Programme Notes

Eduardo Reck Miranda Qubism

In the 20th century, avant-garde composers changed the face of music through experiments with electronic technologies, which became mainstream with the advent of digital computers. Nowadays, most composers are versed in programming computers to manipulate recordings and improvise. But computing technology is ever-evolving. The 21st century is changing music through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and new computers: most notably, quantum computers, which compose by mutating given snippets of music. Qubism uses live interaction with quantum hardware via the web. Instead of programming AI to reproduce conventional styles of music, I used a quantum computer to generate new materials with which I composed Qubism

Jonathan Harvey Ricerare una melodia feel too far in the future and ultimately that we are already too trapped within it to do much or change anything.

Ricerare means literally ‘to seek’, and in musical usage it signifies a fugal, often strict movement. Here, a five-part canon is obtained by means of a tape-delay system, and when the ‘sought-after’ melody is ‘found’, the canon is by progressive augmentation and at the interval of the octave.

Ricerare una melodia was commissioned by the Park Lane Group and written for Jonathan Impett (trumpet) and John Whiting (sound projection), who gave the first performance at the Purcell Room, London, on 10 January 1985.

Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) was a British composer most famous for his works combining live instruments with electronics, which are now in constant demand from a host of international organisations. He obtained a PhD from St John’s College, Cambridge, and held several other honorary doctorates, was a Member of Academia Europaea, and in 1993 was awarded the prestigious Britten Award for composition.

The title is inspired by Evening, a poetical commentary on the climate crisis by the American poet Dorianne Laux. She deftly puts into words where we’ve brought knowingly or unknowingly ourselves to.

The brutal and uncompromising altered piano heaves and puffs the piece into life; the cello fights echoes repeats opposes surrenders sings rusts. ‘We know we are doomed, done for, damned, and still the light reaches us, falls on our shoulders even now.’ from Evening by Dorianne Laux

Ailís Ní Ríain is an Irish composer and writer whose work has been performed across Europe, in Israel, Brazil, USA and Japan and broadcast on BBC and RTÉ. Her artistic interests are diverse and combined with a desire to push and develop her artistic practice through each new project or commission. In 2016 she was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers. NMC will release a

A quantum computer deals with information encoded as quantum bits (qubits), which is to a quantum computer what a bit is to a digital one: a basic unit of information. In hardware, qubits live in the subatomic world, subject to the laws of quantum mechanics. I leveraged this to create music in ways that would be unfeasible using a standard digital computer.

Eduardo Reck Miranda is a composer working at the crossroads of music, science, and new technologies. His background as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) scientist and a classically trained composer with early involvement in avant-garde pop informs his distinctive music. Currently, he is a professor in computer music at the University of Plymouth and an associate researcher at Quantinuum, where he is pioneering new approaches to musical composition with quantum computers.

Kaija Saariaho NoaNoa

NoaNoa (‘Fragrant’, 1992) was born from the ideas I had for flute while writing my ballet music Maa. I wanted to write down, exaggerate, even abuse certain flute mannerisms that had been haunting me for some years, and thus force myself to move onto to something new.

Formally I experimented with an idea of developing several elements simultaneously, first sequentially, then superimposed on each other.

The title refers to a wood cut by Paul Gauguin called NoaNoa. It also refers to a travel diary of the same name, written by Gauguin during his visit to Tahiti in 1891-93. The fragments of phrases selected for the voice part in the piece come from this book.

NoaNoa is also a team work. Many details in the flute part were worked out with Camilla Hoitenga. The electronic part was developed under the supervision of Jean-Baptiste Barrière and programmed by Xavier Chabot.

Christian Mason I wandered for a while...

I wandered for a while… (2019) is a short piece for piccolo soloist, accompanied by bells, cello, piano and electronics, which was composed during a year-long residency at the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany, in 2019. At that time I was developing sketches towards a music theatre piece called (Dis)embodiment, on the subject of Near Death Experiences. Though that piece never came to fruition, various self-contained maquettes remain, of which this is one. The title is from the following fragment of verbatim text, collected during an initial phase of research: “I wandered for a while in what used to be my life… Fragments deeply buried in my memory scrolled”.

A 2015 winner of an Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung Composer Prize, Christian Mason is a visiting teacher of composition, mentor for young composers’ schemes, and has been a resident artist at several establishments. In 2012 he was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship and received a British Composer Award. Christian completed a PhD at King’s College London with George Benjamin and worked as Composition

Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, and worked on research at IRCAM. Her luxuriant textures are created by combining live music and electronics. Saariaho claimed the major composing awards in The Grawemeyer Award, The Wihuri Prize, The Nemmers Prize, The Sonning Prize, The Polar Music Prize. In 2018 she was honoured with the BBVA Foundation’s Frontiers of Knowledge Award.

Luciano Berio Naturale

Naturale was composed in 1985 for the Ater Balletto of Reggio Emilia and is dedicated to Aldo Bennici “in brotherly devotion”. The piece has the subtitle “action for dance” but it can also be performed in concert. It re-employs themes of Sicilian folk songs first used by Berio in Voci for viola and two groups of instruments (1984), which here have been filtered out, so to speak. The flow of musical events is interrupted by the voice of a Sicilian folk singer, recorded by the composer in Palermo. The work is nourished by the contrast between a highly refined transcription of folk songs and the raw, natural voice of a folk singer.

Luciano Berio (1925-2003) took classical music out of the age of the traditional orchestral instruments and into the world of electronic music made with computers and tape. Not only did he combine instrumental performance with pre-recorded sounds and/or music on tape, giving the tape recorder a role equal to other instruments, he also created new kinds of pieces by electronically manipulating recordings of instruments or voices.

David Fennessy The Room is the Resonator

Throughout the piece the cello plays against a long, held chord which I recorded on an old harmonium that resides in the garage of my girlfriend’s mother in Aberdeen. There’s something about that instrument, that garage, that day – there’s a stillness in that room, you can hear yourself. As I sat there listening to the pedals pushing air through the instrument my mind drifted to other places, other rooms…

David Fennessy began his musical life as guitarist in a school rock band but had no formal musical training before studying classical guitar at the age of fifteen. His interest in composition stems from his undergraduate degree at the Dublin College of Music. In 1998, he obtained his Masters Degree at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama with James MacMillan, and has held a teaching post there since 2005.

Dai Fujikura K’s Ocean

This piece is a relative of a much bigger work of mine, called Vast Ocean, which was written for trombone, orchestra and live electronics for Donaueschingen Musiktage 2005. Both pieces started developing at the same time, although K’s Ocean took a much longer journey, on and off until its world premiere at London Sinfonietta’s Sonic Explorations festival in October 2009. This has resulted in the piece having different dimensions to its sibling.

Both works are influenced by Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris. For me, the most interesting part of the story is that the Solaris, the ocean, gives different perspectives on a character’s past experience. In this piece, the solo trombone is the main character (Kelvin in the novel) and the live electronics, which are directly related to the soloist’s performance, are the ocean.

Born in 1977 in Osaka Japan, Dai Fujikura was fifteen when he moved to UK. The recipient of many composition prizes, he has also received numerous international co-commissions. He has been Composer-in-Residence of Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra since 2014 and held the same post at the Orchestre national d’Île-deFrance in 2017/18.

Ailís Ní Ríain doomed, done for, damned, and still In recent years the climate crisis has grown even more urgent and the artistic response has been even greater. Art can help us feel its urgency - it is difficult to fully comprehend how pervasive the issue has become even in my lifetime. It can often be difficult to connect to the climate crisis: it can

Karlheinz Stockhausen Gesang der Jünglinge

Today, Gesang der Jünglinge (‘Song of the Youths’, 1956) is arguably the most famous piece of electronic music of the 20th century. At the time it was written, Stockhausen was working on a PhD in communications at the University of Bonn. Here, he got the idea of writing a piece of music with a text that would be treated with a new type of musical scale: one extreme of the scale would be the text rendered completely unintelligible and the other extreme would be the text in its purest and most intelligible state.

Gesang der Jünglinge was designed to be the last part of a planned electronic Mass, based on the Latin text “benedicete dominum” or “bless the Lord”. In the German that Stockhausen used, this is the easily discernable recurring text “Preiset den Herrn”. The prerecorded voice is made unintelligible by overdubbing itself and speeding up the recording to make it sound higher, and the work begins and ends with the unintelligible extreme of the scale. Other sounds created electronically by sine waves and noise act conventionally as an accompaniment.

In the original presentation, Stockhausen used serial techniques to arrange how the sound shifts between five speakers surrounding the audience. The pitch, durations, and dynamics are equally rigorously serialised.

© LA Phil

By the end of the 1960s, Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was probably the most widely known and emulated living composer. He had his face on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Deutsche Grammophon released recordings of his music including two “Greatest Hits” albums. Works such as Gesang der Jünglinge pioneered the combination of electronic and acoustic instruments and sounds, and Gruppen, for three orchestras, brought a new dimension to the symphonic avant garde.

Edgard Varèse Poème Electronique Poème Electronique (1957-1958) was composed for the Phillips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair and was an example of what Varèse referred to as “organised sound”, which expanded the composer’s potential for sonic expression beyond traditional classical norms, be it through the use of rhythm, tone color, silence and layering via magnetic tape. Within his work, there are “no chords, no harmonies, no imitations of instruments, and no clichés of composition that have been done a thousand times over.” Instead of strings and brass, there are sirens, human cries, explosions, and electronic squelches. The Philips Pavilion itself, designed by architect Le Corbusier, had over 400 loudspeakers spread throughout the interior which created an immersive sonic experience for the fair goer.

© WNYC

Despite his small output of compositions, Edgard Varèse (1883-1965) is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. His concept of “organised sound” led to many experiments in form and texture. He was constantly on the lookout for new sound sources (working throughout his life with engineers, scientists and instrument builders), and was one of the first to extensively explore percussion, electronics, and taped sounds.

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