 2014 suite Limbo Lander the resistance she faced when shaping the work through online collaboration with Ensemble Interface became the heart of Quizzle Translate, a gameshow-like performance in which the musicians are made to read out extracts from their own emails. ‘Somehow it’s easy for musicians to hide and to say, it was just a rule or that I didn’t say this, and not take real responsibility for what they do,’ she explains. ‘I wanted them to say what they really think, and it was difficult.’

The networks between real and online life, interaction and art become infinitely more tangled in Szmytka’s newest work, Lost, a dizzying mix of images, Facebook posts, music theatre, short films and semi-fictionalised celebrity avatars currently flickering into life on a screen near you.

‘Limbo Lander was a piece about social media; Lost is a piece that happens in social media.’

‘I like building up a tension in a project and you get it when no-one knows what’s going on,’ she admits. ‘Everyone gets stressed at the end of the end; it’s a little bit chaotic, but then everyone becomes intensified and thinks faster. Because normally when you meet within a stable, safe framework, nothing happens and then everyone goes home.’ © Abi Bliss

Jagoda Szmytka Š Andoz Krishnadas

PROFILE 21

22

EVENTS

Friday 20 // November

2 The Riot Ensemble Bates Mill Blending Shed, 9.30pm Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online) The Riot Ensemble Aaron Holloway-Nahum conductor / artistic director The Riot Ensemble make their premiere appearance at hcmf// with a programme featuring the work of Jagoda Szmytka for the first time in the UK. Szmytka writes music for ear, eye and thought, examining social and interpersonal processes such as communication and identity, often in relation to phenomena that influence modern life or referring directly to the social dimension of making music. Szmytka’s work features alongside works from Samantha Fernando and Lee Hyla.

Jagoda Szmytka (1982, Poland) GAMEBOY UK PREMIERE (2015) 14’ Jagoda Szmytka (1982, Poland) sky-me, type-me UK PREMIERE (2011) 7’ Jagoda Szmytka (1982, Poland) empty music UK PREMIERE (2014) 13’ Samantha Fernando (1984, UK) Positive/Negative Space (2013 rev. 2015) 12’ Lee Hyla (1952 – 2014, USA) My Life on the Plains UK PREMIERE (2010) 25’ It’s time to throw out – or at least update – the image of the composer sitting alone in a room, drawing notes from a deep well of hermetic contemplation. Life today for many music creators is much more nomadic and fragmented: moving between cities, collaborating across time zones, their multiple selves occupying online rather than physical spaces.

Jagoda Szmytka understands this all too well: ‘As an expat, I’ve been travelling around for 12 years now and there are so many weird things that accompany this living mode,’ she says – appropriately enough – via Skype, a mode of communication which forms the basis of sky-me, type-me, one of three of her works performed by The Riot Ensemble at hcmf// 2015.

In it, four megaphone-wielding vocalists bring to life the rhythms of typing, the glitch-ridden approximations of human speech, the erratic flow of a dropped connection, the simplification of sentiment when emoticons are more convenient than words. ‘What is nice is when people perform or listen to this piece and recognise a little piece of the reality they live in.’

For Szmytka, the 2011 work marked a shift of focus away from testing musicians’ limits through ‘physical composing’ to exploring the virtual landscapes of social media. She went on to explore the darker implications of lives shaped by dropdown menus in empty music (2014): against a backdrop of videogame characters, garish graphics and glowing programming menus, a disembodied ‘composer’ voice directs puppet-like musicians who play between MIDI versions of the music.

‘It’s a little bit ironic; I’m laughing at myself as it’s nice to have this control,’ she says, ‘but at the same time everyone wants to defend their own circle of freedom somehow. When you open a new account, you define yourself only by the available tools that are in the system. ‘In a sense, we all are the robots somehow. I was thinking about living in a mixed media reality. Where is our freedom in all this?’

The answer suggested by the concert’s newest work, GAMEBOY (2015) might be that we at least have the freedom to be famous. Weaving a densely referential audiovisual web from the disparate lives of Liberace, Joseph Beuys and Szmytka’s friend Sebastian Berweck, it links the internet’s democratisation of creativity back to Beuys’ concept of ‘social sculpture’ and fuses footage of

Friday 20 // November

Liberace preparing for a show with the chirps and buzzes of 8-bit gaming. The red cross stitched onto Beuys’ Infiltration for Piano becomes confused with the control button from Nintendo’s Game Boy console; Liberace’s name is interchangeable with liberty but his charisma has a dangerous power.

‘I like to work with visual symbols and I found it hilarious to bring together the cross of saving people by Beuys with the cross of control by Game Boy,’ Szmytka explains. ‘GAMEBOY is also about playing games. I had a personal game with Sebastian Berweck. There’s the layer of samples sounding like a Game Boy. Then there’s the skill and showmanship, the question of whether art is onstage or offstage and why you are really doing this.’

Is the purpose of art to entertain, control, to save?

‘There are all these questions and I don’t know the answers, so I just try to connect things that are related.’ © Abi Bliss I was first introduced to the music of Lee Hyla while studying at Northwestern University near Chicago – where Lee eventually taught composition. Unfortunately our paths never overlapped before he died suddenly in June 2014.

Lee was known – as both a teacher and composer – as a captivating, pulsating force of energy who was as steeped in the music of Cecil Taylor as he was Beethoven.

What has always most interested me about his music – and what makes it such a wonderful counterpoint and context to Szmytka’s work – is how it questions style and boundary in so many ways. The obvious, surface issue at question is how Hyla fuses his love of folk, jazz and rock music so successfully into his classical training and history. These worlds were his contemporary culture, yet this is not new music that bounces from one radio station to the next, but the masterly and persuasive summation of a composer in total control of every timbre and every note.

EVENTS

23

More deeply, within the music itself, Hyla is so entrancing because you so rarely come upon a hard edge. At one boundary of the music the character suddenly shifts, but you slowly recognise that the same harmony has somehow carried across the divide. Later, the harmony and rhythm makes a dramatic and disruptive change, yet somehow the character of the music holds itself in a single line. This quality is what allows Hyla’s music to drift from one emotion to the next with such conviction, authenticity and tender expression.

Samantha Fernando’s work has equally captivated me from the first time I heard it. Perhaps it is her similarly authentic and masterful consideration of timbre, boundary and space that called her to mind when we were looking for a third piece to tonight’s puzzle. Her work Positive/Negative Space took as its starting point an illustration of the way different spaces encourage us to move and disperse vs gathering and resting. Her resulting piece fascinates as these disparate spaces come up against each other. Here, in one moment, the music is claustrophobic and frighteningly restrained, the next as sonorous and wide open as a field. © Aaron Holloway-Nahum Produced by hcmf// supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme; also supported by hcmf// Benefactors Colin Rose & Roz Brown

24

EVENTS

Friday 20 // November

Bailey / Stockhausen Bates Mill Photographic Studio, 11pm Free Event (limited capacity; priority will be given to Event 2 ticket holders) Ensemble Anomaly: Diego Castro Magaš guitar Alex Ward guitar In the late 1960s, pioneering British improvisor Derek Bailey was obsessively exploring ways to break down the received habits of musical language, and leave behind the devalued traditions of existing musics. Briefly, composition seemed to provide a possible mechanism for effecting this, and as part of his experiments Bailey began preparing a realisation for two (or more) improvising guitarists of Stockhausen’s Plus-Minus (1963). The realisation was only partially completed, and almost certainly never played – until now. Simon Fell has completed a performing version from Bailey’s original material and sketches, and the piece will finally be heard, almost 50 years later.

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 – 2007); realised Derek Bailey (1930 – 2005, UK) Plus-Minus WORLD PREMIERE (1967 – 1969) 20’ The cryptic, hyper-complex yet somehow openended nature of Stockhausen’s ‘recipe’ score of 1963 has attracted many adventurous musicians, with several of them relishing the opportunity to use Stockhausen’s template to mould distinctively personal material of their own. Bailey’s interest in Stockhausen’s work at this time is evidenced by several entries in his notebooks, and this realisation must have seemed like an interesting way for Bailey to structure the very personal guitar language he was in the process of developing, without allowing his own aesthetic preferences to predominate. This performance is of one possible

completion of Bailey’s unfinished realisation (see note).

Archival note: Bailey prepared a final version of 2x1 pages (53 moments) of the 2x7 pages notated

by Stockhausen; according to Stockhausen’s instructions this would be sufficient to represent a realisation of the piece, but it is clear from Bailey’s notes that he anticipated realising at least one other page to provide a second ‘layer’.

Unfortunately, very little (if any) material for Bailey’s second page is still extant, so I have used a certain amount of creative leeway to construct a performable two-layer version of the Bailey realisation. However, all material used in this version is from Derek Bailey’s own hand; the first guitar part is exactly as he prepared it; the second guitar part has been constructed from a mix of (probable) sketches for the second guitar part, and the initial ‘translation’ notes that Bailey made when working from Stockhausen’s score.

Particular thanks for enabling the public performance of this material must go to Karen Brookman-Bailey, who has generously allowed me unfettered access to Derek Bailey’s personal archive. © Simon H Fell Produced by hcmf//

Saturday 21 // November

EVENTS

25

3 London Sinfonietta

Commissioned by the London Sinfonietta and generously

St Paul’s Hall, 12.30pm

and Patricia McLaren-Turner

Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online)

Marisol Jiménez (1978, Mexico) XLIII - MEMORIAM VIVIRE (2015) 12’

London Sinfonietta Garry Walker conductor Edmund Finnis Seeing is Flux Marisol Jiménez XLIII - MEMORIAM VIVIRE Laurence Crane Chamber Symphony No 2: The Australian Huddersfield favourites the London Sinfonietta return to hcmf// to perform two exciting new commissions. A new work by composer and multidisciplinary artist Marisol Jiménez – whose output focusses on the tactile process of creating sound – sits alongside a new work from Laurence Crane in this exciting programme celebrating UKMexico 2015.

Edmund Finnis (1984, UK) Seeing is Flux (2013) 12’ Clear and direct linear patterns of sounds are variously heard in sequence, superimposed and threaded through the ensemble; subtle pulsations and sustained resonances act like grids and flat planes of sound that these patterns flow across, overlap and intersect with; the instruments make lines that intertwine, dovetail and shadow one another.

The title of this piece is lifted from a Siri Hustvedt novel. While composing I was thinking about parallels between listening and seeing, reflecting particularly on experiences of looking at the line-based drawings and paintings of the artists Nasreen Mohamedi and Agnes Martin. I had in mind the kind of friction that exists between the calm, iterative clarity of their work and the complex act of perception itself, which elicits memory, shifts focus and is perpetually in flux. ©Edmund Finnis

supported by London Sinfonietta Entrepreneurs Michael

This piece is dedicated to the memory of the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, as well as for the hundreds of people missing in Mexico over the last decade. May their memory help us change the destiny of our country to be free from violence. © Marisol Jiménez Commissioned by Festival Cervantino

Laurence Crane (1961, UK) Chamber Symphony No 2: The Australian (2015) 18’ My Second Chamber Symphony – which carries the subtitle The Australian – is a single movement of around 18 minutes duration and is scored for 13 players. As is quite frequent in my work, the starting points for the composition were a couple of fragments from previous pieces; small sequences of chords, which are taken on a walk and viewed from a different angle – or number of angles – in this new piece. These fragments come from two works completed in 2014; Pieces About Art, written for EXAUDI vocal ensemble, and Gli Anni Prog, composed for the Italian flautist Manuel Zurria.

It is dedicated to Matthew Shlomowitz and was first performed by the London Sinfonietta conducted by Garry Walker at St John’s Smith Square, London on 10 October 2015. © Laurence Crane Co-commissioned by London Sinfonietta and hcmf// Produced by hcmf// supported by the Government of Mexico as part of Year of Mexico in the UK 2015 and also supported by the British Council, CONACULTA and INBA

26

EVENTS

Saturday 21 // November

4 Richard Uttley Phipps Hall, 5pm Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Richard Uttley piano Thomas Larcher Smart Dust Naomi Pinnock Lines and Spaces WORLD PREMIERE Francisco Coll Vestiges WORLD PREMIERE Michael Cutting This Is Not A Faux Wood Keyboard WORLD PREMIERE Tristan Murail La Mandragore Since winning the British Contemporary Piano Competition in 2006, Richard Uttley has established himself as one of the foremost young interpreters of new music. He has recorded three discs of contemporary piano music to critical acclaim and his playing is regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 3. In this recital he uses piano, prepared piano, a Fender Rhodes and electronics to present works exploring nature, the unnatural, and the supernatural.

Thomas Larcher (1963, Austria) Smart Dust (2005) 10’ This piece was my attempt to return to the piano a sound with a sense of urgency, of desperation, something that cannot be easily expressed but only forced out, something to hammer against the piano’s sound and the entire range of conventions bound to it. The image I had in mind was inspired by an article on ‘smart dust’, tiny wireless sensors that can be deployed, ‘like pixie dust’, to detect everything from light and temperature to vibrations. The term ‘smart dust’ is very well suited to the atmosphere of this piece, which has something wild, threatening, as well as hermetic to it. © Thomas Larcher

Naomi Pinnock (1979, UK) Lines and Spaces WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 10’ Dedicated to Richard Uttley The miniatures are titled as follows: Space I – Line I – Space II (On a Clear Day) – Line II – Space III (Song) – Line III. The subtitles for Space II and Space III originate from works by Agnes Martin: On a Clear Day (1973, Portfolio of 30 screen prints) and Song (1962, Oil paint on canvas).

Whilst composing these miniatures I kept coming back to Agnes Martin’s exquisitely simple paintings. They have shown me over and over again how much is possible with lines and spaces.

They are just grids and lines, and yet they evoke much more with the delicate layering of paint and beautiful imperfections.

These miniatures fluctuate between compressing or expanding, creating a bold line or subtle bands of faint colours. © Naomi Pinnock Commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society

Francisco Coll (1985, Spain) Vestiges WORLD PREMIERE (2012) 9’

Vestiges was inspired by the work of Spanish painter Hugo Fontela, whose cycles of interrelated paintings find a warmth within starkness and are often concerned with nature and decay. The piece is a kind of triptych: the first and third movements are full of gnarly, volatile canons, while the second is a meditative chorale infected at its core by a germ of the outer movements’ energy. Coll works in the remnants of ideas from Bach and Nancarrow, stating that, ‘I don’t see the vestiges, the ruins, as the end of something, but as the beginning of something new, full of beauty and delicate power.’ © Richard Uttley

Saturday 21 // November

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Michael Cutting (1987, UK) This Is Not A Faux Wood Keyboard WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 5’

Tristan Murail (1947, France) La Mandragore (1993) 10’

Last summer, I saved up for a Fender Rhodes.

It replaced a beech-effect electric piano I had developed an increasing aversion to, being as it was a fraud. It wasn’t made of beech, and it shouldn’t have sounded like a piano. Its pretense offended me, probably because the apartment was already saturated with faux wood furniture and quasi metal appliances. I didn’t like looking at it, and I couldn’t make music with it. A Fender Rhodes, on the other hand, is honest. Actual hammers hit actual tone bars, while the sustain pedal moves real dampers. It doesn’t try to be a classical piano, it is resolutely something else with its own sound, technique and history. I can make music with it. So this piece is a celebration of real things, and more specifically a Fender Rhodes. © Michael Cutting

‘Under the gallows grows the mandrake. At midnight, when the moon is full, it is picked beneath the hanged man who swings…’ The mandrake: a Mediterranean plant used in witchcraft. Due to its root in the shape of a homunculus, it is believed to have magic powers.

The music: a spiral centred on several ostinati of rhythm, colour and timbre – five ‘spectral’ chords of variable appearance turn in the arms of the spiral. This piece was commissioned by pianist Tomoko Yazawa and the French Ministry of Culture. © Tristan Murail

Commissioned by hcmf//

Produced by hcmf// supported by hcmf// Benefactors Mervyn & Karen Dawe Parts of this concert will be broadcast

by BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 26 December 2015

Naomi Pinnock © Amy Newiss

EVENTS

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PROFILE

Mauro Lanza: a model composer

A

s often seems to be the case, Mauro Lanza’s first head-turning exposure to contemporary music occurred not in a concert hall but through his television set. In 1987 the state broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italiana commissioned Salvatore Sciarrino to compose the accompaniment for a complete reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Sciarrino’s 15-hour evocation of the realms of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven inspired young Mauro’s own otherworldly experiments. ‘I had fun with a cassette recorder, trying to record as many sound sources as possible at the same time – radios, televisions – while torturing some homemade instruments, ‘ he says. ‘It sounded weird to me and I wanted to do something weird as well.’

From such beginnings it seems almost inevitable that Lanza would eventually arrive at IRCAM, where today he is a teacher and research composer.

However, his initial studies were in piano and composition and when a friend recommended that he apply to the institute’s Cursus programme, he had no knowledge of computer music, programming or acoustics. ‘I made the application without really believing that I had the slightest chance of being selected,’ he recalls.

Arriving at IRCAM in 1998, he found the technology available to solve problems he had previously tackled with pencil and paper invaluable. Today, his specialisms are computer-assisted composition and physical modelling synthesis. For him, the composing process is one in which an initial ‘vague, intuitive’ musical idea is gradually refined through a model – ‘an algorithm, a computer program, or simply a strategy of writing, the machine that makes the idea. The whole process can be riddled with ‘creative’ errors. It can happen that some strategy, unfit to reproduce the original ‘vision’, ends up outputting something completely unexpected, yet intriguing.’

The spiritual and mathematical complexities of Dante’s allegorical masterpiece must have sown a seed, as recently Lanza has also been increasingly inspired by the ways in which people throughout the centuries have tried to categorise and imitate the world around them. In collaboration with the Turin-based researcher and musician Andrea Valle he is currently working on Regnum lapideum for instruments and computer-controlled electromechanical devices. The mineral-themed piece completes their trilogy Systema naturae: ‘a big catalogue of miscellaneous imaginary beings, inspired on one hand by the medieval tradition of bestiaria, herbaria and lapidaria and on the other by the systematic description of nature that dates back to Linnaeus.’

The borders between knowledge and imagination become even fuzzier with his hcmf// 2015 premiere and co-commission, The Kempelen Machine. Combining a live singer with voice modulations produced by computer-controlled accordion reeds, the piece takes its name from the eerie-sounding artificial voicebox created by the 18th century inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen – an innovative designer whose best-known creation, the chess-playing Mechanical Turk, was a notorious fake.

‘I am fascinated by the territory between Renaissance natural magic and modern science,’ Lanza explains. ‘The mechanical wonders of Kempelen, Vaucanson and other geniuses of the golden age of the automata lived in this no man’s land where the hoax and the genuine invention, the circus-like trick and the systematic investigation seem to coexist without apparent contradiction.’

Science and magic – could it be said that contemporary music is a bit of both? © Abi Bliss

Saturday 21 // November

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5 United Instruments of Lucilin

Catherine Kontz (1976, Luxembourg / UK) The Moon Moves Slowly (But It Crosses The Town) UK PREMIERE (2013) 8’

St Paul’s Hall, 7.30pm

The Moon Moves Slowly (But It Crosses The Town) is based on the natural and choreographed sound production of a very large tam-tam. A tam-tam this large has a long response and a slow decay time, which is something I try to magnify and explore in this piece. The work is inspired by an African saying I came across while researching the notion of time. It was originally commissioned for United Instruments of Lucilin at the opening of the rainy days Festival at the Philharmonie Luxembourg on the theme of slowness and other explorations of the notion of time. © Catherine Kontz

Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online) United Instruments of Lucilin Donatienne Michel-Dansac soprano David Reiland conductor Catherine Kontz The Moon Moves Slowly (But It Crosses The Town) UK PREMIERE Dai Fujikura scion stems UK PREMIERE Edwin Hillier engine oil and charcoal UK PREMIERE Manuela Meier epar UK PREMIERE Mauro Lanza The Kempelen Machine

Mauro Lanza © Roselyne Titaud

EVENTS

WORLD PREMIERE

Dai Fujikura (1977, Japan) scion stems UK PREMIERE (2011) 6’

United Instruments of Lucilin – Luxembourg’s first chamber music ensemble dedicated to new music – make their Huddersfield debut with an unmissable programme featuring an exciting new commission from Italian composer Mauro Lanza: a work for female voice and eight instruments, inspired by Wolfgang von Kempelen’s 18th century speaking machine.

In this piece I wanted to start with one texture and transform the music into all sort of different textures. It is as if you are working on one sample of a recording and first you process it electronically to make a completely different sound, then you split the spectrum of sound into even more different textures.

30

EVENTS

Saturday 21 // November

Rather than just lining up the contrasting textures one after the other, I wanted to expose the more organic process of transformation, which happens when you play around with knobs and lever (values) in effectors in computer music. © Dai Fujikura Edwin Hillier (1988, UK) engine oil and charcoal UK PREMIERE (2015) 5’

Engine oil and charcoal draws upon a series of paintings of the same name by Indian artist Vivan Sundaram. In these works, Sundaram extends the dimensions of the traditional canvas through the incorporation of a metallic tray, sewn into the fabric at the base of the painting and filled with a shallow pool of gleaming engine oil. This element affords the viewer an ever-changing impression of the complex, industrial canvas above: densities shift, elements are magnified and isolated, and perspective altered. © Edwin Hillier

Mauro Lanza (1975, Italy) The Kempelen Machine WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 25’ Wolfgang von Kempelen worked on his speaking machine from 1769 to 1804. The final design, although still far from complete, amazed Kempelen’s contemporaries uttering, with a childish voice, syllables, words and even complete phrases.The device was more than a mere speech synthesiser, it was a mechanical replica of the human vocal tract. The Kempelen Machine is an homage to the genius of Kempelen and the other creators of the golden age of automata, whose attempt in the mechanisation of bodily processes constantly redefined the conceptual borders between organic and inorganic. © Mauro Lanza Co-commissioned by hcmf// and United instruments of Lucilin Produced by hcmf// supported by Austrian Music Export and Austrian Cultural Forum London

Manuela Meier (1981, Austria) epar (2013) 13’

UK PREMIERE

Draw thin and fragile lines across spaces of varying dimensions and resonance, then observe their interplay as they diverge into spectral nets and fields of gravity. Use poles to map out these last vast plains – plains of which the surface is so extremely thin that it could potentially burst at any point, triggered by any action exceeding the minimum possible. In that way almost confined to the breaking, create microtonal outlets. Lost in stasis, release to escape. © Manuela Meier

PROFILE

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Derek Bailey

T

he author of probably the seminal text on musical improvisation, Improvisation; its Nature and Practice in Music, Derek Bailey (1930 – 2005) was a technically astonishing and unremittingly inventive guitarist, whose research into the technical possibilities of his instrument was relentless, uncompromising and inspiring. But if Bailey’s influence on modern guitarists and the evolution of his instrument is significant, it is his 40-year involvement with the creation, evolution and documentation of what has become known as Improvised Music that is his most valuable legacy to the artistic world.

In a period of astonishingly intense musical development in the second half of the 1960s, Bailey and other adventurous British musicians (including Tony Oxley, Evan Parker, Barry Guy, Paul Rutherford, John Stevens, Trevor Watts and AMM) developed a style of ensemble improvising that was revolutionary and widely influential, carefully extricating itself from the hierarchical associations of free jazz, the aleatoric/happening environments of Black Mountain experimentalism and the drone- or riff-based explorations of psychedelic rock.

Subsequently Derek Bailey conspicuously (and sometimes controversially) rejected all methods of organisation or determination of sounds in time, with the exception of ‘through the powers of improvisation’. In single-mindedly so doing he acquired a reputation as an ascetic, a purist and an evangelising apostle of improvisation; but Bailey’s rejection of the comfortable, the predictable and the gratifying was neither high-minded asceticism, nor a Yorkshireman’s awkward bloodymindedness. For him, the solution to the problem of developing a constantly renewing aesthetic for musical dialogue was the (almost) consistent rejection of habitual playing circumstances, familiar groupings, regular collaborators, mutually

agreed principles and other accommodations to so-called ‘successful’ music-making.

In view of all this, the amount of notated music Bailey composed in the late 1960s may come as a surprise, although the existence of these pieces was not a secret. Bailey rarely discussed this material, but he never destroyed or publicly repudiated it, merely losing interest in it. The mature Bailey found the whole rigmarole of predetermining music in advance of performance ridiculously time-consuming and hugely overrated; the ‘powers of improvisation’ had rendered composition irrelevant. Doubtless, Bailey would have expressed wry incomprehension as to why anyone would be interested in these old scribblings, pitying the folly of those who are so attached to the past and its fetishistic totems. He may well have improvised an Appleyard rant about the matter – but I hope he would not have refused to let people hear this music. Ping, for example, is a genuinely intriguing composition, clearly costing Bailey a great deal of effort, and which deserves to be heard after almost 50 years in a small suitcase.

However, let’s be very clear; playing these pieces does not represent an ‘outing’ of Derek Bailey as a closet composer, not is it an attempt to rebalance the focus of Derek’s life and work away from free improvisation by one iota. It is simply an opportunity to understand in a little more detail one tiny part of the career of an extraordinary musician, a vital musical philosopher and a man of rare principle. © Simon H Fell

EVENTS

Saturday 21 // November

6 Bailey / Sikorski / Frey Bates Mill Blending Shed, 10pm Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online) Please note: as this concert will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, audience members must be seated by 9.45pm Please be aware that seating is limited at this event Ensemble Anomaly: Trevor Watts soprano saxophone Robert Jarvis tenor trombone Hannah Marshall cello Alex Ward electric guitar Chris Burn piano Simon H Fell double bass / direction Mark Sanders percussion Franc Chamberlain speaker University of Huddersfield Low Brass Choir Dominic Lash double bass

Lol Coxhill (1932 – 2012, UK) arr. Christopher Hobbs Lol’s Tunes (1977) 3’ Tomasz Sikorski (1939 – 1988, Poland) Autograph (1980) 7’ – 8’ Paul Rutherford (1940 – 2007, UK) Quasi-Mode III (1980) 15’ Jürg Frey (1953, Switzerland) Accurate Placement WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 14’ Tomasz Sikorski (1939 – 1988, Poland) Zerstreutes Hinausschauen (1971) 7’ – 8’ Derek Bailey (1930 – 2005, UK) No 22 (Ping) WORLD PREMIERE (1980) 30’ Tomasz Sikorski (1939 – 1988, Poland) Echoes II (1961 – 1963) 16’ Tomasz Sikorski (1939 – 1988, Poland) The Silence of the Sirens (1986) 6’

Noszferatu XL + John Tilbury: Finn Peters alto saxophone Ivo de Greef piano Dave Price percussion Zoe Martlew cello John Tilbury piano

Joe Cutler (1968, UK) Sikorski B (2007) 8’

A special live broadcast from hcmf// 2015 including works by Derek Bailey, Polish composer Tomasz Sikorski and Composer in Residence Jürg Frey - performed by Ensemble Anomaly (an especially selected ensemble of players put together by Simon H Fell), double bassist Dominic Lash, Noszferatu XL and John Tilbury - alongside composer and performer interviews.

This substantial notated work sees Bailey adopting another externally-imposed structuring device in an attempt to disrupt the habitual or comfortable responses of both composer and performers. The structure is a transliteration of Samuel Beckett’s Ping; Beckett’s English version of the text was published in 1967, and it’s probable that Bailey started work on this setting shortly thereafter. With a through-composed nucleus of over 300 bars, the piece is a remarkably single-minded exploration of a systematic structural experiment, making no concessions to instrumental practicality - written for a trio of legendary improvisers: Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford and Bailey himself.

The centrepiece of tonight’s concert presentation by Ensemble Anomaly is the much anticipated world premiere of arch-improviser Derek Bailey’s No 22 (Ping).

Derek Bailey © Jo Fell

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Saturday 21 // November

Ensemble Anomaly precede Bailey’s Ping with a new version of trombonist Paul Rutherford’s Quasi-Mode III a composition which reflects Rutherford’s lifelong fascination with the permutation of modes and note sequences, and Christopher Hobb’s arrangement of Lol Coxhil’s Lol’s Tunes. Although the compositions are clearly Coxhill, the inexpressive, uncomfortable and occasionally perverse arrangements are definitely Hobbs’ work, with both men reflecting their lifelong interests in the process. A small treasure unearthed in the British Music Collection.

Frey’s Accurate Placement written for bassist Dominic Lash evokes two possibilities of looking at accuracy – on the one hand, we have a precise placement of material and elements – on the other, the music demands rhythmic precision. The balance of these two contradictory elements gives the piece its fragile identity.

Produced by hcmf// supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music Programme, also supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Despite his tragically short life, Tomasz Sikorski (1939 – 1988) created a body of work which feels poignant, compelling and utterly contemporary today. Drawing upon a life filled with personal angst and existential crisis, the Polish composer created a personal aesthetic of brutal beauty through the use of obsessive repetition and an uncompromising approach to musical material.

A note from Simon H Fell: I have many people to thank for making this concert possible; in addition to all the performers, the hcmf// team and the Music Department of the University of Huddersfield, my particular thanks must go to Karen Brookman-Bailey, Barry Guy & Maya Homburger, Ulrike Coxhill-Scholz, Christopher Hobbs & Virginia Anderson, Sound and Music, The British Music Collection, Dominic Lash, Evan Parker and Philip

The four Sikorski works in tonight’s concert span his whole career. Echoes II (1961 – 1963) for between one and four pianos, percussion and tape is one of his earliest works. What is immediately apparent is his interest in the resonance of sound, and in particular the phenomenon of echo.

The two piano works, Autograph (1980) and Zerstreuetes Hinausschauen (1972) are representative of a maturing of Sikorski’s language.

In both pieces, materials have been stripped back to their essence with individual sections functioning rather like recurring objects. Equilibriums are established and then brutally savaged.

The Silence of the Sirens for solo cello (1987) is one of Sikorski’s final works, full of profound and lyrical expression. Ewa Grossman says of the piece, ‘perhaps the composer felt that he would soon “fall silent” as an artist and wanted to share this feeling with his listeners.’

Nozsferatu XL complete their Sikorski portrait with composer Joe Cutler’s tribute piece Sikorski B commissioned by hcmf// in 2007.

Thomas.

This concert will be broadcast live

by BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 21 November 2015

Sunday 22 // November

7 Quatuor Bozzini: Jürg Frey St Paul’s Hall, 1pm Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Quatuor Bozzini: Clemens Merkel violin Alissa Cheung violin Stéphanie Bozzini viola Isabelle Bozzini cello Jürg Frey String Quartet No 2 Jürg Frey String Quartet No 3

UK PREMIERE

Quatuor Bozzini return to Huddersfield with a programme of string quartets by hcmf// 2015 Composer in Residence Jürg Frey. The Bozzini’s long association with the work of the composers of the Wandelweiser collective put them in a unique position as one of the foremost ensembles in the performance of this branch of experimental music, with their 2006 release of Frey’s string quartets heralded by Richard Pinnell as ‘achingly beautiful’.

Jürg Frey (1953, Switzerland) String Quartet No 2 (1998 – 2002) 28’ The piece explores a space between standstill and movement, between monochrome and narrative, but also between the fragility of individual details and an almost monumental appearance. The seemingly endless juxtaposition of triads, a complex correlation of strings and bow, the occasional very quiet humming of the performers, and a delicate glissando technique let arise within half an hour a space and an atmosphere beyond a quick legibility. The piece unfolds gently, creating, in the process, a space all of its own. © Jürg Frey

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Jürg Frey (1953, Switzerland) String Quartet No 3 UK PREMIERE (2010 – 2012) 28’ My music is silent architecture, like the silence of a room, a wall, a landscape, like places or squares that are silent. It is silent music, but it is not absent. It is not speechless, and it also doesn’t move with virtuosity bordering on silence.

The music gets its vitality and its radiance not from gesture and figuration. But in the quiet presence everything is there: colours, sensations, shadows, durations, lives. There are in this music different emotional and architectural sound spaces. Voluminous and fallow land, lightness and heaviness of materials, intimacy and lostness appear and disappear. A sliding balance between arrival and moving on lives within the piece. © Jürg Frey

Produced by hcmf// supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia; also supported by Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and Canada Council for the Arts

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Sunday 22 // November

8 Ensemble Phoenix Basel + Robert Piotrowicz

Khat, the name of a plant containing psychoactive ingredients and used to induce a state of trance by antique cultures and peoples, seemed to have the right association to my piece / composition.

Bates Mill Blending Shed, 4pm

KHAT was written for Christoph Bösch and Daniel Buess. © Alex Buess

Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online) Ensemble Phoenix Basel Robert Piotrowicz electronics Alex Buess KHAT UK PREMIERE Alex Buess VORTEX_V1.01 UK PREMIERE Robert Piotrowicz Grund UK PREMIERE Robert Piotrowicz Apendic UK PREMIERE Ensemble Phoenix Basel and Polish sound artist, composer and improviser Robert Piotrowicz team up for an unmissable performance including works by Basel-based Alex Buess as well as Piotrowicz himself. Buess’ work reflects his diversity of experiences in electronics, acoustics, musicology, phonetics and semantics while Piotrowicz’s output features saturated, complex structures created with computers and analogue synthesisers, leading to works of powerful dynamics grasped within dramatic forms.

Alex Buess (1954, Switzerland) KHAT UK PREMIERE (2003) 8’ The piece / composition consists formally of three parts with the allusive names: Ataxia, Tron and Metatron. Some of the percussion instruments are of ethnic origin, while others possess a sort of ‘pidgin’ character. The electronics used are not to be understood as an extension of the instuments’ sound, but rather as their indispensable, second manifestation. As often before, what interested me was the moodiness, the acoustic life of its own, the inner organics as well as the remaining inflexibility and resistance of the material, rather than its calculability.

Alex Buess (1954, Switzerland) VORTEX_V1.01 UK PREMIERE (2009) 18’ In both pieces Vortex_V1.01, for flute, piano, percussion and Acousmonium, and Vortex_V2, the electroacoustic version for Acousmonium, I work with different kinds of ‘morphed’ sounds: one morphic field, consisting of a variety of patterns. Once a pattern comes into contact with another it will sound and will be suited to repeat periodically... In Vortex_V1.01 these fields consist mainly from live acoustic instrumental samples, whereas in Vortex_V2 the fields are formed on a basis of sound material that I have synthesized partly through filtering, partly through compression and augmentation.

A vortex is created within the acoustic space in both pieces through sound distribution and diffusion. Additionally, a ‘Hyper---acoustic’ is established through the extensive electronic sound amplification; this results in sound impressions, which would be concealed from our ears in a normal acoustic situation where they may be covered up by louder or more present sounds. © Alex Buess Robert Piotrowicz (1973, Poland) Grund UK PREMIERE (2015) 20’ The piece takes its title after an old word of European origin, which in the past has denoted ‘foundation, the lowest part’ or ‘deep place’.

Grund is constructed around a few ideas that organise the piece for more than 20 minutes. One of them, is the horizontal, almost cluster-like masses of sound, where all instruments retain

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a similar powerful intensity and are focused on timbre and harmonic animation. The second important property is the challenging, variable levels of dynamics that subtly change both in attack as well as in microtonal organisation.

Lastly, Grund is defined by its subversive narrative structure – while it may rise and develop repetitions, it then stops abruptly, only to pick up again. Meticulously scored with no space for improvisation, this bold composition allows instead for modulation of colour in its fullest and widest spectrum. © Robert Piotrowicz Robert Piotrowicz (1973, Poland) Apendic UK PREMIERE (2015) 10’ Based on a graphic score, Apendic is informed by live improvisation techniques of Robert Piotrowicz. The slowly developed structure of the piece brings the richness of colours and micro events whilst relying on a few axes of tones and intervals. Carefully defined pitches move in very slow independent glissandos to achieve a dramatic moving architecture. Apendic, performed together with the composer, creates a complex ensemble chemistry through the scrupulous control of gestural, dynamic and spatiotemporal properties. © Robert Piotrowicz Produced by hcmf// supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia; also supported by the Adam Mickiewicz

Robert Piotrowicz

Institute as part of the Polska Music programme

George Lewis + Don Cherry Š Karl Berger 1979

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PROFILE

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The AACM and American Experimental Music

S

ince its founding on the virtually all-black South Side of Chicago in 1965, the African American musicians’ collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) has played an unusually prominent role in the development of American experimental music. Over more than 50 years of work, AACM members like Muhal Richard Abrams, Mwata Bowden, Anthony Braxton, Kelan Phil Cohran, Douglas R Ewart, Joseph Jarman, Leroy Jenkins, George Lewis, Nicole Mitchell, Roscoe Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers, Matana Roberts, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, and Edward Wilkerson, Jr, have explored a wide range of methodologies, processes and media. AACM musicians developed new and influential ideas about timbre, sound, collectivity, extended technique and instrumentation, performance practice, intermedia, the relationship of improvisation to composition, form, scores, computer music technologies, invented acoustic instruments, installations, and kinetic sculptures – achieving lasting international significance as a crucial part of the history of world musical experimentalism.

In addition to these already ambitious achievements, the collective developed strategies for individual and collective self-production and promotion that both reframed the artist/business relationship and challenged racialized limitations on venues and infrastructure. In a 1973 article, two early AACM members, trumpeter John Shenoy Jackson and cofounder and pianist / composer Muhal Richard Abrams, asserted that ‘the AACM intends to show how the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies.’

This optimistic declaration, based on notions of self-help as fundamental to racial uplift, cultural memory, and spiritual rebirth, was in accord with

many other challenges to traditional notions of order and authority that emerged in the wake of the Black Power movement.

The musical influence of the AACM has extended across borders of genre, race, geography, and musical practice, and must be confronted in any nonracialized narration of musical experimentalism that hopes to account for the breakdown of genre definitions and the mobility of practice and method that informs the presentday musical landscape. While accounts of the development of black musicality often draw upon the trope of the singular heroic figure, leaving out the dynamics of networks in articulating notions of cultural and aesthetic formation, the AACM provides a successful example of collective working-class self-help and selfdetermination; encouragement of difference in viewpoint, aesthetics, ideology, spirituality, and methodologies; and the promulgation of new cooperative, rather than competitive, relationships between artists. Musicologist Ekkehard Jost called attention to both the economic and the aesthetic in summarizing the AACM’s influence. ‘The significance and the international reputation of the AACM,’ Jost maintained, ‘resulted not only from their effectiveness in organizing, but also, above all, from their musical output, which made the designation AACM something like a guarantee of quality for a creative music of the first rank.’

From George E Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

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EVENTS

Sunday 22 // November

9 Afterword, an opera Lawrence Batley Theatre, 7pm Tickets £22 (£19 concession / online) International Contemporary Ensemble David Fulmer conductor George Lewis libretto Sean Griffin director / stage design Narda E Alcorn stage manager Joelle Lamarre soprano Julian Terrell Otis tenor Gwendolyn Brown contralto In tribute to the 50th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) hcmf// is delighted to present the UK premiere performance of renowned American composer, sound artist and trombonist George Lewis’ chamber opera Afterword – fresh from the work’s performance at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

George Lewis (1952, USA) Afterword, an opera UK PREMIERE (2015) 105’ Founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has long played an internationally recognised role in American experimental music.

The AACM’s unique combination of artistic communitarianism, personal and collective self-determination, and ardent experimentalism animates the Afterword project.

However, Afterword is not a history of the AACM, but a ‘Bildungsoper’– a coming-of-age opera of ideas, positionality, and testament. The challenge here was to create an opera around a collective that remains noted for its diversity of approaches to creative practice, while eschewing direct character representation of AACM artists. We forgo a

conception in which fixed, authorial characters pose as what Michel Foucault calls ‘historical figure(s) at the crossroads of a certain number of events’ in favour of having music, text, and movement deploy a tricksterish displacement of character onto metaphysical collectivities. Sung and spoken voices, instrumental music, and movement become heteroglossic avatars, in a process described by Toni Morrison and others as the expression of a community voice. In some scenes, that voice presents remembrances and testimony; in others, clashes between subject positions allow audiences to eavesdrop on history as it is being made in real, human time, bringing us face to face with contingency, empathy, and wonder.

The opera takes its title from the concluding chapter of George E Lewis’s 2008 history of the AACM, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Afterword selected quotes from nearly one hundred interviews with AACM members to fashion an imagined intergenerational dialogue about overarching social, cultural, and aesthetic issues that the organisation and its individual members faced over the decades. In these pages, we read of young black experimentalists interrogating issues of power, authority, identity, culture, aesthetics, self-fashioning and representation.

The libretto itself includes testimonials from the Migration, daily observations jotted down in diaries, and descriptions of Paris in the wake of the tumultuous events of 1968. The lively dissonance of the orchestration functions as a musical commentary on these recounted historical and psychic moments, encouraging us to listen in on the fast-moving, creative sonic imagination animated inside the minds of the characters as they calculate their collective creative powers.

Afterword’s direction and movement take their form from the libretto, which is drawn not only from Lewis’ interviews, but also from transcripts of audio recordings of formative AACM meetings made by Muhal Richard Abrams in 1965 and 1966. Movement in Afterword is derived from

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a list of people, places and situations, real and imagined, that made appearances in the libretto as it evolved over time. Forms are built from photographs, imagined situations, impressions, histories, and actions to create a sensorium of experiences and received stances. Bits of social dance from the corresponding periods commingle with gestures derived from the historicity of the AACM’s sculptural, photographic, filmic, textual, and audio archive. These archives reveal recurring issues of personal, professional, and collective aspiration, political positions, self-determination and self-governance, race, gender, and sexuality, aesthetic innovation, identity and representation, building of alternative institutions and pedagogies, confrontations with traditional authority, economic and cultural shifts, tradition, change, and spiritual growth, death, and rebirth.

Building upon AACM ideas that are now part of the legacy of experimental practice constitutes a vital touchstone for operatic experience. The goal of Afterword is to combine aesthetic exploration with critical examination of the multiple, overlapping, and fundamentally human motivations that affect us all. © George Lewis, Sean Griffin & Catherine Sullivan Produced by hcmf// Afterword is being developed in partnership with the Chicago Performance Lab through the Theatre and Performance Studies Program at the University of Chicago, and the MCA New Works Initiative’s Design Residency. The production has received support from the MCA Stage New Works Initiative with lead funding from Elizabeth A Liebman; a Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago; the Multi-Arts Production (MAP) Fund, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W Mellon Foundation; the Edwin H Case Chair in American Music, Columbia University; and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Music Composition.

This concert will be broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 5 December 2015

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Sunday 22 // November

10 The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble: La Monte Young St Paul’s Hall, 10pm Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online) This concert will be recorded live.

Please refrain from making sound during the performance.

Silence will also be appreciated before and after the concert.

Photographs and recordings are not permitted without the written authorisation of the artists.

We would like to continue the tradition of no applause.

This will keep the mood of the music in the air and in our memories.

Let us remain in the world of the music, together.

The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble: Ben Neill trumpet Stephen Burns trumpet Nathan Plante trumpet Matthew Conley trumpet Markus Schwind trumpet Bob Koertshuis trumpet Christine Chapman trumpet Marco Blaauw trumpet The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble, led

by Ben Neill and Marco Blaauw, presents a rare and exciting performance of American composer La Monte Young’s work for eight trumpets – one of the few performances of the composer’s work in Europe in recent history.

La Monte Young (1935, USA) The Melodic Version (1984) of the Second Dream of The High-Tension Stepdown Transformer from The Four Dreams of China (1962) UK PREMIERE 70’ In a setting of Dream Light by Marian Zazeela Born in 1935 in a small town in Idaho, La Monte Young started music as a jazz saxophonist and went on to study counterpoint and composition under Leonard Stein in Los Angeles. Influenced by traditional Indian music and his childhood soundscape (wind in the plain-grass, crickets and cicada, electric transformers, etc.), his research eventually took him into the world of long, sustained sounds. This is particularly clear in his pivotal work Trio for Strings (1958), which went on to greatly influence Terry Riley. The 1960s saw Young form the group Theatre of Eternal Music where he experimented with sustained music, improvising according to pre-established rules, as if nearing the ideal of eternal music. Young soon found a colour to give his musical ‘dream’: magenta, taken from his wife Marian Zazeela’s light installation Dream Light. This colour very quickly seeped across all of Young’s music.

In 1962, La Monte Young composed The Four Dreams of China cycle, imagining different derivations of a single chord. In 1984, he penned a more ‘melodic’ version of the last cycle – The Second Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer for instruments that can be tuned according to multiples of four. ‘Melodic version’ must be understood here as meaning a slight tightening of the rules governing the improvisation. Each musician – eight trumpeters for this concert – is free to play any upper register notes as long as the rules concerning pre-set strings of notes are respected. The outcome is an immersive and invigorating experience that pulls the audience in to the subtleties of sound.

Produced by hcmf// in association with Marco Blaauw, supported by Goethe-Institut London

La Monte Young Š Jung Hee Cho

Sunday 22 // November

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Monday 23 // November

hcmf// shorts

Shipping: Part 1

scapegoat

Richard Uttley piano

scapegoat: Joshua Hyde saxophones Noam Bierstone percussion

CAB Atrium, 12.01pm

Joe Hamlen (1992, UK) Shipping (2014) c. 6’

Phipps Hall, 12.30pm

WORLD PREMIERE

Shipping is a time-specific piece for piano and live radio broadcast, using the shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4. The performance of Shipping is affected by changes in several aspects of the weather in the forecast, meaning that each realisation of the piece is unique, and that the piece is subject to seasonality. Each performance uses the same basic material, the chords derived from the geographical co-ordinates of each point in the forecast, the interpretation of which is then altered based on variables in the forecast.

Shipping should only be performed with a live broadcast of the forecast. © Joe Hamlen

Emily Howard Leviathan Matthew Sergeant bête gabriel-rufael Mauricio Pauly The Threshing Floor scapegoat is an experimental saxophone and percussion duo. Close creative collaboration and multimedia projects form the basis of their pursuit for artistic innovation and expression. This programme presents new works created through the RNCM Research funded m62 collaboration project with three diverse UK-based composers: Emily Howard, Matthew Sergeant and Mauricio Pauly. The unusually tight connection with the performers has led each composer on a fresh and unexpected journey, (re-)discovering new sonic spaces and places along the way.

Produced by hcmf//

Emily Howard (1979, UK) Leviathan (2014 – 2015) 10’

UK PREMIERE

In Leviathan baritone saxophone split-tones and cymbal multiphonics collide in the creation of a newly-formed and unpredictable musical language, which responds to recent mathematical research in dynamical systems. Written exclusively for one particular cymbal to be played with a hybrid bass bow / metal reibstock, various harmonics are generated through the placement of a Tibetan singing bowl in different positions on the cymbal’s surface in combination with changing the bow’s contact angle. I am grateful for so many helpful conversations with scapegoat, mathematicians Lasse Rempe-Gillen and Alexandre DeZotti (University of Liverpool), and support from RNCM Research and The Leverhulme Trust. © Emily Howard

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Matthew Sergeant (1984, UK) bête gabrielrufael UK PREMIERE (2014 – 2015) 8’ Bête Gabriel-Rufael is a 13th century rockhewn church, one of 11 such structures at the UNESCO world-heritage site in Lalibela, Ethiopia. The church jointly commemorates the saints Gabriel and Raphael and the idea of conjoinment informs bête gabriel-rufael. Here, two disparate instrumental identities – saxophone and percussion – are fused into a hybrid. A sonic common ground is forged in loops of shrieks and squeaks from frictional percussion and multiphonics, the tempos of which oscillate around one another (following a computercontrolled click-track, which is generated in real time). bête gabriel-rufael is part of a larger set of pieces, collectively entitled The Eleven Churches of Lalibela, which together explores issues of decay, space and place. © Matthew Sergeant Mauricio Pauly (1976, Costa Rica) The Threshing Floor UK PREMIERE (2014) 20’

The Threshing Floor spotlights two performers facing one another, their choreographies intimately integrated between them, their instruments, and the terms of their amplification.

A rough undulating centre throws offshoots into a pale ring of sustained tones projected by speakers against the outer walls. These ebb back into slow swarms of controlled feedback, extending the boundaries of all bodies involved. © Mauricio Pauly Produced by hcmf//

scapegoat © Gwenaelle Rouger

hcmf// shorts

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Monday 23 // November

hcmf// shorts

Ensemble CEPROMUSIC Stephen Chase: Part 1 St Paul’s Hall, 1.30pm

St Paul’s Hall to CAB Atrium, 1.50pm

Ensemble CEPROMUSIC

Walking* music (whatever the weather…) made on the move––made from movement––listening to sound travel disperse draw near––simple ideas with simple/complex results––the act of walking and listening––being both in the world and apart from it––anyone may take part… (*other means of carriage too)

Mexican new music group Ensemble CEPROMUSIC present a UK premiere from Mexican composer, theoretician, historian, pedagogue and interpreter, Julio Estrada.

Julio Estrada (1943, Mexico) yuunohui (1990 – 2012) 20’

UK PREMIERE

yuunohui –Zapotec: fresh clay– is a group of solo instrumental works: ‘se, ‘ome, yei, nahui for the strings;’tlapoa, keyboard, ’wah, noisemaker, and ’ehecatl, winds. yuunohui’s musical evolution is constituted by six sections, all represented in a graphic containing five different curves to build a macro-timbre, combination of pitch, dynamics, colour, pulse, vibrato, pressure, noise, etc. An Introduction and a Final add emphasis to the individual instrumental character.

Any yuunohui can be played as a solo or in collective versions (up to 8!), in which case their energy runs in a similar way, sounding differently through each specific macro-timbre.

Produced by hcmf// supported by the Government of Mexico as part of Year of Mexico in the UK 2015 and also supported by the British Council, CONACULTA and INBA

Stephen Chase (1973, UK) RAYUELA, etc., la-la-la…

A fleeting intervention journeying from one place to another. Simple rules for immediate participation by anyone who cares to join in (eg. pitches derived from footsteps or proximity to other walkers)… or just listen. The pieces all deal with simple ideas of making sound and seeing how it changes in relation to space, distance, wind, rain (or its absence…) and loosely collective/ interdependent movement. © Stephen Chase Produced by hcmf//

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Ensemble Anomaly CAB Atrium, 2.10pm

Diego Castro Magaš guitar Alex Ward guitar A series of nine solo guitar pieces, in which Derek Bailey appears to be using the tools of quasi-serial composition to purge himself of his jazz and commercial music background, while attempting to move towards a world where all inherited musical styles and expectations could be avoided. Ultimately, in Bailey’s own words, ‘it became necessary to reject all tonal, modal and atonal organisation in order to leave the way free to organise only through the powers of improvisation’; but the series of pieces the process generated are a fascinating document of the early journey of a major creative artist.

Derek Bailey (1930 – 2005, UK) No 10 (Five Pieces for Guitar) WORLD PREMIERE (1966 – 1967) 10’ Derek Bailey (1930 – 2005, UK) Nos 18-20 (Three Pieces for Guitar) (c. 1967) 6’ Derek Bailey (1930 – 2005, UK) No 23 (Bits) WORLD PREMIERE (1967) 4’ Unsurprisingly, Derek Bailey’s archive contains several compositions for solo guitar. Although he recorded some of these at home in 1966 and 1967, only one instance of Bailey performing such compositions in public has so far been identified – a performance of Nos 18-20 in Northampton in December 1972.

In the course of these three sets of pieces, Bailey leaves behind his early influences and gradually incorporates a language which directly reflects the discoveries he was making through improvisation.

(Bailey’s own recordings of these pieces generally include extemporised interjections, although these are not specified in the score; this option has been retained for today’s performance.)

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The No 10 pieces are generally Webernian in scale, but with a surprising lushness of harmony, and sporadic references to the guitar’s flamenco heritage. (This is perhaps the nearest Bailey comes to writing ‘repertoire’ pieces; Diego will play these pieces on the classical guitar, rather than the amplified instrument normally associated with Bailey.)

In the 18-20 set Bailey’s compositional language has hardened into a more acerbic serialism, and these pieces have a harmonic tautness which gives them something of the intensity that Bailey admired in Webern. Bailey was now starting to lose interest in playing these pieces ‘straight’; by 1967 he was usually using such compositions as starting points for improvisations. (Nevertheless, his fair copy of the 18-20 score presents a selfcontained composed suite, without improvisation.)

By No 23 Bailey’s scores are tending to become sequences of notated gestures, each of which may provide raw material for extemporised development, rather than a fixed work in themselves. However, this is not to suggest that his interest in abstract structural questions had receded; although the score of No 23 is not strictly serial, it uses several varied repetitions of an extended tone row, with the third of its three sections being a (slightly modified) retrograde of the opening section.

Particular thanks for enabling the public performance of this material must go to Karen Brookman-Bailey, who has generously allowed me unfettered access to Derek Bailey’s personal archive. © Simon H Fell Produced by hcmf//

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CHROMA

Phipps Hall, 3pm CHROMA: Roderick Chadwick piano Max Baillie violin Charlotte Bonneton viola Clare O’Connell cello Ausiàs Garrigós Morant clarinet Richard Bayliss horn Rafal Luc accordion Martin Scheuregger Harlequin David Gorton Burgh Castle

Harlequin is a new work by Martin Scheuregger arising from his time as Embedded Composer in Residence at the British Music Collection, supported by Sound and Music. Moving from playful and energetic to dark and introspective, it reflects his time studying a wide array of British music. Commissioned by CHROMA, David Gorton’s new work was composed around, and designed to be performed alongside, a sequence of 19 photographs taken by Claire Shovelton at Burgh Castle, and features Roderick Chadwick as piano soloist.

Martin Scheuregger (1988, UK) Harlequin (2015) 20’

Harlequin is the culmination of my work as Embedded Composer in Residence at the British Music Collection. Conceived in four broad sections, the focus changes greatly in each, sometimes concentrating exclusively on horizontal momentum, at others, exploring textural detail.

Despite its diversity, a sense of playfulness pervades the whole work – in material and technique, if not always in the aural result – and it is this that suggested the title. Harlequin does not directly model any one work or composer I have studied in the collection, but may reflect some of what I have learned during my time there. © Martin Scheuregger

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David Gorton (1978, UK) Burgh Castle (2014) 20’ Burgh Castle is a Roman 3rd century ‘Saxon Shore’ fort with views over Breydon Water near Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast. The piece was composed around, and designed to be performed alongside, a sequence of 19 photographs taken by Claire Shovelton at Burgh Castle and the nearby Strumpshaw Fen on 19 January 2014. There is no programme as such, except the depiction of a passage of time in a particular place. The piano and horn are the main protagonists in an ensemble that is partially retuned to a microtonal schema. ©David Gorton Produced by hcmf// supported by Sound and Music

Stephen Chase: Part 2 Phipps Hall to St Paul’s Hall, 3.45pm Stephen Chase (1973, UK) RAYUELA, etc., la-la-la…

Please see Stephen Chase: Part 1 Produced by hcmf//

Via Nova

St Paul’s Hall, 4.10pm Via Nova Daniel Galbreath conductor Karin Rehnqvist I Himmelen Arvo Pärt Seven Magnificat Antiphons Karin Rehnqvist To the Angel with the Fiery Hands Birmingham-based contemporary vocal ensemble Via Nova presents a programme of contemporary choral music from Scandinavia and the Baltics.

Karin Rehnqvist’s choral works are extraordinary for their power and intelligence; her distinctive voice – brilliantly mingling unearthly folk material

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with striking avant-garde techniques – is one of many coming from Scandinavia and the Baltics, a vital hub of contemporary choral music.

Karin Rehnqvist (1957, Sweden) I Himmelen (1998) 4’ Karin Rehnqvist’s I Himmelen (‘In Heaven’s Hall’) dates from 1998, but its source material is much older. Drawing on a 1622 text by Swedish priest and poet Laurentius Laurentii Laurinus and ancient folk chorales, the piece reinvents tradition with exhilarating, searing intensity. The radiant music depicts heaven’s hall, ‘where happiness abides’ and ‘God eternal fills the space’. Rehnqvist musically matches this transcendent vision through a combination of ‘classical’ singing and kulning, which she describes as an ‘arhcaic style of singing, still used in Swedish folk music (…) to call for animals or to communicate with other people over long distances.’

Arvo Pärt (1935, Estonia) Seven Magnificat Antiphons (selections from) (1988, rev. 1991) 5’ Arvo Pärt’s Seven Magnificat Antiphons (1988, 1991) exemplify the mixture of approachability and sacred aloofness that have earned the composer his international reputation. The movements extracted here are part of a substantial work, a gathering of the antiphons for Vespers in the evenings leading up to Christmas Eve. These 6th century texts convey the mystery and celebration, in the Christian tradition, of the birth of Christ.

Using extraordinary musical economy, Pärt fully explores this vast range of expression. His sparse style recalls ancient music in a way very different to Rehnqvist, yet both offer equally remarkable visions of the divine.

Karin Rehnqvist (1957, Sweden) To the Angel with the Fiery Hands (2000) 9’ We close our programme with a return to Rehnqvist’s brilliant soundworld. If the Magnificat

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Antiphon texts celebrate a newly earthbound divinity, Till Ängeln med de brinnande händerna (‘To the Angel with the Fiery Hands’) (2000) burns that idea into the consciousness. Rehnqvist adds a virtuosic oboe line, vividly colouring the vocal parts. Björn von Rosen’s (1905 – 1989) text asks this extraordinary celestial being to ‘Touch us gently once’, thawing our frozen eyes and lips. This metaphor of liberation closes with a final image of ambiguous serenity: ‘And then we’ll sleep in peace and rest quietly in the ashes left behind’.

Programme notes © Daniel Galbreath Produced by hcmf//

Dominic Lash: Jakob Ullmann Phipps Hall, 5pm

Dominic Lash double bass Bristol-based double bassist Dominic Lash gives the world premiere performance of Jakob Ullmann’s 2013 – 14 work solo IV as part of hcmf// shorts. The German composer’s work is characterised by intricate graphic scores and soft, delicate sounds exploring the subtleties of pitch and timbre, thereby drawing the listener into its unique sound world.

Jakob Ullmann (1958, Germany) solo IV WORLD PREMIERE (2013 – 2014) 32’ In the late 1980s I made my first attempts to depart from the strict conventions of (western) musical notation and to introduce some more or less graphical structures in my scores. The experiences of writing disappearing musics – a piece in which different groups of instruments rehearse independently and coordinate the performance only with the help of a clock – helped me to plan a series of solo pieces, which give the musicians (with the help of graphic notation I

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discussed with John Cage) much more freedom in performing the piece than in my earlier pieces.

The performer must develop a version for each performance, with or without other solo pieces.

Following the first three solo pieces from the beginning of the 1990s, last year I added a solo piece for (low) stringed instrument and a solo piece for piano to this series. The music is very soft, and lasts for around 45 minutes. © Jakob Ullmann Produced by hcmf// supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia; also supported by Goethe-Institut London

Shipping: Part 2 CAB Atrium, 5.54pm Richard Uttley piano Joe Hamlen (1992, UK) Shipping (2014) c. 6’

WORLD PREMIERE

Please see Shipping: Part 1 Produced by hcmf//

Stephen Chase: Part 3 CAB Atrium to St Paul’s Hall, 6.20pm Stephen Chase (1973, UK) RAYUELA, etc., la-la-la…

Księżyc © K Podbielski

Produced by hcmf//

Jakob Ullmann © Batsceba Hardy

Please see Stephen Chase: Part 1

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Ensemble Interface St Paul’s Hall, 7pm Ensemble Interface Jagoda Szmytka Pores open wide shut Pedro Álvarez New Forms of Asymmetry Nadir Vassena cinque stanze buie Pierluigi Billone Δίκη Wall Ensemble Interface, an international collective of musicians founded in 2009 in Frankfurt am Main, is committed to contemporary music through performance, educational activities and research.

A ‘Pierrot-plus’ sextet, they have taken on the challenge of a wide-ranging repertoire, all the while offering new perspectives for this classical set-up. They believe that risk-taking and experimentation are crucial to the artistic process, interfacing this framework with new and existing works, as well as with their interactions with artistic partners and audiences.

Jagoda Szmytka (1982, Poland) Pores open wide shut UK PREMIERE (2013) 9’

pores open wide shut for ensemble and power point belongs to the group of pieces created with Szmytka’s method of ‘social composing’. The piece thematises the issue of the borders of one’s identity and the mechanisms of power and control in the creation processes. The material for the piece was collected during improvisation with the musicians, following on from which Szmytka used motives proposed by the musicians and applied suggested instrumental techniques. The aim was to open the borders of one’s identity to the Other, to see how much one can accept and tolerate the proposal of another person and how far one may integrate it to one’s own creation (being). In the end it was difficult for the composer to deal with the musicians’ material, and after receiving the score the musicians couldn’t recognise their

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initial material. The finished piece belongs to no individual involved in the creative process. The borders of identity are wide shut. © Jagoda Szmytka Pedro Álvarez (1980, Chile) New forms of Asymmetry (2015) 10’ Neither descriptive nor programmatic, the title is rather a literary ‘found object’; a serendipitous conceptual catalyst for a single episode in a larger creative quest that seeks to put form, rather than material, at the centre of aesthetic enquiries.

The fragile relation between acoustic guitar and ensemble, not only in the deliberate instrumental writing but also in the different nature of their sound projection, facilitates the necessary reinvention of a ‘concertante’ dialectics. © Pedro Álvarez Nadir Vassena (1970, Switzerland) cinque stanze buie UK PREMIERE (2009) 11’

cinque stanze buie (five dark rooms) is the quest of something beyond the virtuosity of music writing and performing. Music viewed not as art, but rather as spiritual exercise. It is an attempt to leave art (art as representation) behind, without falling into mysticism or metaphysics. There should also be no nostalgia for what is lost. Music is not a consolation – that would be a pathetic exercise.

In this piece, three musicians and the listeners move within a known – yet unknown – environment: five ‘known’ rooms are evoked through five quotes from the third Leçon de Ténèbres à une et à deux voix by François Couperin. But we move in darkness: we know that we might walk into things, but since the light is missing, their forms, position and time placement are altered. © Nadir Vassena

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Pierluigi Billone (1960, Italy) Δίκη Wall UK PREMIERE (2012) 26’ In ancient Greek culture, Δίκη was the goddess of justice and the spirit of moral order and fair judgement.

Orphic hymn (61) The piercing eye of Justice bright, I sing, plac’d by the throne of heav’n’s almighty king, Perceiving thence, with vision unconfin’d, the life and conduct of the human kind To thee, revenge and punishment belong, chastising ev’ry deed, unjust and wrong; Whose pow’r alone, dissimilars can join, and from th’ equality of truth combine: For all the ill, persuasion can inspire, when urging bad designs, with counsel dire, ‘Tis thine alone to punish; with the race of lawless passions, and incentives base; For thou art ever to the good inclin’d, and hostile to the men of evil mind.

Come, all-propitious, and thy suppliant hear, when Fate’s predestin’d, final hour draws near. © Pierluigi Billone Produced by hcmf// supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme; also supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

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Księżyc

St Thomas’ Church, 8.45pm Księżyc: Agata Harz vocals / objects Katarzyna Smoluk-Moczydłowska vocals / keyboards / objects Lechosław Polak accordion / keyboards / synthesisers Remigiusz Mazur Hanaj tapes / hurdy-gurdy / violin Robert Niziński wind instruments / keyboards / objects The first incarnation of Księżyc was active in the 1990s, the second exists now. Their spirit captures early and late medieval music with a sound rooted in the Slavic tradition, combined with elements of minimalism and vocal experiments of the 20th century. The alchemy of these constituent parts results in a breathtaking original music, at once delicate and sinister, and the surreal fairytale inspired lyrics (written by Remigiusz Mazur Hanaj) add to the inherent beauty, sadness and madness within. Following the Penultimate Press reissue of their self-titled full length recording, the band re-united with a series of shows all over Poland.

Their concert at hcmf// 2015 will be the first presentation of the new repertoire in the UK.

The compositions by Księżyc avoid expedients meant for an instant effect. In general, they are based on simple motifs played by various keyboards and horns. These motifs are obsessively repeated and, as a result, initially having appeared to be subtle, even ethereal, with time they begin to bare a nerve lurking within... The listeners realise then that they find themselves on a trail leading beyond the world of sounds (...)

The repetitions dull the sensory organs and, at the same time, they make the sensitivity more acute by opening the wicket-gates of the soul. Dimmed and melancholic tracks do not end, they are suspended in the twilight, they pass out into darkness, they lack the fulfilment and consequently, they remain

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both delicate and sinister. At first it may seem, quite unexpectedly and surprisingly, that voices are incongruous with the music, but in the end they turn to be complementary to it... They sing in beautiful harmonies which originate in folk music, they conversate. Not always do they use lyrics, but they invariably relate something in an enthralling way. Sometimes they even sigh, there are abrupt outbursts of yell, or of wild, ominous laughter.

Anything is suitable as long as it can serve the purpose of rendering the variety of emotions that are present in the lyrics and music. © Rafał Księżyk, BRUM magazine 2/1996 Produced by hcmf// in association with the Polish Cultural Institute in London and Penultimate Press; supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme

Noam Bierstone

Bates Mill Blending Shed, 10pm Noam Bierstone percussion Noam Bierstone is a Canadian percussionist dedicated to modern artistic performance.

Committed to the creation and development of new music, Noam is a founding member of scapegoat (saxophone, percussion), standardmodell (saxophone, piano, percussion) and the Hellqvist / Amaral / Hyde / Bierstone project, and pursues ongoing collaborations with various composers and artists. At hcmf// he will perform the UK premiere of Mani. Δίκη, the most recent percussion solo by composer Pierluigi Billone, with whom he worked closely at the 2014 Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik.

Księżyc © K Podbielski

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Pierluigi Billone (1960, Italy) Mani. Δίκη UK PREMIERE (2012) 30’

Reciprocal Structures

In ancient Greek culture, Δίκη (Dike -justice-) was the spirit of moral order and fair judgement.

Dominic Lash double bass

Mani. Δίκη can be considered as a sort of celebration of the sound world of metal, and particularly of the richness and quality of its sonic environments: the manipulation of metal-to-metal contact, the unique shape of the instruments that influence the manipulation, and the relative position of the instruments that creates an individual space for the performer’s body. It is an explorative and creative journey of sound, connected to the materials through the living and organic contact between the instruments. © Pierluigi Billone Produced by hcmf//

Kasper T Toeplitz: Zbigniew Karkowski

Phipps Hall, 12.10am

Reciprocal Structures is a beautiful and meditative performance installation exploring the refraction of light and sound. Complex glass structures are lit to project dynamically shifting patterns on sheet-glass scores, interpreted by the musician as a drone-based soundscape of emergent harmonies. This project has developed through collaboration of composer Scott Mc Laughlin, glass-artist Shelley James, and improviser Seth Woods.

Scott Mc Laughlin (1975, Ireland) Reciprocal Structures: Glass Light Sound WORLD PREMIERE (2014 – 2015) 20’

Iannis Xenakis (1922 – 2001, Greece) S.709 (1994) 7’ Zbigniew Karkowski (1958 – 2013, Poland) Fluster UK PREMIERE (2010) 40’

A collaborative project between Scott Mc Laughlin (composer), Shelley James (glass artist) and Seth Woods (cello / improvisation), where the complex structures of glass and sound are revealed, magnified, and interlaced. Light is focused through complex glass structures to reveal grain and cording that are amplified by refraction, producing shifting beautiful caustics on both surrounding walls and on sandblasted glass ‘scores’. Slow rotation of the glass creates dynamically shifting patterns, interpreted by the performer as a quasigraphic score where they refract the vibrating string by splitting the spectrum of the sound, revealing its own inner partials and structures as a reflection of the visual. © Scott Mc Laughlin

Please see page 57 for programme notes

Produced by hcmf// supported by Cultural & Creative

Bates Mill Photographic Studio, 10.50pm Kasper T Toeplitz bass guitar / electronics Kasper T Toeplitz performs the first in a series of concerts focussing on the connection between the two late composers.

Produced by hcmf// in partnership with SONORA; supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme and the Polish Cultural Institut in London

Industries Exchange, University of Leeds

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Shipping: Part 3 CAB Atrium, 12.48am Richard Uttley piano Joe Hamlen (1992, UK) Shipping WORLD PREMIERE (2014) c. 10’ Please see Shipping: Part 1 Produced by hcmf//

Shipping: Part 4 CAB Atrium, 5.20am Richard Uttley piano Joe Hamlen (1992, UK) Shipping WORLD PREMIERE (2014) c. 10’ Please see Shipping: Part 1

Reciprocal Structures © Scott Mc Laughlin

Produced by hcmf//

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LEARNING & PARTICIPATION

hcmf//’s Learning & Participation programme offers a year-round programme of accessible, inspirational and hands-on experiences for you to engage with new music and discover your creative potential. This year’s Festival includes an incredibly exciting, eclectic range of activity and we encourage anyone, regardless of age, background or ability to get involved and reap the rewards from our programme.

ACTIVIES FOR ALL AGES hcmf// shorts Monday 23 November Various Venues Free events

hcmf// will continue to support professional development, with hcmf// shorts taking place on Free Monday, 23 November, presenting a series of concerts featuring talented up-andcoming performers and composers alongside performances from some of the finest musicians working in contemporary music today. Please see pages 42 – 53 for full details.

British Music Collection Tours Wednesday 25 + Friday 27 November Heritage Quay, 11am Free events

hcmf// is teaming up with Heritage Quay to offer a tour of the incredible British Music Collection, which we are lucky to have housed at the University of Huddersfield. Take a trip through the archives to explore the masses of scores, vinyl, tapes and film that are housed in Heritage Quay’s exciting purpose built space beneath the University. No need to book – just turn up. Heritage Quay is located in the basement of the Student Central Building.

The Heritage Quay and hcmf// programme is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund

Auditory Recollections Wednesday 25 November Heritage Quay, 1pm – 3pm

hcmf// is keen to hear your stories about the Festival. Do you have a memory attached to a specific Festival or event? Did hcmf// spark an important life event for you, creative or otherwise?

Tell us all about it at our Auditory Recollections drop-in recording session – your story may form the beginning of our oral histories project which will be developed in future years.

The Heritage Quay and hcmf// programme is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund

Just a Vibration

Saturday 28 November Bates Mill Blending Shed, 11am Free event Indian bass guitarist Shri will be visiting hcmf// with the project Just a Vibration, creating new music fusing the traditions of Brass Bands and Indian Classical music. This work will explore a unique creative relationship with Indian Classical musicians, The Hammonds Saltaire Band, Bradford Music Service and South Asian Arts UK, bringing together musicians from very different backgrounds rooted in the heart of Yorkshire’s cultural landscape. For more information see page 79.

This project is supported by Arts Council England and Bradford Music Service

Sound System Culture + Pop-Up Art School Sunday 29 November Creative Arts Building Atrium, 1pm - 4pm Free event

This year, hcmf// will be working with the team that produced the book and film, Sound System Culture. The project documents and examines the culture that was thriving in Huddersfield in the 1970s and 1980s, initially developing from the Caribbean community in the area but eventually expanding until it became world-renowned in the global reggae and dub scene. The Sound System

LEARNING & PARTICIPATION

Sound System Culture is a project developed by Let’s Go Yorkshire which includes Heritage HiFi, a vintage-style sound system built by Paul Huxtable. This event has been kindly supported by the University of Huddersfield.

FAMILY FOCUS

Up in the Mountains – Music Theatre for Children Monday 23 November Hudawi Centre, 12.30pm & 2pm Free event

The team who brought us Korall Koral in 2012 will return, this time with a piece exploring mountain regions and the sounds and objects that can be found there. The performance, Up in the Mountains, is geared towards 0-3 year olds, and will include music composed especially for this age-group by former hcmf// Composer in Residence, Maja S K Ratkje. Children will be invited to explore the objects and instruments in a hands-on session at the end of the event.

hcmf// is delighted that this year’s Free Monday will also include a Family Focus alongside our usual hcmf// shorts programme.

Up in the Mountains is free, but places are limited.

Children must be accompanied by an adult. To book spaces please email Sarah at s.mcwatt@hud.ac.uk.

Music at Play – Graphic Scores for Under 5s

Supported by Arts Council Norway and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Norway

Monday 23 November Heritage Quay, 10am - 11.30am

Our partnership with Heritage Quay continues as we jointly host further family activity on Free Monday, as well as a workshop exploring the archive with local college students.

Composer and workshop leader, Cheryl Camm, will explore music-making with children aged 5 and under, transforming the whole workshop space into a giant hands-on graphic score to inspire pre-school children to create, compose and physically interact with sounds, textures and objects whilst making music! Everyone is a composer in this group creative session!

This workshop is free, but places are limited.

Children must be accompanied by an adult. To book spaces please email Sarah at s.mcwatt@hud.ac.uk.

The Heritage Quay and hcmf// programme is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund

As always, we offer visiting schools and groups great ticket offers and information about curriculum links. hcmf// is also an Arts Award supporter. For information on our offer go to: http://www.hcmf.co.uk/ hcmf-is-an-Arts-Award-Supporter To discuss your visit further please contact Sarah McWatt on 01484 471116 or email s.mcwatt@hud.ac.uk We will continue to develop our Learning & Participation programme throughout the year.

Please check our website and social media for updates.

Sound System built by Paul Huxtable © Elliot Baxter

Culture project has created a unique interactive sound system which will be housed at the Festival and will form the focus of this year’s Pop-Up Art School, where we will explore the many different facets of the culture through engaging with music via art, media and crafts, facilitated by students from the PGCE Art, Design and Music programme.

The Pop-Up will also provide a hands-on opportunity for you to interact directly with the sound system and make some noise! Dig out your old dub and reggae vinyl and join us!

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11 Konus Quartett: Jürg Frey St Paul’s Hall, 12 noon Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Konus Quartett: Fabio Oehrli soprano / alto saxophone Jonas Tschanz alto saxophone Christian Kobi tenor saxophone Stefan Rolli baritone saxophone Jürg Frey Mémoire, horizon UK PREMIERE Chiyoko Szlavnics During a Lifetime UK PREMIERE Swiss saxophone quartet Konus Quartett – a favourite ensemble of hcmf// 2015 Composer in Residence Jürg Frey – make their Huddersfield debut with the UK premiere performance of Frey’s Mémoire, horizon. A UK premiere by Chiyoko Szlavnics, a composer who practises in both the visual and auditory disciplines of art and for whom the exploration of the ‘beating’ phenomena is a central aspect of her work, completes the programme.

Jürg Frey (1953, Switzerland) Mémoire, horizon UK PREMIERE (2013 – 2014) 30’ In my music I’m balancing these two presences: linearity and width. One can experience time as a linear path, going on and on; or time is expansive, the music standing still and the space opening more and more. Mémoire, horizon is on the threshold between these two experiential worlds.

When it stays close to the line, or path, space is still present, and when the music stands still, opening into space, it is still possible to experience it as moving forward step by step. This fragile field of tension may lead to an inner landscape of horizons and memories. © Jürg Frey Chiyoko Szlavnics (1967, Canada) During a Lifetime UK PREMIERE (2015) 18’ This composition, commissioned by Konus Quartett features a set of multiphonics proposed by the ensemble. Focusing on the timbral quality and actual pitches of these multiphonics, sinewaves are sometimes used to resonate with certain pitches, to highlight them via glissandi or beating, or to extend them by adding intervals implied by the pitches, which are often seemingly inharmonic. The multiphonics range from simple, very clear, bell-like (sinusoidal) dyads, to impenetrable, uncountable bands of clusters (those most often heard in contemporary music).

The piece explores various settings, ranging from reduced, transparent solos (in order to perceive as much as possible), to ‘multi-multiphonic’ chords, some of which produce astounding results. © Chiyoko Szlavnics Produced by hcmf// supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

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12 Karkowski / Xenakis Bates Mill Blending Shed, 4pm Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Daniel Buess percussion Aleksander Gabryś double bass Daniel Buess and Aleksander Gabryś continue the focus on Iannis Xenakis and Zbigniew Karkowski at hcmf// 2015, exploring Xenakis’ influence on Karkowski as well as Karkowski’s instrumental music.

Zbigniew Karkowski (1958 – 2013, Poland) Form & Disposition UK PREMIERE (2008) 30’ Iannis Xenakis (1922 – 2001, Greece) Theraps (1976) 11’ Zbigniew Karkowski (1958 – 2013, Poland) Studio Varèse UK PREMIERE (2013) 35’ The idea to perform Zbigniew Karkowski and Iannis Xenakis’ music together during two concerts cropped up in December 2013, after the Polish composer’s death. The choice seemed obvious, although Karkowski’s trademark had been noise music and he had rarely performed outside this scene.

There are plenty of arguments for this juxtaposition.

Krakow-born composer Zbigniew Karkowski (1958 – 2013) was recognised internationally for his imaginative and non-conforming works. After graduating from Krakow Academy of Music, he continued his music studies in Sweden and in the Netherlands before settling in Japan in the 1990s. Karkowski was active mostly in the field of experimental music but he was also interested in improvisation and creating of sound art.

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In 1989 Karkowski was a resident at Les Ateliers UPIC, a centre for the development and promotion of computer-assisted composition system, created and applied by Xenakis. He also participated in several of Xenakis’ lectures at the Université de Paris I. Karkowski repeatedly admitted that this experience had been immensely formative for him and called Xenakis ‘a true visionary’ and ‘a teacher different from all the others’. Many years later he initiated a project dedicated to Persepolis (1971), as part of which remixes of Xenakis’ electroacoustic epopee were prepared by, among others, Otomo Yoshihide, Ryoji Ikeda, Merzbow and Francisco Lopéz. The project, executed under Xenakis’ patronage, resulted in a double album released in 2002, including Xenakis’ original composition and nine reinterpretations, including Karkowski’s Doing by Not Doing.

Both composers displayed a similar approach to sound: Karkowski used stochastic procedures typical for Xenakis’ work and achieved sound effects that evoked Xenakis’ musical pieces.

James Harley, author of the book Xenakis: His Life in Music and the Greek composer’s student, perceives Karkowski as one Xenakis’ successors.

The program of two concerts is structured around two main axes – one investigates Xenakis’ influence on Karkowski, while the other focuses on Karkowski’s instrumental music, less known than his electronic pieces.

Towards the end of his life Karkowski returned to instrumental writings. He collaborated with number of musicians, among them Daniel Buess (percussion), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), Aleksander Gabryś (double-bass), Erik Drescher (flute), Kasper Teodor Toeplitz (bass guitar), for whom he wrote solo pieces and electronic music.

He also cooperated with many outstanding ensembles for contemporary music, including Ensemble Phoenix (Basel), Zeitkratzer (Berlin), and Apartment House (London).

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In this way the concerts will give a larger view on Karkowski’s music and its aesthetical background.

The aim is also to investigate how Karkowski’s many years’ experience in the field of pure electronic music has shaped his treatment of acoustic instruments.

The project is curated by Monika Pasiecznik. © Monika Pasiecznik Produced by hcmf// in partnership with SONORA; supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme and the Polish Cultural

Zbigniew Karkowski © Atsuko Nojiri

Institute in London

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Pierluigi Billone: Forging the scales of justice t is necessary at the beginning to keep distance from the sound conception we already know.

Then, I simply stop (knowing) what a sound is, and consequently what a noise is, what a pitch, what a voice or singing or a bassoon. I keep waiting for a different starting point.’

From a lecture given by Pierluigi Billone at Harvard and Columbia universities in 2010 One such starting point for the Italian-born, Vienna-resident composer comes in the eyecatching form of his 2004 work Mani.De Leonardis for car suspension coils and glass bowls. Going beyond the brute force shock tactics that might tempt many composers, Billone challenges the soloist with an intricate dance of striking and muffling actions. Vibrations from the springs are transmitted back through the hands, melding sonic smith with instrument in a circuit of energy.

The scrapyard visits are something of a red herring, however, when this former student of Lachenmann and Sciarrino’s quest to reinvent first principles can be heard as clearly in Legno.Edre II.Edre (2003) for bassoon. From the score, dense with multiphonics, oscillating beats and exacting directions for lip position and reed pressure, emerges an instrument with both a fiercely primal heart and an exquisitely delicate response. As he says in the piece’s notes: ‘The traditional sound here is no longer at the centre.’

Billone’s break with tradition encompasses both Western hierarchies of sound source – hence those suspension coils – and the nebulous yet strictly policed border line between ‘music’ and ‘noise’. In his 2010 lecture, the composer noted how the sound of metal has been largely ignored by the West. In Medieval Europe, trumpet, drum and cymbals were excluded from Christian ritual,

Pierluigi Billone © Benjamin Chelly

‘I

whereas in Tibetan culture they were seen as sacred. Such perspective informs Ebe und anders (2014), written for Klangforum Wien, with trumpet, trombone and two percussionists prominent among waves of silvery timbres that shiver and exult in a ‘ritualised sound journey’.

And in Mani. Δίκη and Δίκη Wall (both 2012), metal is placed at the forefront: the former a solo piece assembling a ‘large metal instrument’ from the interdependent elements of Tibetan sounding bowls, Chinese and Thai gongs and plate bells; the latter seeing woodwind, strings and extended piano imitate and complement the percussion’s soundworld. ‘Δίκη’ here translates as ‘justice’: not a dry, bureaucratic process but the ‘piercing eye’ of the ancient Orphic Hymns, a harsh yet necessary cleanse to strip away cultural baggage so that the sound can be reborn anew. ‘In a different perspective,’ Billone writes, ‘the usual cultural limits of a body making sound, could have no real reason more to exist. They could and should be overcome.’ © Abi Bliss

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13 Ensemble CEPROMUSIC St Paul’s Hall, 7.30pm Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online) Ensemble CEPROMUSIC Matthew Sergeant Bet Golgotha WORLD PREMIERE Christian Wolff Robert UK PREMIERE Víctor Ibarra La dimensión frágil UK PREMIERE Pierluigi Billone Legno.Edre II.Edre UK PREMIERE Hilda Paredes Jitanjáfora UK PREMIERE Established in 2012 to stimulate the development of contemporary music in Mexico, Ensemble CEPROMUSIC delivers an exciting and varied programme of works including Jitanjáfora, by renowned Mexican-born, London-based composer Hilda Paredes, and Christian Wolff’s 2010 work Robert.

Matthew Sergeant (1984, UK) Bet Golgotha WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 6’ Bet Golgotha is an ancient rock-hewn church, one of many such structures at the UNESCO World-Heritage site in Lalibela, Ethiopia. The church is special: it is the only structure to contain ornate carved tableaux and houses the tomb of the site’s namesake, King Lalibela. Yet there are ambiguities. Bet Golgotha is part of an entanglement of structures – scholars disagree as to where one ends and the other begins. Despite its contents, it has fallen into disuse by the many contemporary pilgrims that visit the area – it is now little more than a storage room. The piece is an exploration of such a state. As instruments attempt to mimic the materials of others, the ensemble creaks with glitches and scratches, occupying a continuum of erosion and forgetting. © Matthew Sergeant

Christian Wolff (1934, USA) Robert UK PREMIERE (2010) 30’

Robert is dedicated to the dancer Robert Swinston. The structural idea comes from a Merce Cunningham dance for five dancers, which starts with a solo, goes to duo, then trio, etc. till all five are dancing. The instrumentation is open, at least five players required. The music begins in one unison line, then goes to two; then, after sections of ‘anarchic’ counterpoint – that is, a number of players play the same series of short phrases, each in an independently chosen sequence – in three, five and four parts (the additive pattern is side-stepped). Altogether there are differing patches of writing with various notations, variously focusing: primarily on pitch and counterpoint; rhythm (no pitch specification); dynamics (only); coordination (only). © Christian Wolff Víctor Ibarra (Mexico) La dimensión frágil UK PREMIERE (2015) 15’ During my residence in Spain as a member of the Casa of Velázquez French Academy in Madrid, I developed a project based on an interdisciplinary endeavor established between visual arts and music. As part of this project I had the opportunity to collaborate with the French photographer Guillaume Lemarchal. During our encounters, we had the occasion to dialogue about some recurrent concepts shown on his work, which seemed to me, to be a fundamental basis for our endeavor.

Among other topics, we discussed concepts such as: the inherent memory of a landscape, the borders and limits, reading ambiguities, encounter and resistance or a dream’s failure. Química del agua (2015) is the first piece derived from this joint effort; however, many other interesting ideas were left beside in that first attempt. Thus, while writing La dimensión frágil, I decided to start working from a re-reading of the elements previously referred, which to me had an undoubtedly potential. Moreover, throughout the second part of this interdisciplinary project, I’ve focused

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particularly on the multiple possibilities of a sound object’s ‘design’ by questioning both, its metrical properties as well as the medium which contains it (the acoustical space). Doing this, as a challenge to transgress the one-dimensional sound barrier. La dimensión frágil was written between Perpignan, Lyon and Cassis in October 2015 for Ensemble CEPROMUSIC, on the occasion of their concert at this year’s hcmf//. © Víctor Ibarra Pierluigi Billone (1960, Italy) Legno.Edre II.Edre (2003) 14’ In recent years, I have embarked on a long personal study and exploration of the bassoon.

The first results of this work are the soloist part in Mani. Long (2001) for ensemble, some of Studi da concerto (2003), Legno. Edre I-V (2003 – 2004) for solo bassoon, and Legno. Stele (2004) for two bassoon soloists and ensemble.

Legno. Edre I-V for solo bassoon is a work of deep breath, where technical interests, compositional ideas, abstract concepts and an emotional surge towards sound meet at the point where it becomes possible to achieve the special ‘freedom’ that is born when a complete familiarity with the instrument is oriented with attention and the ability to listen.

Here, the traditional sound is no longer at the centre. By offering all the unexplored inhomogeneity of its physical and acoustic properties, the bassoon opens completely.

Thus, terms like ‘exploration of sound’, ‘research’, ‘extended effects’ etc., (that always refer back to the primary role of the traditional sound, whether explicit or implicit) are meaningless here.

The instrument is completely reimagined under the impulse of a different musical conception that creates its own hierarchies and orientations – inevitably the whole instrumental technique changes, and especially the dual hand-mouth relationship (and the related system of notation).

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The interpreter is entrusted with the difficult task of advancing into this open space. © Pierluigi Billone Hilda Paredes (1957, Mexico) Jitanjáfora UK PREMIERE (2014) 18’ The meaning of the tile refers to a poetic composition made out of meaningless words but with rich phonetic implications that can themselves give meaning to a text.

Jitanjáfora was the first work that the young Mexican Ensemble CEPROMUSIC commissioned and it is dedicated to them and the conductor José Luis Castillo, who premiered it in Mexico City in 2014.

As this was the first time I worked with these young players, I wanted to involve them in exploring a wide range of instrumental techniques that I have been working on for several years. The piece explores different timbric combinations that the different instruments can provide, as well as their expressive possibilities and thus, the form of the piece is shaped.

Jitanjáfora was commissioned by Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura through Centro de Experimentación y Producción de Música Contemporánea of México. © Hilda Paredes Produced by hcmf// supported by the Government of Mexico as part of Year of Mexico in the UK 2015 and also supported by the British Council, CONACULTA and INBA

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14 Jakob Ullmann Town Hall, 10pm Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Erik Drescher flute Dafne Vicente-Sandoval bassoon / artistic direction Pavlos Serassis basset horn Saori Furukawa violin Silvia Tarozzi violin Cyprien Busolini viola Ellen Fallowfield cello Deborah Walker cello Carlota Cáceres percussion Lucia Carro Veiga percussion Jakob Ullmann composer / artistic direction Jürg Henneberger conductor Following the critically acclaimed (and first complete) performance of Jakob Ullmann’s Son Imaginaire III at hcmf// 2013, an especially selected collective of musicians come together at hcmf// 2015 to present the world premiere of his new work la segunda canción del ángel desaparecido.

Jakob Ullmann (1958, Germany) la segunda canción del ángel desaparecido WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 90’ In 1987 I wrote a piece for seven instruments with the title la CAnción del ánGEl desaparecido. It was based on the poems of Rafael Alberti and written in commemoration of missing persons especially (but not only) in Chile and Argentina. This piece was performed at the Donaueschingen festival in 1988. For several reasons I was not satisfied with this performance, so I created a second version of the piece. I became less restrictive, and a flute replaced the oboe. But even after the changes the piece could not convince me. So I put it aside. In 2011 the score fell into my hands coincidentally and I had the impression that the material could be used for a new attempt. During my considerations of how such a new attempt could be possible I heard that the famous Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos had died in a traffic accident. So I decided to dedicate the new piece to the memory of this great artist. Perhaps the slow developments in the piece will remind listeners of the special kind of camera work in Angelopoulos’ movies.

The long – often broken – melodies performed by the bassoon in particular use material from the old piece, the ‘song’ is often a song for bassoon – perhaps one could see the whole piece as something like a little bassoon concerto.

To the old material I added not only structures of slow glissandi and chords which are adumbrated by the string players – the most important change is the addition of material for the wind section, based on non-Western-European music (so for basset horn and the trio of wind instruments).

The trios are clearly audible because they have a slightly higher sound level than the remaining material, which is very soft. © Jakob Ullmann Produced by hcmf// supported by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and Goethe-Institut London

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15 Erik Drescher St Paul’s Hall, 12 noon Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Erik Drescher glissando flute Salvatore Sciarrino Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio UK PREMIERE Michael Maierhof splitting 51 UK PREMIERE Dror Feiler – Questions and Stones 3 UK PREMIERE Alvin Lucier Double Himalaya UK PREMIERE Erik Drescher has placed a special focus in recent years on his work around the glissando flute – a normal C-flute with a variable-length headjoint replacing the standard mouthpiece, developed

by Robert Dick. This focus is reflected in his solo recital at hcmf// 2015, which includes repertoire composed specifically for the instrument.

Salvatore Sciarrino (1947, Italy) Il pomeriggio di un allarme al parcheggio UK PREMIERE (2014) 15’ June 2014, an afternoon in Berlin. A car alarm – formed of recognisable stereotypes, yet somehow apart from the usual rigid formula – tears the vital space of the city and its tangle of sounds. My mind invaded this strange sounding alarm, which seemed to me the performance of a repertoire, a collection of alarms from which one must choose a favourite. I associated its gliassandi harmonics with those made by the flute adapted by Dick, which Erik Drescher had offered to play for me several days earlier, stressing its compression of tone. The following week I took this into consideration, trying to place it into a new musical context, as varied as the buzz of the city between the brutal interruptions of the alarm had seemed to me. The scope of the piece is to interrupt – rather than imitate – reality, replacing it with an organic image, a discourse that in its continuity produces a shadow of urban noise – the afternoon not of a faun, but of a car alarm.

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Translated and edited from an original note © Salvatore Sciarrino Michael Maierhof (1956, Germany) splitting 51 UK PREMIERE (2015) 10’ Since 1999 I have been working on the series splitting for solo instruments. Most of the pieces are about splitting the pitch into various sound qualities. In splitting 51, modulations of the stream of air (via gliss mouthpiece) and the ‘splitted’ air by particles of spittle are routed into the resonance space of a plastic cup with a microphone. The flautist produces an additional sound layer by using a sonic motor to activate the plastic cup’s resonance space and the flute mouthpiece itself. © Michael Maierhof Dror Feiler (1954, Sweden / Israel) – Questions and Stones 3 UK PREMIERE (2013) 13’ On the situation in modern music For those gathered dutifully round the bed, the death-rattle of a dying man is so boring that they fall asleep. But their snores sound so like the death-rattle that it is difficult to ascertain who is actually dying. Such is the relationship between bourgeois society and modern music.

Of course, music is a remarkable art. Its muse has bodily defect. She lacks both legs and so cannot stand or walk on earth. She is forced, by means of a pair of extremely dilapidated wings, to move in ‘higher regions’. But now up there too, there is inconvenience from the aeroplanes and the smoke from the factories, and radio listeners curse the disturbance and static. But the somewhat disabled muse flutters bravely on and, in spite of everything, assists a multitude of people to produce a host of questionable things; questionable because they have almost nothing to do with anybody, not even those who produce them; questionable because mostly they aren’t worth the question…. © Hanns Eisler (Uber modern Musik, Die Rote Fahne, 15 October 1927)

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Alvin Lucier (1931, USA) Double Himalaya UK PREMIERE (2012) 12’

Double Himalaya was inspired by a drawing of part of the Himalaya Mountain Range given to the composer by Alice Schumacher of Portland, Connecticut. It was commissioned by and written for Erik Drescher. © Alvin Lucier Produced by hcmf// supported by Goethe-Institut London

16 Jonty Harrison Phipps Hall, 4pm Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Travel broadens the mind. It also develops the traveller’s ear by making it more keenly aware of new, different, ‘alien’ sounds.

Despite the confusion and discomfort of actually getting there (and then having to negotiate the idiosyncrasies of local transport and deal with different languages, attitudes and customs), we all want to travel – even though disorientation, compounded by jet lag, seems inevitable.

Going / Places, a large-scale multichannel acousmatic project, will transport you… Sit back and enjoy the aural ride.

Jonty Harrison (1952, UK) Going / Places WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 60’ The idea of composing a large acousmatic work based broadly on the theme of travel (and the accompanying confusion, disorientation and even alienation) arose several years ago, when I was recording in the London Underground and was asked directions by an overseas visitor.

My habit of carrying sound recording equipment on my travels developed in the early 1990s when I became interested in capturing, as compositional material, everyday sonic events that somehow indicated their geographical location – I have amassed quite a sound library over the years! In 2014, I composed a concert piece and two gallery works in which material from very different places was presented simultaneously – physically impossible in the ‘real world’, but believable in sound. Large loudspeaker arrays aided the illusion.

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The material, however, still deserved further investigation, so Pierre Alexandre Tremblay’s request for a long multichannel work was perfect.

A Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship enabled me to travel to locations not already represented in my sound collection and to engage programmers to develop signal-processing software. The compositional period was supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Going / Places is not so much a piece as an ongoing project; this is ‘the story so far’. I intend to carry on travelling, recording new materials that will undoubtedly demand to participate.

I am hugely indebted to many people and organisations for their contributions and assistance: •

•

Jonty Harrison © Alison Warne

•

the Leverhulme Trust, for a 12-month Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, enabling field recording trips to Australia and Iceland, and the development of multichannel signal processing software; National Lottery through Arts Council England, for a Grants for the Arts award; Pierre Alexandre Tremblay;

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James Carpenter and Chris Tarren, for developing multichannel signal-processing tools – downloadable in BEASTtools at: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/facilities/eastudios/research/beasttools.aspx; • Alex Harker and students, for setting up the HISS system for me to hear; • Graham McKenzie (hcmf//) and CeReNeM / Electric Spring (University of Huddersfield); • Lisa Whistlecroft and Steve Benner, for sharing knowledge of places to record in Iceland (and who were reckless enough to accompany us on the trip); • David Hirst, for hospitality, advice and information about Australian recording locations; • Elainie Lillios, for hosting me on the Klingler Electro-Acoustic Residency at Bowling Green State University, Ohio; also Michael Thompson; • Ali (as ever), for keeping me more or less sane throughout the project (and helping to carry the recording gear!). © Jonty Harrison Co-produced by the HISS and hcmf// supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and by the Leverhulme Trust

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17 Biliana Voutchkova Bates Mill Blending Shed, 7.30pm Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Biliana Voutchkova violin / voice Øyvind Torvund Plans for future violin pieces WORLD PREMIERE

Peter Ablinger Augmented Study for 7 Violins UK PREMIERE Biliana Voutchkova Ruins of rules WORLD PREMIERE Biliana Voutchkova presents a solo program that highlights her interest in exploring the different soundings of the violin. The musical macrame with various ways of layering, microtonality and voicing absorbs the listener into a land of various imaginary soundscapes.

Øyvind Torvund (1976, Norway) Plans for future violin pieces WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 15’

Plans for future violin pieces is a multimedia presentation of ideas for violin pieces that would be too expensive or impractical to realise.

Peter Ablinger (1959, Austria) Augmented Study for 7 violins UK PREMIERE (2012) 25’

Augmented study is a proportion canon from a slow glissando over one octave.

Biliana Voutchkova (1972, Bulgaria) Ruins of rules WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 20’

Ruins of rules is a real time composition that blends the sounds of the violin and voice into one symbiotic structure.

Produced by hcmf// supported by the Norwegian Embassy, Austrian Music Export and Austrian Cultural Forum London

Biliana Voutchkova

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Wednesday 25 // November

18 reductive journal FOUR: the book launch tour #1 Bates Mill Photographic Studio, 10pm Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Ryoko Akama objects and electronics Heather Frasch flute Jürg Frey clarinet Sarah Hughes objects and zither Bruno Guastalla cello and bandoneon Manfred Werder traces This is the first event in the book launch tour of FOUR – celebrating the fourth issue of mumei publishing’s free online journal, reductive journal.

The central tenet of the journal investigates the diverse perceptions that occur when we deal with text and sound. It attempts to consider minimal and abstract forms of art to interrelate sonic, image and text experiences. We ask various contributors to participate in each issue with their own compositional approaches and methodologies in relation to the journal’s theme. The first three journals include works from Taku Sugimoto, Toshiya Tsunoda, Manfred Werder, Jesse Goin, Joseph Clayton Mills amongst others.

Jürg Frey (1953, Switzerland) Floating Categories WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 20’ lo wie (Korea) CLOUD SCISSORS WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 20’ Manfred Werder (1965, Switzerland) 6 scores WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 20’

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FOUR consists of 11 cross-disciplined works around text-sound compositions, examining text scores, images, objects, constraints, literature, instructions, poems or notations.

We commissioned Ryoko Akama (UK), Daniela Cascella (UK), Patrick Farmer (UK), Jürg Frey (Switzerland), Christine Sun Kim (USA), Sarah Hughes (UK) and David Stent (UK), Joseph Clayton Mills (Canada), Daniel del Rio (Spain), Manfred Werder (Switzerland), lo wie (Korea) and Audra Wolowiec (USA) to echo ideas of empty space and absence which can be deciphered, interpreted, performed, read and so on. These works are reduced materials but not reducible to fewer elements. Far from that, what is behind absence is not the transparency but the complexity of potentials.

This event ‘discusses’ Bates Mill Photographic Studio as a possibility, composing the space with exhibition, presentation, performance and installation. You are invited to find a visual exhibition with framed works extracted from FOUR, a presentation corner introducing reductive journal, and a group of six musicians / artists composing and performing sonic actualisations and interpretations corresponding with the book, in which case, the selected works or pages act as their ‘scores’ for the evening. The result is a unique experience, not only about listening but also seeing and reading.

reductive journal / mumei publishing is Ryoko Akama, Heather Frasch, Daniel del Rio and Vasco Alves. The journal info and past issues are available at www.reductivejournal.com © Ryoko Akama Produced by hcmf// supported by Arts Council England, Acción Cultural Española and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

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Thursday 26 // November

19 Diego Castro Magaš Phipps Hall, 2pm Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Diego Castro Magaš guitar Following the success of his performance at hcmf// 2014, Chilean virtuoso Diego Castro Magaš champions recent British guitar music in a concert launching his CD Shrouded Mirrors. The recording – released by Huddersfield Contemporary Records – includes first recordings of pieces by Matthew Sergeant, Michael Finnissy, Bryn Harrison and Wieland Hoban amongst others. This concert at hcmf// 2015 presents a selection of works from the recording, alongside several other pieces in the same vein: challenging repertoire of radical aesthetics and highly evocative content.

Christopher Fox (1955, UK) Chile (1991) 11’ James Erber (1951, UK) Am Grabe Memphis Minnies (1997) 8’ Brian Ferneyhough (1943, UK) Kurze Schatten II (1983 - 89) 18’ Wieland Hoban (1978, UK) Knokler I WORLD PREMIERE (2009) 5’ Bryn Harrison (1969, UK) M.C.E. (2010) 16’ The repertoire for this concert is made up of (but not limited to) music generally associated with so-called complex music. In fact, most of these scores portray highly rationalised materials and notated challenges as well as strong connections to metaphorical domains. The seduction that these pieces exert upon me lies in this particular combination of features, as they offer an opportunity to explore thresholds. That is, we may regard the open field of musical gesture as a territory for the embodiment of metaphorical

correspondences, given that ‘gesture’ is a term that surpasses the Cartesian divide between the physical and the mental. Therefore, for the performer, the challenge becomes that of shaping the physical / sonic image of the materials through a score regarded as an entire cultural artefact.

Thus, Fox’s Chile brings into play a rhythmic vocabulary based on Latin-American music, suggesting metaphors of political significance without any direct quotation. Erber’s Am Grabe Memphis Minnies, originally a tribute to Louisiana-born blues singer Memphis Minnie, has resonances of the sound produced by many blues guitarists in the 1930s. Ferneyhough’s Kurze Schatten II, a seven movement work, adopts the convention of a baroque suite by pairing slow and fast movements (concerned with polyphony and variation, respectively) plus a final fantasia; a reflection on the text of the same name by Walter Benjamin and his work on the baroque. In Hoban’s Knokler I, the title comes from a Norwegian poem, in which the word for bones – knokler, which resembles ‘knuckles’ – establishes a bodily connection to the guitar while also to the poem, which refers to a collection of small bones placed to form pictures. Harrison’s M.C.E., a piece in three main sections, takes its name from the initials of the Dutch graphic artist M C Escher, who explored the illusion of the Penrose staircase in the lithograph Kimmen en dalen (Ascending and Descending); a staircase that appears to be continually ascending without getting any higher. © Diego Castro Magaš Produced by hcmf// supported by CeReNeM, Centre for Research in New Music, University of Huddersfield; also supported by hcmf// Benefactor Peter Bamfield

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20 Eddie Prévost’s Workshop Bates Mill Blending Shed, 4pm Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Jennifer Allum violin Marjolaine Charbin piano Ute Kanngiesser cello Daniel Kordik Vostok synthesiser / electronics Massimo Magee alto / sopranino saxophones (electro-acoustic) N O Moore guitarism David O’ Connor baritone saxophone James O’Sullivan electric guitar David W Stockard drum An improvisation workshop

Eddie Prévost

‘We (AMM) are searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them.’

Cornelius Cardew, Towards an Ethic of Improvisation (1967) Cornelius Cardew A Reader, Copula, 2006

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The workshop method examines the meaning and validity of Cardew’s early formulation.

Eddie Prévost – percussionist and drummer. Cofounder of the seminal improvisation ensemble AMM which celebrates its 50th anniversary in a featured event at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

An albeit reluctant theorist, Prévost has published three books about an improvising aesthetic that grew out of the AMM experience. And for the past 16 years has convened a weekly London workshop that has drawn over 500 musicians from at least 20 countries. All this extra-musical activity is in response to an absence of an appropriate criitcal theory for this activity. His perpetually provisional thesis acts as a counterweight to received wisdom and the attribution of method and meaning arising often from those who have little practical experience and even less sympathy for this way of making music.

This concert features musicians drawn from the London workshop.

Produced by hcmf//

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Thursday 26 // November

hcmf// @ British Art Show 8 Leeds Art Gallery, 8pm Free event Artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White work at the intersection of art, music and information networks. Their collaborative work Open Music Archive is an ongoing project to distribute out-of-copyright archive material and to spark collaborative activity through exhibitions, films and live events.

This event reanimates both public domain archive material and copyleft recordings generated by the artists and their collaborators. The event brings together a live remix of a new audio work produced the British Art Show 8 alongside the presentation of two recent Open Music Archive projects.

Eileen Simpson (1977, UK) & Ben White (1977, UK) Auditory Learning WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 30’ Performed live by Bambooman For British Art Show 8, Eileen Simpson and Ben White sourced vinyl records of UK chart hits from 1962 – the last year that commercial recordings can be retrieved for public use, due to recent copyright revisions – and extracted over 50,000 sounds from them to produce a ‘public sonic inventory’. This inventory of individual notes, percussive elements and vocal phonemes provides the copyleft soundtrack for the artists’ new audiovisual work assembled during the exhibition’s tour. For the event, the artists invite local Leedsbased electronic music producer Bambooman to produce a new performance exclusively using the 1962 inventory as source material.

Auditory Learning was commissioned for British Art Show 8, curated by Anna Colin and Lydia Yee

Open Music Archive DJ set Eileen Simpson (1977, UK) & Ben White (1977, UK) ATL 2067 (2013) 30’ Audio-visual DJ set

ATL 2067 imagines a future Atlanta. The project reanimates music recordings fixed during the early days of the recording industry in the city of Atlanta – and controlled under copyright in the USA until 2067. Working with local hip-hop producers, 78rpm recordings from the 1920s were reassembled into the rhythmic matrix of rap beats.

A street-level sound system was installed and an open mic invitation was extended to the Atlanta public who were invited to rap about the future of the city. For five hours people stepped from the crowd to improvise a freestyle rap cypher over the archive / future beats.

ATL 2067 was originally commissioned for Flux Night 2013, curated by Helena Reckitt

Auditory Learning research image © Eileen Simpson + Ben White

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Open Music Archive DJ set Eileen Simpson (1977, UK) & Ben White (1977, UK) Local Recall (2014) 20’ Film with live soundtrack performed by Graham Massey (808 State)

Local Recall explores ghostly echoes that persist through repetition in the playback of music and draws a line between the model 19th century industrial city and a post-industrial Manchester of the early 1990s. Using the algorithmic logic of the search query, the film rips and reassembles archive material from Ancoats, Manchester and beyond – ranging from footage of workers leaving the factory to videos of young ravers. The film is accompanied by a specially commissioned soundtrack, performed by Graham Massey, founding member of 808 State. Massey was invited by the artists to reassemble popular 1890s piano roll music using 1990s MIDI music technology.

Local Recall was produced for A Different Spirit in 2014, curated by Helen Wewiora Produced by hcmf// in partnership with Leeds Art Gallery and British Art Show 8

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21 Ensemble Grizzana: Jürg Frey

harmonies and melodic surprises – while the piano brings with it the shimmer of a soloist. © Jürg Frey

Phipps Hall, 12 noon

Jürg Frey (1953, Switzerland) Grizzana WORLD PREMIERE (2014) 15’

Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Ensemble Grizzana: Jürg Frey clarinet Mira Benjamin violin Richard Craig flute Emma Richards viola Philip Thomas piano Anton Lukoszevieze cello Jürg Frey Fragile Balance UK PREMIERE Jürg Frey Grizzana WORLD PREMIERE Jürg Frey Area of Three UK PREMIERE Jürg Frey Ferne Farben UK PREMIERE Some of the foremost performers of the music of the Wandelweiser Collective come together as Ensemble Grizzana – named after Jürg Frey’s 2014 work – to perform four pieces from the composer’s recent oeuvre. In this music all is laid bare, relationships between players and musical lines are exposed as fragile, flexible and complex.

Frey’s extraordinary sensitivity to pitch and to time and space entices the players to focus afresh upon their craft, as he himself demonstrates through his breathtakingly quiet and nuanced clarinet playing. This is amongst the most honest, exhilarating and profound music of our time.

Jürg Frey (1953, Switzerland) Fragile Balance UK PREMIERE (2014) 15’ This is a two-page score; one page consists of lists of single sounds and little motifs, independently read by the musicians from top to bottom; the other page is a melody for piano. The title Fragile Balance refers to the musical process, which is kept up in the air – partly with foreboding, partly with unforeseeable developments in sounds,

The Italian painter Giorgio Morandi owned a summer house in Grizzana. This piece expresses my respect for the painter. Morandi’s paintings are figurative, but at the same time they incorporate aspects of abstract painting – Morandi, then, is an abstract painter working with objects.

I can recognise these qualities in my music: if ‘melody’ can be understood as the figurative part, and ‘sound’ as the abstract part in a piece, then I am working in between the two. Sometimes ‘melody’ is treated as an abstract thing, and ‘sound’ has aspects and elements of ‘melody’.

With Morandi’s work in mind, the colours of instrumentation and harmony in Grizzana mirror the painter’s palette of chalky blue, purple, brown and yellow. © Jürg Frey Jürg Frey (1953, Switzerland) Area of Three UK PREMIERE (2013) 30’ For many years I have been resistant to the idea of using canons in my music. Even today, having used this technique in my work, sometimes one may still recognize my critical position towards it: my canons often possess silences, flat or blank melodies or vague and uncertain structures.

I have learned that canons can also be simple: it’s the same thing, but it happens again and again.

When I walk through the streets I see canonical structures everywhere in daily life – it’s not just a musical phenomenon. With this in mind, I found my position towards the Canon, and I began to love it: once I have found the right notes, sounds and pauses, it goes on by itself, I just listen. Lovely. © Jürg Frey

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Jürg Frey (1953, Switzerland) Ferne Farben UK PREMIERE (2013) 12’ Central to the piece is the loudspeaker part and the superimposing of different field recordings and instrumental sounds. At first the musicians are listeners, and then they add, in accordance with the score, their sounds and colours to clarify – or to blur – the harmonies and colours in the distance. © Jürg Frey

Produced by hcmf// supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia Parts of this concert will be broadcast

by BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 26

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22 Berlin Splitter Orchester + George Lewis St Paul’s Hall, 7pm Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online) Berlin Splitter Orchester George Lewis trombone / electronics Berlin Splitter Orchester make their Huddersfield debut with the UK premiere of Creative Construction SetTM, a brand new work by American composer and improviser – and hcmf// 2015 featured composer – George Lewis.

December 2015

George Lewis (1952, USA) Creative Construction SetTM UK PREMIERE (2015) 45’ The title of the work pays homage to the Creative Construction Company, an early AACM ensemble.

Their name foregrounded agency, process, emergence and collectivity, aspects of creative practice CCSTM encourages. The work was made for the Splitter Orchester, which has described itself as an ‘un-conducted, leaderless, large group.’ Theorist Michael Pelz-Sherman calls this heteroriginal music, where ‘decisions are made during the performance as the product of the relationships of multiple agents.’

Splitter provided me with a set of questions about improvisors working with composers that brought out key issues around identity, methodology, genre, style, leadership and power. Among these were: 1) How will this help us to play better?

Philosopher of education Andrea English (University of Edinburgh) tells us that ‘Teaching that cultivates growth and transformation in learners…is an improvisational practice, one that requires recognizing where a learner …has lost

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the desire to move on past taken-for-granted ways of seeing and being in the world.’ This suggests a view of musical improvisation in which composers, improvisors, and audiences comprise part of an assemblage devoted to critical pedagogy about our world.

2) Do we need composers?

Muhal Richard Abrams’s characterization of the AACM School of Music as ‘collaboration between so-called teachers and so-called students’ leads us to CCSTM’s troubling of bright lines distinguishing ‘so-called composers’ from ‘socalled improvisors.’ CCSTM is a recombinationist computing machine in which indeterminacy, an aspect of everyday life that is addressed improvisatively, becomes one of its affordances.

In CCSTM, structure, freedom, power, agency and constraint become emergent in improvisative interaction.

3) Will [the composers] play with the group? What if we don’t like their playing?

J David Velleman proposes, ‘Figuring out how to live is a process of trial and error, in which the trials are what Mill called experiments in living.’

Here, CCSTM aspires to create a space where discontinuity, disruption, support, and struggle become audible pathways to new experience, leading to Arnold I Davidson’s experimentalist notion of ‘improvisation as a way of life.’

I hope they like my playing. © George Lewis Produced by hcmf// supported by the Berlin Senate Chancellery, Department of Cultural Affairs

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23 Philip Thomas: Jürg Frey Phipps Hall, 9pm Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Philip Thomas piano Jürg Frey Extended Circular Music No 2 WORLD PREMIERE

Jürg Frey Pianist, alone No 2 Jürg Frey Extended Circular Music No 9 WORLD PREMIERE

Three arrestingly intimate works drawn from the recent proliferation of piano music by the Swiss composer Jürg Frey are presented by UK pianist Philip Thomas, whose new recording of these and other recent works is released this autumn.

It is rare for a performer to feel quite as exposed as when playing Jürg Frey’s music, and likewise the piano itself – its sound, its mechanism, its history – is foregrounded in an unusually raw and intimate setting. The musical material is familiar – pitches, tonally resonant and distinctly organised, arranged across phrases and patterns, including forms of canon, featuring strategies of repetition and reiteration. Yet it is strangely unpredictable and elusive, like the way Satie’s Vexations never quite settles. One chord leads to another in ways that seem both systematic and intuitive, occasionally perplexing. Just as the music appears to be settled comfortably within a pattern it shifts without warning. And all the while the pianist – and only the pianist, alone - is involved with hammers and strings, making sense of this mysterious, intimate music, one note, one chord, at a time. © Philip Thomas

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Jürg Frey (1953, Switzerland) Extended Circular Music No 2 WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 5’ This piece is a sequence of eight chords. The manner in which the pianist plays these chords, with the finest and softest differences at each passage, raises at the end of each one the question: may I start again? The chords are more than repeated patterns, but a balanced phrase where the ending is kept open, vague and delicate – the recommencement appearing not as a cue but as an almost imperceptible floating.

Jürg Frey (1953, Switzerland) Pianist, alone No 2 (2010) 25’ Unlike the term ‘piece for solo piano’, Pianist, alone is more than just this genre. With Pianist, alone, I have the impression that the pianist makes his own way through the music, the melodies, the canons, the chord sequences and repetitions, while the listener is invited to follow him only as a guest. The music does not talk first of all to the audience – in fact, it takes little notice of their presence. It goes on and on, the pianist continues, hesitates sometimes, moves through sounds and lines, and makes his way, alone.

Jürg Frey (1953, Switzerland) Extended Circular Music No 9 WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 20’ The music moves in a circle, further each time as one or more chords are added to the circuit.

How many circuits are possible and does this process reach a natural end? After nearly a dozen repetitions, I feel a need to leave this music and to proceed forward, to make steps towards another manner of circular music: here too, things are added (and again removed). And now the music becomes no more this natural phrasing but an architectural repetition of patterns.

Programme notes © Jürg Frey Produced by hcmf// supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

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PROFILE

Zbigniew Karkowski here language ends, music begins.

Some words about my friend Zbigniew Karkowski. Firstly, he talked a lot and often with extreme candour. He was often brutally honest and did not suffers fools gladly. He pushed himself continuously, chaotically, uniformly and with great discipline. He laughed in the face of the madness of the World, he literally destroyed sound systems and anything that he disliked was ‘boollllllshit man’. He made people cry and was stubborn, obstinate and often hilariously funny. He could empty a space in seconds with a deafening, earsplitting, chest thumping combination of sub-bass and ultra-high frequencies. He once shattered a toilet bowl with the intensity of these sounds.

Zbig was a kind of existential zen warrior, where nothing mattered but the actual moment. He often would tour relentlessly, performing in some of the most unlikely venues in China and beyond. Once he told me that he had worked out how to tour Africa and go to the Congo for performances.

What of his music? Well, there is really nothing I can say, words fail me and it is totally useless to even begin to try to describe what his music was or is like.

On some of the music of our time he was often severely critical: ‘When I go to the concerts of contemporary music I don’t hear any music at all – all I hear is hard work.

In my opinion some examples of the recent trends in Western art music, like some compositions written in post serial “new complexity” style result in works that are a direct insult to the listeners. I mean you have to think that people who listen to your music are stupid in order to present them with music like this. The exactness is always fake.

The notation and graphical aspects of the scores have become more important than the sound of the music itself.’

I remember observing Zbigniew at the helm of a sound desk whilst we were performing once, his craggy visage illuminated by the lights of the console, like some strange Captain of a ship, hauling it through stormy seas. He was one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. There was something elemental and essentially pure about him and his artistic vision, he was constantly searching for new ways of redefining what music was and how it could be made. When we worked together on our last project for Sub Rosa, Nerve Cell-0 for cello and computer, he would struggle with me for days to try to encapsulate in written or notational form exactly what he wanted to make, until I realised that the act of composing for him was more a form of telepathy, almost a shamanistic act. It was only after we had finished the work in the studio and during the act of performing did the actual thing he wanted to make, actually emerge. Thus I will remember him, like a character out of a Joseph Conrad novel, a unique, intrepid and brave sonic explorer. © Anton Lukoszevieze

Zbigniew Karkowski © Annika von Hausswolf

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24 Apartment House: Zbigniew Karkowski Bates Mill Blending Shed, 11pm Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Apartment House: Gordon Mackay violin Hilary Sturt violin Bridget Carey viola Anton Lukoszevieze cello Simon Limbrick drums Apartment House pair two iconic and startling works. Zbigniew Karkowski’s elemental Field for amplified string quartet and live-electronics in a new version of the work written for them in 2006, alongside the premiere of Luiz Henrique Yudo’s paean to punk and skinhead music ORDEM & PROGRESSO, which strives to get ‘order’ from ‘chaos’, and from ‘chaos’ into ‘order’.

Zbigniew Karkowski (1958 – 2013, Poland) Field UK PREMIERE (2006) 30’ Luiz Henrique Yudo (1962, Brazil) ORDEM & PROGRESSO (2002 – 2003) 30’ Karkowski’s Field was premiered by Apartment House with him on live-electronics at the ICA in 2006 at the Cut and Splice Festival, commissioned

by BBC Radio 3. Tonight’s performance is a new version utilizing electronics devised by Karkowski in collaboration with Anton Lukoszevieze in 2012.

ORDEM & PROGRESSO by Luiz Henrique Yudo is scored for amplified string quartet and punk drummer. The essential aesthetic here is punk, skinhead or oi! music. The piece is a presentation of short ‘anthem-like’ wordless songs to each state of Brazil respectively (26 states + 1 Federal District (Brasília), 27 flags in total). The Brazilian motto, ‘Ordem and Progresso’, comes from August Comte’s motto of positivism, which was a very popular philosophical stream in Brazil by the end of the 19th century: ’L’amour pour principe et l’ordre pour base; le progrès pour but’ (Love as a principle and order as the basis; progress as the goal’). © Anton Lukoszevieze Produced by hcmf// supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme

Shri Sriram © Kirsty Halliday

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Just a Vibration Bates Mill Blending Shed, 11am Free Event Indian bass guitarist Shri Sriram presents a performance of an exciting new music project called Just A Vibration which brings together two distinct and diverse musical forms: Indian music and the traditional brass band. Well known as half of the highly successful UK drum & bass duo Badmarsh & Shri and for his ability to blend Indian and western musical styles, the largely selftaught Shri has developed a finely tuned sound that breaks boundaries. Shri is well-renowned as performer, producer and composer – he wrote and performed the official promo song for the Indian release of Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012), has remixed work for artists as diverse as De La Soul and the

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Kronos Quartet, appeared on Later With Jools Holland, performed at the Montreux and London Jazz Festivals, and is currently composing the soundtrack for his third Indian film with Yashraj Films.

During October and November Shri led Just A Vibration workshops in Huddersfield and Bradford in partnership with hcmf//. This Learning & Participation Project partnered Indian classical students from South Asian Arts UK (SAA-UK) and brass band students from Bradford Music Service together to explore cross-cultural music, blending traditional styles to create a unique contemporary fusion. The students will perform crossover compositions alongside the 72 piece Just A Vibration band, which includes Indian classical musicians and The Hammonds Saltaire Band.

Produced by hcmf// supported by Arts Council England and Bradford Music Service

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25 Quatuor Diotima St Paul’s Hall, 1pm Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online) Quatuor Diotima: YunPeng Zhao violin Constance Ronzatti violin Franck Chevalier viola Pierre Morlet cello Dieter Ammann String Quartet No 2 ‘Distanzenquartett’ Daniel Fígols-Cuevas Azoth WORLD PREMIERE Thomas Simaku String Quartet No 5 WORLD PREMIERE

Heinz Holliger String Quartet No 2 Following on from the success of their world premiere performance of Thomas Simaku’s String Quartet No 4 at the 2011 Festival, hcmf// 2015 sees Quatuor Diotima premiere the Albanian composer’s String Quartet No 5 – commissioned by hcmf// especially for the quartet. Daniel Fígols-Cuevas, one of a new generation of Catalan composers, also receives his Huddersfield debut with a world premiere performance in this exciting programme.

Dieter Ammann (1962, Switzerland) String Quartet No 2 ‘Distanzenquartett’ (2009) 14’ Is this piece a joke? A ‘Distance Quartet’ as an answer to Mozart’s ‘Dissonance Quartet’? What’s the meaning of this title? Nothing suggests that there is any ‘distance’ between the musicians or in the music itself. Ammann points out that the distance between musical extremes has become ever greater – between micro-intervals and tonal elements, and between non-metrical, free rhythmic and pulsating passages. At the same time, however, as we can hear, the distance between individual events has expanded. Sounds do not follow each other as closely as before,

not so restlessly, even if they are still highly charged with energy and are extremely subtle. Is there perhaps a certain calmness here? It is not that Ammann is here behaving like a dignified, ‘established’ composer and wants to engage in outward show: he simply treats his material in a more generous fashion, giving himself more time.

Sometimes the music holds for somewhat longer on its resting points. It savours the harmonies more (Ammann is also a master of harmony!); Ammann explores even deeper into his sound and in the end reaches an unexpected, slow, even beautiful close – though to be sure, not the kind of beauty we think we already know. © Thomas Meyer Daniel Fígols-Cuevas (1980, Catalonia) Azoth WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 12’ Azoth is the essential agent of transformation in alchemy. It is the name given by ancient alchemists to Mercury, the animating spirit hidden in all matter that makes transmutation possible.

This alchemic procedure is a clear image of my current central concern at the moment: how the different acoustic features of various instruments can be combined together to obtain brand new hybrid timbres and textures where components are not anymore distinguishable. This new acoustical objects may invite the audience to discover their own listening capabilities and consequently foster an awareness for the subjective thinking process, a mental activity present in the very act of perceiving. © Daniel Fígols-Cuevas Thomas Simaku (1958, Albania) String Quartet No 5 WORLD PREMIERE (2015) 15’ Dedicated to Terry Holmes Consisting of two parts played without a break, the idea for this piece is inextricably linked to my impressions from Berlin. A single gesture is constantly passed on from one instrument to another providing an essential textural impetus for the first part; the second part is composed of two

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Quatuor Diotima © Verena Chen

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duos incessantly interacting with and against each other. Whilst the instrumental partnerships here are well identified, various alliances are formed within the four sectors of the quartet. Although in no way programmatic, the extra-musical idea behind the piece is not incongruous to the Orwellian formula of 2 + 2 = 5. © Thomas Simaku Commissioned by hcmf//

Heinz Holliger (1939, Switzerland) String Quartet No 2 (2007) 24’ There is hardly another musical genre which is so burdened by its history as the string quartet.

Whoever composes for this ensemble inevitably senses the sceptical and critical stares of the great composers. This can have a paralysing and intimidating effect. Perhaps this is the reason why I have only now dared to rise once more to the great challenge, 34 years after my much criticised First String Quartet.

My Second String Quartet is a one-movement work with a duration of approximately twenty-three minutes, and can be subdivided into six sections: I: molto energico, impetuoso II: moderato (‘...wie Wolken um die Zeiten legt...’, Hölderlin / Scardanelli) III: Adagio (embellished canon) IV: shimmering (perpetuum mobile) V: Heterophonies (‘...wie Wolken um die Zeiten legt...’, Hölderlin / Scardanelli) VI: 12-part epilogue in 3 parts (‘singbarer Rest’, Paul Celan) The String Quartet No.2 was commissioned by KölnMusik for the Zehetmair Quartet, and received its world premiere on 29 February 2008 in Cologne.

It is dedicated to Elliot Carter. © Heinz Holliger Produced by hcmf// supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia; also supported by the hcmf// Friends

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26 Eastern Waves

Mirt (1979, Poland) Solitaire

Phipps Hall, 4pm

A solo composition and re-interpretation of the legendary Solitaire by Arne Nordheim. Mirt took as his departure point various ways of slowing down the original piece by the Norwegian electronic master. The new material revealed a number of emerging details appearing only for seconds in different moments of the process. They became the focal point of Mirt’s interest and resulted in an ephemeral piece displaying unexpected planes in the clearly recognisable original. In a live setting Mirt’s composition delivers autonomous parts for further explorations and improvisations.

Tickets £12 (£9 concession / online) Mirt synthesiser Maja S K Ratkje voice / electronics Mirt Solitaire UK PREMIERE Maja S K Ratkje In Dialogue with Eugeniusz Rudnik UK PREMIERE Over the last five years Foundation 4.99 and Bôłt Records have become leading institutions in Polish experimental music. The focus on the rich yet unexplored tradition of Polish avant-garde music together with insights into the new scene proved fruitful. Among the label’s main projects is the Polish Radio Experimental Studio series of albums combining remastered and de-noised archival recordings from the Studio and their new re-interpretations by world famous musicians such as zeitkratzer, John Tilbury, Thomas Lehn, Lionel Marchetti and many others.

These pieces by Maja S K Ratkje and Mirt have been conceived within the framework of the Eastern Waves project organised by Foundation 4.99, dedicated to the long history of collaboration between Polish and Norwegian electronic music composers, mainly in the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. Polish synthesiser constructor and experimental musician Mirt and Norwegian voice virtuoso Maja S K Ratkje were commissioned to reinterpret compositions by Arne Nordheim and Eugeniusz Rudnik, resulting in two CD releases and concerts in Poland, Norway, Serbia, Germany, France and Belgium.

UK PREMIERE

(2015) 30’

Maja S K Ratkje (1973, Norway) In Dialogue with Eugeniusz Rudnik UK PREMIERE (2014) 30’ Composer, sound engineer and the godfather of Polish ambient lo-fi, Eugeniusz Rudnik rarely performed live and most of his ouevre is tape music. In her (live) dialogue with Rudnik, Maja S K Ratkje combines his recordings with hers to create a new entity of indistinguishable origins. it serves as a tape music framework on top of which she performs live using voice, bells and electronics, underlining their common approach to field recordings and voice as well as the intuitive, touching and sometimes amusing sound world they might meet in.

Produced by hcmf// in partnership with Foundation 4.99 / Bôłt Records; supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of the Polska Music programme; also supported by the Norwegian Embassy

Mirt

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27 Apartment House @ 20

George Brecht (1926 – 2008, USA) String Quartet 1’

St Paul’s Hall, 7.30pm

Jon Gibson (1940, USA) Melody IV Part I (1977) 13’

Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online)

Toshi Ichiyanagi (1933, Japan) String Quartet No I (1964) 10’

Apartment House: Gordon Mackay violin Hilary Sturt violin Bridget Carey viola Anton Lukoszevieze cello Philip Thomas piano Simon Limbrick percussion Apartment House mark 20 years of performance with a rare programme covering a diverse range of experimental and contemporary music. From the sixties conceptualism and Fluxus roots of George Brecht, through rarely heard music by Japanese experimentalist Toshi Ichiyanagi and Jon Gibson’s richly open, harmonic work from the early 1970s. They mark Christopher’s Fox’s 60th year with a performance of BLANK (written for them), Peter Garland’s resonantly beautiful piano quintet Where Beautiful Feathers Abound, a new realisation of one of artist Louise Bourgeois’ enigmatic late works Insomnia Drawing and finally back to the source of so much of Apartment House’s ethos, Cage’s hypnotic tableaux of rhythmic-harmonic music, Hymnkus.

Peter Garland (1952, USA) Where Beautiful Feathers Abound (1993) 11’ Christopher Fox (1955, UK) BLANK (2002) 11’ Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010, France/USA) Insomnia Drawing (1994 – 1995) 5’ John Cage (1912 – 1992, USA) Hymnkus (1986) 3’ Awkward harmonic stability Perhaps denoting social graces Always something to treasure Revealing you and yours and elsewhere The absolute or perhaps an elemental acquiescence?

Myopic dream sequence Every note you never played No Territorial soundings Hallelujah compulsion Observing cornice behaviour Unrelentingly boring Safe to say the End © Anton Lukoszevieze

Produced by hcmf// Parts of this concert will be broadcast

by BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 28 November 2015

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28 Splitter Music Bates Mill Blending Shed, 10pm Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online) Please note: as this concert will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, audience members must be seated by 9.45pm Berlin Splitter Orchester The Splitter Orchester use their unique process, extraordinary artistic profile and specific group sound to create a programme designed especially for their second performance at hcmf// 2015, drawing on a wide range of contemporary and improvised music.

The Splitter Orchester, founded in 2010, is a Berlin-based collection of internationally respected composers / performers which draws inspiration from many genres, most noticeably contemporary and improvised music. Splitter Orchester originates from the Echtzeitmusik scene which emerged in Berlin in the mid1990s – a locally based and globally networked experimental music scene and long-term platform for the exchange of artistic ideas.

All the members of the Splitter Orchester are simultaneously composers, interpreters and improvisers who collectively elude clear classification – forming an ensemble most comfortable in the creative borderland between composed and improvised music. They utilise a broad variety of extended techniques on traditional, electronic, and especially constructed and tailored instruments. The main focus in their artistic practice is the production of sound (as opposed to musical material) and on how to diffuse it in space. The collaborative nature of musical creation within a Composer-Performer context is integral, from the first sketch to the performance.

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Ten different nationalities are represented in the orchestra, although all the members are currently based in Berlin. The Splitter Orchester is an example of how the contemporary music scene in an international context is changing and experimenting (especially in Berlin), with newer forms of musical communication and presentation.

Splitter Orchester is not a homogenous body, but consists of a variety of autonomous and ultraspecialised musicians / composers who choose not to work in an institutionalised framework and call the existing hierarchies in the music establishment into question. The whole group relies on each member equally and deliberately denies established leadership roles to create an experimental production field, which is processoriented and, therefore, socially relevant in a broader sense.

The long-term ongoing collective work processes of the orchestra utilise a wide range of improvisational and compositional approaches – analysing and contextualising specific methods and practices of composition and improvisation.

Over five years of experimentation, the ensemble has developed an extraordinary artistic profile and specific group sound.

Their performance at hcmf// will be created and performed specifically for the Festival – as is the case with the vast majority of their performances.

They are not a repertoire based orchestra – when they come together as an ensemble, they create, rehearse and then perform – always with the context of the performance at the forefront of their creative considerations.

Produced by hcmf// supported by the Berlin Senate Chancellery, Department of Cultural Affairs This concert will be broadcast live

by BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 28 November 2015

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29 Arditti Quartet St Paul’s Hall, 12 noon Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online) Arditti Quartet: Irvine Arditti violin Ashot Sarkissjan violin Ralf Ehlers viola Lucas Fels cello John Zorn The Remedy of Fortune UK PREMIERE Iris ter Schiphorst Aus Liebe UK PREMIERE Klaus Lang Seven Views of White UK PREMIERE Harrison Birtwistle String Quartet No 3: The Silk House Sequences The Arditti Quartet’s hcmf// appearances are always a Festival hot ticket, invariably the first to sell out, and this programme will be no exception: the concert opens with the UK Premiere of John Zorn’s latest work for strings, The Remedy of Fortune and closes with Harrison Birtwistle’s String Quartet No 3, The Silk House Sequences – an hcmf// co-commission.

John Zorn (1953, USA) The Remedy of Fortune UK PREMIERE (2015) 14’

The Remedy of Fortune is divided into six tableaux depicting the changing fortunes of romantic love: pain, desire, devotion, hope, beauty, longing, ecstasy, intoxication, frustration, anger, despair and more. Referencing both Bartok and Machaut, it explores a variety of different sound worlds and is a mature, subtle work, more economical and less flamboyant than The Alchemist or Necronomicon, but with just as wide an emotional range. Remedy is my 6th quartet, and like Bartok’s 6th quartet each of the six movements (tableaux) begin with a kind of mesto which then morphs into a kaleidoscope of contrary emotions, moods, tone colors and tempi. Named for Machaut’s 14th century poem (4300 lines about courtly love) the

piece was written in January 2015 and premiered at the medieval wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters in May by the JACK quartet. © John Zorn Iris ter Schiphorst (1956, Germany) Aus Liebe (frei nach der Arie Nr 49 aus der Matthäus-Passion von J S Bach) UK PREMIERE (2013 – 2014) 13’ The process of composing always feels like the start of a long walk in unknown territory for me.

The starting point here was a meeting with Hans Woudenberg, the cellist of the Doelen Quartet – the commissioner. We soon agreed that the new piece should refer to the coloured light of stainedglass church windows. Another inspiration was Peter Sellars’ and Simon Rattle’s version of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, especially Mary Magdalene’s breathtaking aria Aus Liebe with its overwhelming prelude, but suddenly the fact that I was writing a piece for a Dutch quartet became very important to me. My father came from a Dutch family and returned to Holland as a refugee escaping the Nazis in 1939. I remembered the stories of my childhood and reflected once again on how he told me about the ‘Dutch Hunger Winter’, a shocking experience. All this came together in creating the piece Aus Liebe – and now the title ‘Because of love’ changed its meaning. Bach’s aria is still there, but only as far as a shining memory of a very deep impression. ©Iris ter Schiphorst Klaus Lang (1971, Austria) Seven Views of White UK PREMIERE (2013) 43’ Observing cows, you can see movements that are entirely understandable for us: A horsefly sits on the belly; In response, the cow flings its tail in the direction of the horsefly.

But then there are movements of an entirely different kind: After a cow has been standing still and motionlessly in one spot for the longest time it suddenly makes a step forward – without, for us, any intelligible or understandable reason.

Arditti Quartet © Brian Slater

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For the cow this movement must have been as reasonable and logically consistent as the first (horsefly-tail) – nevertheless we cannot understand it.

So there is a layer of logic that is not understandable to us (and probably even not for the cow) and although it is not understandable it mysteriously ensures that the sequence of events is perceived by us as conclusive.

Even though an unexplainable step of the cow remains mysterious as a single event it still does not destroy our consistent image of reality, as it would happen if the cow would start, for example, to recite the Heart Sutra from memory.

Nevertheless, one never ceases to be amazed by an extremely mysterious and highly sublime fact: cows eat almost only green food and yet the milk they give is white. © Klaus Lang

from first violin and cello, glissandos sliding towards one another, and the music gears down in speed. And this is just the first of these Silk House Sequences, named after the composer’s Wiltshire home (a former silk mill) and flowing into one another, sometimes echoing what has happened, sometimes disrupting the course of events as the ensemble is constantly broken down into subgroups and reformed, while density shifts and instruments move between iteration and melody, all towards a long delayed, thoroughly earned point of emphatic conclusion.

Harrison Birtwistle (1934, UK) String Quartet No 3: The Silk House Sequences (2015) 20’

Produced by hcmf// supported by Austrian Music Export

String Quartet No 3, The Silk House Sequences is cocommissioned by hcmf//, Cité de la Musique, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik 2017, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, and by Wigmore Hall with the support of André Hoffmann, president of the Fondation Hoffmann, a Swiss grant-making foundation

and Austrian Cultural Forum London; also supported by hcmf// Benefactor Professor Emeritus Richard Steinitz OBE

Quick, high, nervy motion starts and restarts at the beginning of Birtwistle’s third full-scale quartet, and tumbles into a cello solo against continuing memories of how things were (first violin) together with a new, locked duo. Soon there are signals

This concert will be broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 2 January 2016

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30 AMM St Paul’s Hall, 7.30pm Tickets £17 (£14 concession / online) AMM The Festival’s closing concert features – with their first appearance together in a decade – the classic line-up of pianist John Tilbury, drummer Eddie Prévost and guitarist Keith Rowe, celebrating the 50th anniversary of AMM.

As if by slow magnetic attraction, AMM came together 50 years ago. Refugees from prevailing trends of jazz, this group of fluctuating membership was a gradual coalescence of prevailing and contradictory forces in the early 1960s, their playing bringing to light all the implications, half-spoken thoughts and shadow territory that others chose to ignore. Exploratory sessions from within the Mike Westbrook group left a quartet of saxophonist Lou Gare, bassist Lawrence Sheaff, guitarist Keith Rowe and drummer Eddie Prévost. In January 1966 they were joined by Cornelius Cardew and by May of that year were considered sufficiently en vogue to be profiled in Vogue.

Listening back to their earliest recorded work hardly aligns them with Mary Quant. Even now, in the age of noise as both genre and pollutant, the physicality of AMM’s conglomerate sound glowers in its confrontation with the orthodoxies of music, all compositional strategies discarded in favour of a free improvisation ruthless in its quest to push through chaos to whatever lay beyond. As Lou Gare has said: We used to talk quite a lot about silence, the self and inner silence but actually, when it came to it, the music could be quite violent and unpleasant but that seemed to be necessary to break through somehow to the silence sort of reality.

Not only was there an extraordinary amount of noise; they also used a degree of distortion equal to rock bands of the day. Even though AMM played at a far lower decibel volume than such bands their use of extreme contrast, harsh and relentless long-duration sounds made them subjectively louder, an effect emphasised by levels of volume relative to the small venues in which they played.

At the beginning of the 1970s I would go to The Place, a London dance studio, to hear AMM’s weekly plays. They had established a new weekly residency there in July 1969. The room was not large, no stage, no special lighting. Audiences were small enough to make these occasions feel like the gathering of an estranged family, rather uncomfortable yet deeply affecting. The music had become less torrid, more refined but there were extraordinarily abrasive passages. I remember Lou Gare with a large sheet of white polystyrene foam, walking it edge-wise along the floor, exploiting its potential as one of the most distressing sonic by-products of the petrochemical industry.

This fractious edge also figures in a convoluted extra-musical history in which ideological differences fuelled personal animosity. Yet AMM’s identity has held fast despite upheavals that would finish most groups. Even in times of estrangement a more reflective, tranquil approach developed; when John Tilbury joined in the early 1980s, this became the sound most closely associated with AMM. The question of what happens when a group of individuals dedicate themselves to improvisation over a lifetime is encapsulated by AMM’s ‘story’, its musical traces. As ever, there is no better way to understand its complexities then by listening, as the music happens, in the place in which it happens. © David Toop Produced by hcmf// supported by hcmf// Benefactor Dr Mick Peake

Š Keith Rowe

Sunday 29 // November

EVENTS

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INFORMATION

Discounts

Buying Your Tickets

Festival Saver Tickets

To Book Your Tickets Online booking: www.hcmf.co.uk Phone: +44 (0)1484 430528 Monday–Saturday 10am–5pm. Minicom users can also phone this number. (no booking fee) Post: hcmf// Box Office, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Queen’s Square, Queen Street, Huddersfield HD1 2SP In Person: Monday–Saturday 10am–5pm at Lawrence Batley Theatre, or Monday–Saturday 9.15am–5pm at Huddersfield Tourist Information Centre, Huddersfield Library, Princess Alexandra Walk, Huddersfield, Tel +44 (0)1484 223200

Festival Saver Admission to all events £390 Weekend 1 Saver (21 + 22 November) Admission to all events £120 Weekend 2 Saver (28 + 29 November) Admission to all events £90 Group Discounts (tickets must be bought in one transaction) Parties of ten or more – 10% discount.

Education and Community Group Discounts (tickets must be bought in one transaction) Parties of five or more – 10% discount.

Groups of ten or more – 20% discount.

Discounts for 17 – 25 Year Olds A limited number of tickets available for all events at a price of £5 (or £7 for evening concerts) offering huge savings of up to £15 on normal ticket prices (these tickets must be booked in advance and will not be available on the door).

Paying For Your Tickets Cheque payable to: Lawrence Batley Theatre Card Visa, Mastercard, Solo, Switch or Delta (no booking fee) Reservations can be held for four working days but must be paid for one week before performances.

To have your tickets posted, enclose a SAE or 50p postage cost, otherwise collect your tickets at the first event you attend.

Please check your tickets as soon as you receive them. The Box Office may be able to resell your ticket (applies to sold-out performances only) for a charge of 50p per ticket. Tickets for resale must be returned to the Box Office at least three hours before the performance.

INFORMATION

Concessions Students, under 17s, senior citizens, disabled, those claiming unemployment or supplementary benefits and Kirklees Passport holders. Proof of eligibility is required – send a photocopy of the relevant document or present the document at the Box Office.

Please Note Latecomers to performances will not be admitted until, and if, a suitable break can be found in the programme. hcmf// will do everything reasonable to ensure the performance of the published programme but reserves the right to change artists and programmes or cancel a concert in the event of circumstances beyond its control.

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Information Accessibility This brochure and our separate Access Leaflet are available in large print, braille, on audio cassette and computer disk. Call +44 (0)1484 472900 for copies.

Concessionary rates are available for attendees with a disability, plus one free ticket for a companion if required. Support dogs are welcome.

Limited parking is available for attendees with a disability outside each venue and on the University campus. Call +44 (0)1484 472900 to reserve a place on campus.

Bursaries Available to assist students and those with limited means to attend the Festival. Call +44 (0)1484 472900 or visit www.hcmf.co.uk for further details.

Places to Stay Huddersfield Visitor Information Centre +44 (0)1484 223200; email huddersfield.information@kirklees.gov.uk For more information about Huddersfield visit www.hcmf.co.uk

Travel Information National Rail Enquiries +44 (0)8457 484950 www.nationalrail.co.uk National Express +44 (0)8717818178 www.nationalexpress.com West Yorkshire trains and buses Metroline +44 (0)113 245 7676 www.wymetro.com First Huddersfield +44 (0)1484 426313 www.firstgroup.com West Yorkshire Journey Planner www.metrojourneyplanner.info

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MEMBERSHIP

hcmf// membership – join us today!

Benefactors

For our Friends, Patrons and Benefactors we offer a fantastic range of benefits which, depending on the membership level, includes:

Colin Rose & Roz Brown

Dr Peter Bamfield Mr & Mrs Mervyn & Karen Dawe Dr Mick Peake Professor Emeritus Richard Steinitz OBE Patrons

• priority booking • newsletters • invitations to Festival receptions • offers from various arts organisations • support of individual events or commissions

Martin Archer Mr Richard Benson Paul Bond Mrs Shirley Bostock Sir Alan Bowness Mr Alex Bozman

Benefactors from £300+ Patrons from £60 – £300 Friends from £25 – £60

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To become an hcmf// member please contact Harriet Richardson on +44 (0)1484 472900 or at h.richardson@hud.ac.uk

Mr & Mrs Mike & Mavis Green Dr Colin G Johnson Ms Rosemary Johnson Joe Kerrigan & Christine Stead Graham Hayter & Kevin Leeman Jonathon Lissemore Ursula & Jeffrey Lucas Mr John Moffat Andrew Morris Laurence Rose Dr M R Spiers Mr Martin Staniforth Peter J Taylor Terence Thorpe Peter John Viggers Barnaby & Maria Woodham

MEMBERSHIP

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New music at the Barbican

COMMUNICATIONS COMMUNICATIONS

2015–16

Total Immersion

Days packed with music, film and discussion DUTCH MASTER – THE MUSIC OF LOUIS ANDRIESSEN

Friday 12 – Saturday 13 February 2016

Contact Marcus

Celebrate the music of a composer whose dynamic, propulsive and jazz-influenced art has provided an invigorating force in European music. Events include his Dante-inspired opera La commedia, two UK premieres and a performance from the Britten Sinfonia and virtuoso percussionist Colin Currie.

THE MAGICAL SOUNDWORLD OF HENRI DUTILLEUX

Saturday 30 April 2016

Explore the work of a composer whose meticulously crafted, yet deeply human, music was often inspired by poetry and art. Hear the visionary cello concerto and great orchestral works including The Shadows of Time, inspired by the diaries of Anne Frank.

Music at the cutting edge

for an informal chat to see how we can help you deliver your latest marketing or design project Contact Marcus

+44 (0) 161 638 5615

for an informal chat to see how we can help you deliver your latest marketing mnetherwood@musocommunications.com or design project

+44 (0) 161 638 5615

mnetherwood@musocommunications.com

ALDEBURGH FESTIVAL 2016 10–26 June

Highlights include:

Four world premieres including Richard Dubugnon’s Piano Concerto written for Kathryn Stott and UK premieres including pieces by Anders Hillborg, Anna Clyne, James MacMillan and Brett Dean.

Featured composers: Julian Anderson and Benedict Mason Premieres from composers including Julian Anderson, Charlotte Bray, Elliott Carter and Benedict Mason Catalogue d’Oiseaux: Pierre-Laurent Aimard leads a daylong exploration of Messiaen’s great piano cycle set amid Suffolk’s stunning natural landscape

bbc.co.uk/symphonyorchestra for details of all events and to buy tickets.

www.aldeburgh.co.uk Box Office 020 7638 8891 barbican.org.uk

BBC SO New Music 89x271 v6.indd 1

25/09/2015 15:58

2015/16 Concert Season at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall

NEW MUSIC AND WORLD PREMIERES WEDNESDAY 9 DECEMBER: FRANK PETER ZIMMERMANN PERFORMS MAGNUS LINDBERG’S VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 2 (world premiere) SATURDAY 30 JANUARY: VLADIMIR JUROWSKI CONDUCTS ALEXANDER RASKATOV’S GREEN MASS (world premiere) SATURDAY 9 APRIL: MATTHIAS GOERNE PERFORMS MARC-ANDRÉ DALBAVIE’S WORK FOR BARITONE AND ORCHESTRA (UK premiere) lpo.org.uk 020 7840 4242 | southbankcentre.co.uk 0844 847 9920

Box Office: 0121 767 4050 bcmg.org.uk G facebook.com/bcmgfans U twitter.com/bcmg @bcmg

WORLD PREMIERES 2015 NEW TITLES AVAILABLE FOR CONCERT PERFORMANCE - BY DEUSS MUSIC COMPOSERS -

Anthony Fiumara

7 February

I dreamed in the Cities at Night, for string quartet · Ensemble Musikfabrik, Peter Rundel

‘I don’t think there’s another British new music group who generate such passion and excitement.’ The Times

> Also available for saxophone quartet

Joep Franssens

11 March

Symmetry, a film by Ruben van Leer · Claron McFadden, Capella Amsterdam, Daniel Reuss > Also available as choir piece for female voices

December 2015 – July 2016 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Friday 4 December 2015, 8pm, CBSO Centre Saturday 5 December 2015, 7.30pm, Wigmore Hall Conductor: Dominic Muldowney / Baritone: Roderick Williams Dominic Muldowney: Five cabaret songs / Two Shakespeare settings / Smooth between sea and land (World premiere / BCMG commission) / Howard Skempton: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (World premiere / Maurice and Sheila Millward commission)

Parallel Colour

Saturday 6 February 2016, 7.30pm, CBSO Centre Conductor: Richard Baker / Soprano: Allison Bell / Percussion: Julian Warburton / Clarinet: Timothy Lines Claude Vivier: Trois Airs pour un opéra imaginaire / Tansy Davies: Dark Ground / Edmund Finnis: Parallel Colour (World premiere / BCMG Sound Investment commission) / Rozalie Hirs: Platonic ID (UK premiere) / Jonathan Harvey: Cirrus Light / Franco Donatoni: Still Audience Exchange - Stay on after the concert for an informal discussion with fellow audience members, facilitated by Dr Jonathan Gross.

Benedict Mason Portrait

Sunday 1 May 2016, 7.30pm, CBSO Centre Conductor: Ilan Volkov Benedict Mason: Nodding Trilliums & Curve-Lined Angles (BCMG commission 1990) / Charles Ives: Piano Trio / Benedict Mason: new work (World premiere / BCMG Sound Investment commission)

Remembering the Future

Sunday 12 June 2016, 7.30pm, CBSO Centre BCMG Chamber Players Judith Weir: Blue-Green Hill / Luke Bedford: new work * / Richard Baker: new work * / Zoë Martlew: new work * / Howard Skempton: Field Notes (BCMG, Craftspace and Arts Alive co-commission 2014) / John Woolrich: new work * * (World premiere / BCMG Sound Investment commission) There will be free 30-minute pre-concert talks starting an hour before each performance at CBSO Centre.

Open to all ticket holders.

Anthony Fiumara

As I opened Fire, essay for orchestra · Noord Nederlands Orkest and Stefan Asbury

21 March

>➢Both for professionals as amateur orchestra’s

Otto Ketting 22 April Printemps, for string orchestra, UK premiere Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Frank Zielhorst

Paul M. van Brugge Pandora, for three female singers and string orchestra (suite)

23 April

· Sofia Opera and Ballet choreography by

Boriana Sechanova

Robin de Raaff

25 April

Arnold Marinissen

5-13 May

Theo Verbey

29 May

Robert Zuidam

20 July

Theo Verbey

22 October

Robert Zuidam

24 October

Klaas de Vries

31 October

Joep Franssens

11/12/13 November

Symphony No. 2 · Het Gelders Orkest, Antonello Manacorda Music theatre in collaboration with artist Channa Boon

Traurig wie der Tod, for mixed choir and orchestra · Netherlands Radio Choir, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, James Gaffigan Tanglewood Concerto, for piano and orchestra · Emanuel Ax, fellows of TMC Orchestra, Stefan Asbury Lumen Ad Finem Cuniculum (Light at the end of the Tunnel) · Philharmonie zuidnederland, Dmitri Liss New piece for Calefax 30th anniversary Schizzo, for orchestra and electronics · Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Otto Tausk

Piano Concerto · Ralph van Raat, Noord Nederlands Orkest, Tõnu Kaljuste

Anthony Fiumara

11 /12 December

Bowie XL · Noord Nederlands Orkest, Antony Hermus

www.deussmusic.com

·

New signing: HUANG RUO Chinese-American composer, conductor, vocalist Selected works Folk songs for orchestra (2012) for large or chamber orchestra 12‘ Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (2011) opera 120‘ The color yellow (2007) concerto for solo sheng and orchestra or chamber orchestra 20‘ Path of echoes - Symphony no. 1 (2006) for large or chamber orchestra 20‘ Shattered steps (2006) for large orchestra 12‘ www.ricordi.co.uk

RICORDI

G. Ricordi & Co. (London) Ltd.

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BOOK BO OK NOW NOW

southbankcentre.co.uk/whatyouneedtoknow southbankcentre.co.uk/whatyouneedtoknow

Tom Service Tom Service © Ben © Larpent Ben Larpent Sarah Mohr-Pietsch Sarah Mohr-Pietsch © Belinda © Belinda LawleyLawley Steve Reich Steve© Reich Tim Cochrane © Tim Cochrane

bbc.co.uk/radio3

Hear and Now at hcmf// 2015 Saturday nights from 10pm on BBC Radio 3 Catch festival highlights over 5 editions of BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now. Listen live or online for 30 days after broadcast bbc.co.uk/radio3 21 November 2015 (LIVE) Lol Coxhill arr Christopher Hobbs: Lol’s Tunes Paul Rutherford: Quasi-Mode III Derek Bailey: No.22 [Ping] (world premiere) Simon H. Fell Ensemble Jürg Frey: Accurate Placement (world premiere) Dominic Lash (double bass) Tomasz Sikorski: Autograph; Zerstreutes Hinausschauen; Echoes 1-4 John Tilbury (piano); Noszferatu XL

5 December 2015 George Lewis’s Afterword, an opera based on the history of the Association for the Advancementn of Creative Musicians (AACM) on its 50th anniversary 26 December 2015 Music by hcmf// featured composers Jürg Frey and Pierliuigi Billone in performances by Ensemble Grizzana and Klangforum Wien, plus new music for piano by Francisco Coll, Naomi Pinnock and Michael Cutting, performed by Richard Uttley

28 November (LIVE)

2 January 2016

Berlin Splitter Orchester (live set) Toshi Ichiyanagi: String Quartet No.1 Peter Garland: Where beautiful feathers abound Christopher Fox: BLANK Louise Bourgeois: Insomnia Drawing Apartment House

John Zorn: The Remedy of Fortune (UK premiere) Iris ter Schiphorst: Aus Liebe (UK premiere) Klaus Lang: Seven Views of White (UK premiere) Harrison Birtwistle: String Quartet No.3: The Silk House Sequences (hcmf// co-commission) Arditti Quartet