INTO - November 2009

Page 1

Issue 3. November 2009

What you’re into if you’re into sound and music

Louis Andriessen ‘I’m interested in expressing beautiful music, not myself.’

The magazine of

The cutting edge of jazz London Jazz Festival Bridging the divide Ryoji Ikeda Akram Khan My Sound and Music Unsung electroacoustic hero Tristram Cary


Welcome to the November issue of INTO November is probably the busiest month for new music and sound, and there’s a staggering range of work out there this month. Alongside Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and London Jazz Festival, there are Sound and Music’s own autumn series, The Cutting Edge, the ICA’s Calling Out of Context, Sound festival in Aberdeen, and a host of further events and installations across the country. We have a similarly jampacked issue! Ahead of HCMF, our cover story is an interview with Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, now at 70 a senior figure in contemporary music, but still refreshingly bold, bringing together an antiexpressionistic mix of French classicist aesthetic, left-wing politics and musical influences ranging from Bach and Stravinsky to improvisation and avantgarde jazz. Meanwhile Brian Morton profiles idiosyncratic improviser and composer Anthony Braxton, who is also featured at Huddersfield, and asks why it

Published by Sound and Music www.soundandmusic.org Contact: into-magazine@soundandmusic.org

is so hard to accept a jazz musician as a ‘serious composer’. Ahead of the London Jazz Festival, Marcus O’Dair looks at the cutting edge of jazz on show. The festival is gradually expanding the definition of jazz as a genre, so what are the most innovative musicians on show this year, and where are they coming from musically? Meanwhile, ahead of an installation and performance in Birmingham this month, Nigel Prince explores the work of Ryoji Ikeda, one of the few artists to be taken seriously as both a sound and a visual artist. We also have a tribute to one of the UK’s best electroacoustic composers of the twentieth century, Tristram Cary, and leading dancer and choreographer Akram Khan on the ‘My Sound and Music’ hotseat. I hope you enjoy. Shoël Stadlen Managing Editor Managing Editor: Shoël Stadlen Deputy Editor: Eleanor Turney Designed by: Andy McGarity andymcgarity.co.uk Original Design: PostParis, www.postparis.com


03

November 2009

Want to print your issue of INTO? Click here to download the PDF

What’s on in the UK? Click here to visit Sound and Music’s UK Listings

Cover Image of Louis Andriessen by Nils Andriessen The opinions expressed in INTO are those of the authors and not necessarily those of INTO or Sound and Music. Copyright of all articles is held jointly by Sound and Music and the authors. Unauthorised reproduction of any item is forbidden.


04

November 2009

Contents

C ntents NEWS. Pages 6—9

HCMF 2009 INTERVIEW WITH louis andriessen Pages 10—19

The Cutting edge of jazz Pages 20—25

My sound and music: Akram Khan Pages 26—29


05

November 2009

Unsung Electroacoustic hero: Tristram cary Pages 30—35

Contents

FROM THE BLOGS: THE EARWIG Pages 42—46

OPPORTUNITIES. Pages 48—49

Bridging the divide: Ryoji ikeda Pages 36—41


06

November 2009

News

NEW final 24 hours of silence

day before All Saints’ Day or Mardi Gras on the day before Lent kicks in, 21 November will be No Music Day, but for the five years only from 2005 to 2009. No Music Day exists as an open invitation to choose not to blindly – or rather deafly – consume whatever music is on offer. It is a day to think about what we do and do not want from music, and to develop ideas of how that can be achieved.’ The fifth annual No Music Day takes place in Linz, Austria, on 21 November. No Music Day has taken place each year since 2005, focused in a different place each year: Liverpool, London, Scotland and Sao Paolo. The project is the brainchild of Bill Drummond, who writes: ‘No Music Day is on the 21st of November because the 22nd of November is Saint Cecilia’s day. Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of music. In many countries the 22nd of November was the day chosen to give thanks for and to celebrate the existence of music. Using the same traditional principles as having Halloween the

This year No Music Day visits Linz during its tenure as European City of Culture. Many parts of the city will refrain from music: churches will not play music during services; commercial radio stations will broadcast only talk radio; and Linz’s central cinema will only screen films without musical soundtracks. www.nomusicday.com


07

November 2009

News

Recordings

For the second year running, NMC Recordings has won the Classic FM Gramophone Award in the Contemporary category, this year for its 20th anniversary celebration of contemporary vocal music, the NMC Songbook, which features short pieces by 96 composers. The Songbook is a 4-disc box set, commissioned to celebrate NMC’s 20th Anniversary, featuring 96 composers and more than 30 artists. NMC is releasing several new titles this month, including Unknown Britten, featuring premieres of newly discovered Benjamin Britten works; Michael Zev Gordon: On Memory, per-

formed by pianist Andrew Zolinsky; and Peter Maxwell Davies’s opera Taverner. Meanwhile Divine Art/Metier’s new releases include Silence of the Night, five works by composer Jeffrey Lewis and Exaudi Vocal Ensemble’s recording of Christopher Fox’s acoustic installation piece, Catalogue Irraisoné. Finally, John Pitts’ Intensely Pleasant Music a collection of new piano music performed by Steven Kings, has been released and can be purchased here.


08

November 2009

News

NEW Teaching listening

Awards

Hear Here!, the UK’s first classical music project dedicated to listening, draws to a close with three months of live, online and on-air activity examining how we are taught to listen, and how we can build on early experiences to become more adept at listening to music. The project includes work in Cardiff, in partnership with the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, investigating how seven to elevenyear-olds are taught to listen to music. Hear Here!’s website contains articles about teaching listening through exams, in the classroom and through education outreach work, and includes contributions from Sean Gregory on the current state of education outreach work and musician Rachel Leach on orchestral outreach work. Other features include 12:21, a monthly profile of a contemporary composer, which profiled Julian Anderson in October, and will profile Judith Weir this month and Jonathan Harvey in December.

Kaija Saariaho has won the 2009 Wihuri Sibelius Prize, awarded by the Wihuri Foundation for International Prizes. The prize is at least €30,000 and up to €100,000. Previous recipients include Sibelius, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Britten and Lutoslawski. Meanwhile a new category for Contemporary Jazz Composition has been added to this year’s 2009 British Composer Awards. John Surman is nominated for his piece Rain on the Window, Jason Yarde for Rhythm and Other Fascinations, and Barry Guy is nominated for Schweben; aye But Can Ye? More than 300 submissions were made for the 2009 awards overall, including nominations for established figures such as Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir John Tavener, Jonathan Harvey and Alexander Goehr, together with relative newcomers such as Bernard Hughes, Christian Mason, Mira Calix, Simon Dobson and Elizabeth Winters. The winners will be announced on 1 December.

www.hearhere.org.uk www.britishcomposerawards.com


09

November 2009

News

Drummond Fund commissions its first new music for dance

Photos: Hugo Glendinning

The first commissions from the Drummond Fund, set up following the death of Sir John Drummond in 2006 by Bob Lockyer and the Royal Philharmonic Society to commission new music for dance, are being performed in London this October/ November. Terry Mann’s score for choreographer Rosemary Lee’s Common Dance had its world premiere at Greenwich Dance Agency as part of Dance Umbrella on 29 October. The second commission is Comedy of Change by Julian Anderson, created for the Rambert Dance Company and choreographer Mark Baldwin to mark 150 years since the publication of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of the Species. www.royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/drummond/fund.html


010

November 2009

HCMF 2009

‘I am absolutely not interested in expressing myself’ Ahead of his profile at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival this month, Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, who is 70 this year, talks to Ben Oliver about his musical and aesthetic roots, the CIA and what would drive him to throw his interviewer into a local canal…


011

November 2009

HCMF 2009

Ben Oliver: The music in the two concerts at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival featuring your work spans a large amount of time, ranging from 1971 to the last couple of years. Has your approach to composition changed over the years, or are the similarities between your old and new pieces more important than the differences? Louis Andriessen: Ok, so basically you want to know everything! I think the details of my style have changed, or moved, or developed – I don’t even know how to choose the right word for this – but the attitude towards composing has never changed. And that has to do with taste and philosophy and way of looking at the world, which I probably learned from my family and my father. Let’s say German late-Romanticism didn’t score particularly highly in my family and with my father, who was a composer too. My brothers and I, and the whole family, held fairly anti-German-Romantic ideas about art in general – we had a pro-French and Latin education. And there starts the whole problem (or more like a solution in fact) that I feel bound to the Latin classicist tradition in art – the Apollonian tradition, if you like – instead of the


012

November 2009

HCMF 2009

‘Flights of fancy...’

expressionist Viennese developments, which I consider as bourgeois basically. Were there any composers from the French or Latin traditions who influenced you particularly? Well my father, who was born in 1892 – his heroes were Franck and Duparc and Chausson and other late-Romantic French composers, and then later the impressionists, both the composers and the visual artists too. I was born over 40 years after him and my focus was on more modernist composers, but of course I also started with Ravel and Stravinsky, who have both been heroes of mine throughout my life, and Bartók. And when I was a teenager, lots of other things showed up in my interests. If you were a teenager when I was, you listened to a lot of avant-garde jazz music. Yes, so did I... Ah, but you’re probably too young for that. You probably listen to Frank Zappa, and even that would make you very old! ... No, but I did listen to Zappa a lot too, when I was in my late thirties.

And how about Frederic Rzewski? Did you listen to his music much or work with him? Yes, I knew Frederic quite well, because we were both students in Berlin in the early ‘60s. There was a large project from the Americans to support West Berlin, basically to irritate East Germany, I suppose. And later we found out that this DAAD project, which was paid for by the Ford Foundation, was actually paid for by the CIA, like the famous Philhamonie building, built by Scharoun, which you could see from the East – the whole idea was to irritate the Communists! We were benefiting from scholarships, which allowed artists and academics to live there. Frederic was sponsored by the Ford Foundation to come to Berlin to study with Elliott Carter; the Japanese composer and pianist Yuji Takahashi was also sponsored to study with Xenakis. Both Frederic and I had pretty left-wing sympathies, like my teacher, Luciano Berio. It’s interesting that Rzewski is extremely active as a performer of his music, as a pianist, which brings me to my next question – will you be involved as a performer in the ‘Andriessen Peanuts’ concert at


013

November 2009

HCMF? The brochure is quite enigmatic about your involvement. Will you be playing the piano? Yeah, from time to time I hear people talking about that, and I still don’t know what ‘the girls’ are planning for me! I’m bringing with me to Huddersfield two of my secret weapons, the amazing artists Monica Germino, the violinist, and the singer Cristina Zavalloni. We do some things as a trio, and I accompany Monica in a piece that I wrote back in the ‘60s for violin and piano, in which Monica puts down the violin at a certain moment and starts singing a pop song, also written by me. What’s the piece called? It’s called Le voile du bonheur, which means ‘The Veil of Happiness’, which is the name of incidental music by Fauré, which as far as I know hasn’t been performed during my lifetime. And my piece is a combination of French lateRomanticism and this pop song, which interrupts it. So you’re playing at HCMF but you’re not sure what you’ll be playing?

HCMF 2009

Well Monica tells me there are rumours that I’ll be playing an improvised set. But you should not know that, I think, because it’s not planned. It’s just something that people are talking about! Do you do much public improvisation? When I do, I generally perform with a singer, usually Greetje Bijma, who’s an amazing Dutch vocal artist. And what role does improvisation play in your composition? Well when you write for more than three instruments, it makes sense to make decisions about most of the parameters, but not as much as the Ferneyhoughs do – I’m somewhat more liberal than that. The improvisation I like the most is when it’s not calculated at all – like free jazz. I think setting parameters is good, but I do like composers where you find in almost every bar something to do with improvisation – you find this in good composers from Bach to Stravinsky. I call it ‘taking the wrong direction’. Whenever you’re interviewed, people ask you about the influence of Stravinsky, so I’m determined not to ask you too much


014

November 2009

‘Flights of fancy...’

HCMF 2009


015

November 2009

HCMF 2009

about him. But I do have one pretty silly question to ask you: if some impending disaster meant that you had to choose just one of The Rite of Spring and Petrushka to save for mankind, which would you choose?

abstract and concrete context, creating sounds with electronic material, was too limiting for me. I find, for example, the sound of the soprano saxophone far richer than any of the sounds produced in electronic studios.

Well, I would kill the guy who asked me to choose! Yeah, that’s the best thing. I would throw him in the canal, which is very easy here in Amsterdam. And I’d ask why the Firebird wasn’t included in the list as well! They’re really an amazing triptych – I think Stravinsky finished being a normal composer with Firebird, which instantly made him better than any other composer in the world.

But although I am not so interested in composing electronic works, ‘amplification’ in the broadest sense – not to make things loud but to be able to work with the balances of different instruments – is very important to me. None of my larger pieces can sound right without amplification and electronic balances. Writing for these balances is an integral part of my composing, as well as writing for electronic instruments – synthesisers, bass guitars (I’m famous, or notorious, for my bass guitar parts!).

I recently discovered that you wrote an early electronic piece back in the 1970s, based on a Mussolini speech. Have you worked in any electronic media since? I did a few studio things until the early ‘70s. Since then I moved – back, you might say – into the profound relation of composers with the actual ‘matter’ of the music – which is not only the thinking, but also the instruments and the musicians who play the instruments. I think that was partly a political decision, but also partly my love of jazz and improvisation. I felt that creating work in an

Your large-scale piece De Staat is being played as a piano duo at HCMF. The text isn’t being sung – does that matter? Well, I call the piano duo version a ‘black and white photo’, but a very sharp photo. I don’t mind the lack of the meaning of the text, but I do miss the physical intention of the singing, which the piano string can never replicate. When I first wrote the piece, I was adamant that the text should be completely clear to the


016

November 2009

HCMF 2009

‘Flights of fancy...’ public, so even when the full piece was played, with singers, the text had to be reproduced in programmes. But over the years it’s become impossible to control every performance in every location, and I’m now laconic and old enough not to worry about it too much. That said, I hope it will be in the programme at HCMF! I’ve been reading Roger Adlington’s book about De Staat and he says you resist the word ‘influence’ and you describe references to other music as deliberate ‘structural allusions’. Can you explain what you mean by this? I’m very much aware of where the things that I write down come from, but Mozart was the same – he himself said that he stole all his material, and he talked about Haydn and Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach. And certainly when you listen to Mozart, you can hear the Haydn and CPE Bach, but Mozart does something with those two composers that they hadn’t done. Mozart writes to his father when he is in Mannheim: ‘I am writing six violin sonatas in the style they like here.’ I find this very interesting. We now hear about the profound original genius of Mozart, but actually he just imitated the Mannheim school. But of course the thing was that he did it better. Now I wouldn’t say I am

better than Bach or Stravinsky or Mozart or Ravel, but I am very aware of the fact that I have a lot of ‘gods’ or ‘spirits’ around in my studio. Strangely enough, I think that actually the personality of my music partly results from a lack of talent. I could try to write as well as Ravel and get it nearly perfect but not succeed. But in the end, your music always sounds like you… Yes, but that’s my fault! So what’s the role of these different styles – these ‘gods’ and ‘spirits’? Well that’s very simple and it comes back to where we started in this conversation. I am absolutely not interested in expressing myself. I am only interested in expressing the most amazing music I can come up with. That’s my goal, and I learnt that from my father also. We are not important; it’s the music that is important. It follows the French classicist approach to art: the creator should disappear behind his work. Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, including a focus on Louis Andriessen, runs from 20 to 29 November. www.hcmf.co.uk


017

November 2009

Who is Anthony Braxton? Brian Morton argues that Braxton, featured at HCMF this month, is one of the most important composers working today.

HCMF 2009

In 1990 I published a 1000-page reference work called Contemporary Composers, offering biographies, work-lists and critical approaches to more than 500 living musicians. The book was dutifully - and mostly kindly - put on the scales and received some praise for including not just the great modern names – Berio, Cage, Messiaen, Stockhausen – but also composers whose work was little known outside an academic context and also composers from the Philipines, Iceland, Ireland and Azerbaijan. Where the reviewer was hostile, just one name was pointed out in the crowd, as if a suicide bomber had been spotted but carrying something far more dangerous than Semtex. The offending composer was Anthony Braxton. The explosive was something that as far as most negative reviewers were concerned had no place in a book about modern composition, for surely it was clear to all not prepared to be blinded by opus numbers, Braxton was a jazz musician. Braxton’s presence in the book more usefully raised a question about what a composer actually is, and how that definition relates to jazz. Predictably,


018

November 2009

HCMF 2009

‘Flights of fancy...’

up popped the old, tired dictum about jazz being the classical music of African-Americans, a nonsense as transparent as it is persistent. There is a long and distinguished line of black American 20th-century composers, from William Grant Still (1895-1978) to Olly Wilson (b.1937) and beyond, and it has nothing inherently to do with jazz, drawing its language(s) from European as well as American sources. By the same token, there are a number of jazz musicians, and a varied number, who have shown a clear interest in formal composition as well as improvised forms: a survey might include anyone from James P. Johnson to Duke Ellington’s, Mary Lou Williams’ and Dave Brubeck’s sacred works. Anthony Braxton’s music – or at least his own delineation of a creative ancestry, which isn’t quite the same thing – is so complex a network of apparently inconsistent threads that any simple definition is bound to fail. That it partakes of jazz is obvious. Braxton’s saxophone forebears include John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, Warne Marsh, Charlie Parker, but also the nameless section men who stood

proudly alongside bass saxophones, C-melody instruments and other awkward cousins in group photographs from the 1920s and 1930s. But then, much like Parker himself, Braxton was also influenced by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Stockhausen, Varèse, significantly all composers whose ‘European’ status was modified by a profound urge to the universal. Similarly, John Cage, one of the dedicatees of Braxton’s epochal solo For Alto disc, whose musical language was anything but natively ‘American’. Braxton also pointed out that Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers had been important to him, too. With doo-wop in the mix, it was that little bit harder to cast him as a cerebral chess player with tones. With Schoenberg and Cage on hand, he couldn’t quite be parcelled off into some well-meaning ‘African-American continuum’, which was just a betterlighted ghetto than the old ‘race records’ one. Setting aside the word ‘classical’, which rarely means much now unless applied to music of a particular period, is Braxton a composer in the usual sense? The answer has to be


019

November 2009

yes, even if the job spec is left at its most open. Braxton’s aim, to provide aesthetic form for the highest thought of which one is capable, is absolutely instinct with the nature of ‘composition’. For more than forty years now, Anthony Braxton has shaped a body of work which at a quick glance seems to divide into the episodic immediacy of post-bop jazz and a corpus of work whose eye rests on posterity. At 65 (the anniversary falls in 2010) Braxton is one of the most important composers at work today, not because he navigates apart from the familiar stylistic islands but because, Odysseus-like, he has visited most of them already, and escaped. ‘New Complexity’? He has been there. ‘Minimalism’, ‘Reductionism’, ‘post-jazz’: landfall on all of them, and unnerving adventure on most. There is some small satisfaction in seeing that twenty years after taking flak for having included him in a run of composers that included Bernstein, Boulez, Brant (and Braxton is one of the rare few to cite the Canadian as an influence), Bryars and Bussotti, no one much questions his right to be

HCMF 2009

there any more. It has been a long and slow process of recognition, but Braxton no longer requires a cabaret card. His work reaches across genre and across continents. Whether it yet reaches out beyond planet Earth into those empty spaces he once promised to fill remains to be seen. HCMF’s focus on Anthony Braxton runs 20-22 November. www.hcmf.co.uk


020

November 2009

Cutting edge jazz

The cutting edge Marcus O’Dair takes a look at the innovative edge of music on show at this month’s London Jazz Festival.

Over recent years, jazz has come to be regarded by many as all but cryogenically frozen, with Ken Burns’ notorious 2001 Jazz documentary series, for instance, dedicating just one of its ten episodes to music made after 1960. Thankfully, the London Jazz Festival does not share such a perspective. Alongside such retro-styled acts as Madeleine Peyroux and Kurt Elling, the ten-day event finds room for a number of artists


021

November 2009

cutting edge jazz

Previous page: Lukas Ligeti (photo: Chris Woltmann)

Seb rochford

e of jazz who continue to expand, even explode, the genre’s horizons. Percussionist and composer Lukas Ligeti, son of composer György Ligeti, is a case in point. Though Austrian by birth, Ligeti lives in New York and is involved in that city’s famously experimental Downtown scene, yet his playing is also influenced by electronica, various African traditions and Western classical music.

pamelia kirstin

Impressively, Ligeti has found a way to fuse such apparently contradictory impulses, developing a style that would no doubt appeal to fans of Steve Reich or Konono No 1. Accordingly, his London Jazz Festival show will constitute a solo performance on the Marimba Lumina, an instrument designed by Californian synth pioneer Don Buchla.


022

November 2009

‘The instrument is very sophisticated,’ he explains of the advanced MIDI controller, ‘both in hardware and in software. It contains many coils, and the special mallets with which it is played also contain coils. When the mallets are close to the instrument, a magnetic field is built up. The four mallets are color-coded and the instrument recognizes which mallet is striking it, so that I can program it totally differently for each mallet. That’s just an example of the many wondrous things the Marimba Lumina can do.’

Cutting edge jazz

many still associated with old sci-fi films and 1960s experimental pop. In her hands, however, it is taken in genuinely unprecedented directions, the employment of looping technology helping to create her polyphonic ‘theremin orchesetra’. It’s aptly named: as well as the spectral, otherworldly tone we know from the Beach Boy’s Good Vibrations, she is capable of mimicking strings, wind, brass, even the human voice – emotive quality curiously intact.

Another percussionist calling into question strict, neo-classical genre definitions at this year’s festival is Seb Rochford. His two Mercury Prize nominations (and voluminous barnet) have made him something of a poster boy for contemporary jazz, particularly as leader of Polar Bear. Yet while that act remains, for all Leafcutter John’s electronic work, relatively acceptable to jazz traditionalists, the same could perhaps not be said of his forthcoming duo with Pamelia Kurstin.

Her presence, or the duo format in general, brings to the fore a frenzied freedom in Rochford’s drumming, unseen even in his playing with pugnacious acts like Acoustic Ladyland or The Final Terror. The results are to an extent indebted to free jazz, yet both musicians straddle genre borders: Kurstin has worked with both experimental jazz/ bluegrass act Bela Fleck & the Flecktones and David Byrne; Rochford with Herbie Hancock as well as Brian Eno and even Babyshambles, that touchstone of the avant garde.

Kurstin, who like Ligeti has released on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, is a virtuoso player of the theremin, an instrument to

If the theremin might seem an unusual instrument to feature in a jazz festival, it’s nothing compared to the prepared


023

November 2009

paulo angeli

Sardinian guitar – a truly extraordinary invention described by owner Paolo Angeli as ‘a hybrid between guitar, acoustic bass, cello and drums’. ‘There are piano-like hammers operated by foot pedals, eight resonance strings, four extra strings in a second floor on a double bass bridge – the punk side of the instrument! – and three propellers to produce drone…. I can bow just on the

cutting edge jazz

trio vd

first string or play chords and at the same time play the bassline by foot pedals…’ The somewhat confused mental image such a description creates is testament to the uniqueness of this Frankensteinlike instrument. Yet it’s no mere novelty: the quirky, percussive, contrapuntal music Angeli creates is strange but often hauntingly beautiful, reminiscent of


024

November 2009

Lukas Ligeti

mid-20th century composers Moondog and Harry Partch. Of all the acts in this year’s London Jazz Festival, however, perhaps none refuses to adhere to the jazz-as-museum-piece ideology as violently as the young, Leeds-based Trio VD. Members of the band have worked with jazz legend Jack DeJohnette and even the London Sinfonietta, yet it’s the fact that their drummer has played with Henry Rollins of hardcore legends Black Flag that gives the best indication of their sound. It might be billed as jazz, but there’s little that separates their sonic blitzkrieg from the math rock of Battles or the experimental metal of Mike Patton’s Fantômas. Guitarist Chris Sharkey laughs that ‘stadium improv’ is the nearest he’s got

Cutting edge jazz

Seb Rochford & Pamelia Kurstin

so far to describing the way his jagged shards of avant rock guitar combine with Christophe de Bézenac’s free jazz saxophone skronk and the battering-ramon-fast-forward drumming of Chris Bussey. There’s also an increasingly electronic element to their collective arsenal and all three members now sing (in the sense of creating effects vocally; there are, alas, no barbershop style harmonies). Yet for all this, Sharkey is keen to point out that they’re not being petulant or provocative for the sake of it: ‘That connection between between jazz and popular music has always been there, and we’re a continuation of that idea… We’re not setting out to upset the apple cart or tear up the

P


025

Pamelia Kurstin

November 2009

Paolo Angeli

rulebook; all we’re doing is doing our version of the music, as artists have [since] however far back.’ One gets the same sense from all the artists featured in this piece, who are keen to point out that incorporation of external influences by no means signals a lack of respect for the tradition. Some would not even claim to be jazz musicians so much as musicians influenced by jazz, though all certainly incorporate a significant element of improvisation. Ultimately, it’s all down to definitions, although the idea that jazz has to swing and allude to the blues does seem contrary to its continuation as a living, breathing art form. That none of the musicians mentioned above is AfricanAmerican is itself testament to how

cutting edge jazz

Trio VD

all-pervasive the music has become since its conception over a century ago, and its evolution has been in full swing ever since the cornet took over from the violin in early ragtime orchestras. All that matters in the end is that, however labeled, the sounds themselves are being made; as Chris Starkey says, ‘We just make the music and let other people decide what to call it.’ The London Jazz Festival runs 13 – 22 November. http://www.londonjazzfestival.com


026

November 2009

my sound and music

MY SOUND AND

Photo Š Carl Fox


027

November 2009

D MUSIC:

my sound and music

Akram KhAn

Contemporary dance practitioner and choreographer Akram Khan talks about his musical loves, from Nitin Sawnhey to Henryk Gorecki.

I think kathak has made me more interested in music. As part of the training you have to learn an instrument, and initially I learnt singing. I had one lesson and the teacher said: ‘Sing the note Sa, so I sang the note Sa, and he said ‘Get out, you’ll never be a singer’, which was really quite horrific, especially as a child. So he sent me to the next room and said I’d be better off in tabla class. I really persevered at the percussive side, and now I love anything that’s percussive. In kathak you are both musician and dancer, and that has absolutely affected how I listen to music. Because of the training I had I’m much more interested not just in the melody but also in the craft of the performer, the musician. Are they really accomplished, are they really good at what they do, do they speak through what they do? A lot of dancers respond very honestly to music, and so when the music’s speaking from the heart, from the musician, somehow the dance connects

with it much more easily. I was also into Michael Jackson as a child, his physicality and his musicality, how he physicalises music, that I just find absolutely fantastic. He responds to the music, rather than dancing on the music, and there’s a big difference. That’s something I was very drawn to. So, kathak and Michael Jackson are two influences I had growing up. In terms of who I’d like to choreograph to, I’d love to collaborate with Salif Keita, a beautiful singer from West Africa. He’s got a song called Folon, and it’s just beautiful. I like Bjork. I also love Massive Attack; I’d love to do stuff with them, especially their early stuff. Nitin Sawnhey and I have made a few collaborations together, and Nitin I love. I love his music because he’s scientific, he’s fascinated by science, but he’s also very spiritual. These two worlds are something I’m fascinated by, the spiritual has the narrative, and the science has the information. The spirituality is more


028

November 2009

about faith and trust, you don’t need it to be ‘in your face’, you just believe it. And then, in the middle, where you meet, is the human being. And so you make a choice, you either accept both or you choose one direction or the other. For me, Nitin really encompasses both. There’s something extremely spiritual about him as a performer, but he’s also extremely scientific, it’s amazing. When I’m tired and I need to focus, or when I can’t sleep, I listen to Indian vocal music. It’s so soothing, it creates an atmosphere. I don’t really listen to a lot of Western Classical music, although I like it. I put on stuff like Justin Timberlake, I’m kind of cheesy in that way, I like that stuff. There’s a hint of him being influenced by Michael [Jackson], with the dancing and stuff, it makes you want to groove. I like a lot of hip hop, but I tend to like just one or two songs from each person, a specific melody, or what they’re saying, I like it when it’s about themselves. Because of my dance, I work with a lot of different cultures, people, dancers and collaborators, and the way to get to know them is to get to know what they eat and get to know the music they listen

my sound and music

to. I’ve been listening to a lot of Arabic music recently, because my next piece is inspired by stories from the Arab world, the Muslim world. Before that, I made a piece called Bahok, with the National Ballet of China, so I was listening to a lot of Chinese music. It was kind of Chinese Opera, which was really strange! I like Tan Dun, who did the score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and we’re planning to work together in the future. I love Japanese music, I’m a big fan of Ryuichi Sakamoto. I’m working with a Japanese Taiko drummer at the moment, and she’s incredible. I want to see her perspective of what I’m doing. Rather than going to a musician and saying, ‘this is what I’m doing, this is what I want you to do, this is the story, you follow’, I show them what I’m doing and then I ask, ‘What do you see in it?’ So she, coming from a different place, has a different opinion of what I’m doing. You’re always seeing from your own perspective, but what’s interesting is when you transfer that perspective, to try and see from someone else’s. Henryk Goreck’s Symphony No.3 is just phenomenal. Phenomenal. It starts at


029

November 2009

my sound and music

the Earth. You can barely hear it, it’s so bass, so low. And it just… transcends. It comes out of the ground and then starts to go to vocals, which is the angels. There’s a journey, a kind of vertical road, (which is the name of the next piece I’m creating), and this journey is very spiritual for me. As an artist, there’s a sense of a journey towards perfection, but of never quite reaching it. The piece repeats itself, but it changes a tiny bit, layer by layer. I love the sense of transition, of mutation, of it evolving. This music really reflects that journey. I feel very attached to it because that’s what happened to me. I trained in Indian Classical dance for many years, and then I went to university and discovered contemporary dance, and my classical got contaminated. Contamination is used as a negative word, but then I realised, no, I’m evolving. Even if people hate it, I’m evolving. That’s why I relate to the music.

Akram Khan was speaking with Eleanor Turney.


030

November 2009

tristram cary

Unsung electroacousti A tribute to Tristram Cary (1925 – 2008) Tristram Cary was a pioneer of electronic music in the UK during the 1960s, establishing the first electronic music studio in a British educational establishment, at the Royal College of Music (RCM), co-designing the ground-breaking VCS3 synthesizer and, of course, composing. Not long before he died in 2008, Cary realised that his collected works ran to a total of 76 CDs. But whereas many of his contemporaries moved mainly in avant garde circles, Cary’s eclecticism matched the age. His work in theatre, radio, television and film, together with his books, articles and teaching, combine to build a picture of a creative, influential, engaged and generous man, whose contribution to artistic life in the UK and Australia has not yet been fully appreciated. By 1954, Cary was earning a living writing music for radio, films and the still new medium of television. His passion for electronic music was unquenchable, despite opposition from some performers who feared that technology might replace them. There were other obstacles, too. In an article for the Musical Times in 1966, subtitled ‘A Call for Action’, Cary wrote: ‘To the musical layman the rapid development of tape and computer music may not seem important. For him it is perhaps no more than another collection of weird noises to add to the weird noises already evoked from ordinary instruments by today’s composers. Possibly this is why no one seems to notice (or care) that Britain is rapidly losing another race among so many lost races...’

Photos courtesy of Tristram


ic hero

m Cary Estate Š 2009

David Burnand highlights an eclectic composer whose passion for electronic music was unquenchable.



033

November 2009

He went on to complain that: ‘The best equipped studio is the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop. This unit, under Desmond Briscow, does a large amount of very interesting work, but does not provide any kind of service which composers can use unless they are directly commissioned by the BBC to do so.’ At the time, Cary estimated that it would cost £50,000 to equip a professional electronic music studio, a fortune in those days. His original equipment had cost nearer £50, and included a good deal of homemade electronics. It had grown over time, of course, especially through his income from commercial work, but much of it was, in his own words, ‘ramshackle apparatus which only [he] would dare use’. One solution, he argued, would be to establish a wellequipped studio attached to a university, which would help to broaden the teaching of composition. Within a year of publishing this call for action Cary had established such a studio at the RCM. He gave his first class in electronic music the following autumn. Lawrence Cas-

tristram cary

serley, former student of, and successor to, Tristram recalls: ‘One of the things that soon became apparent was the great breadth of Tristram’s knowledge, interests and abilities. He was an enormously versatile composer, from music for the Dr Who series and films such as The Ladykillers, through choral and orchestral work, to some beautifully wrought pure electronic pieces. He was a meticulous perfectionist, and his high standards were an inspiration to us all.’ Howard Davidson, another of Cary’s first students at the RCM, writes: ‘Tristram was, above all, a very fine composer and produced the most rich and extraordinarily beautiful music with what were, in essence, very simple electronic boxes and magnetic tape. I remember his score for Leviathan 99, Ray Bradbury’s radio adaptation of Melville’s Moby Dick. His electronic treatment of some of the characters’ voices was both ground-breaking and astonishing.’


034

November 2009

So, by 1967 Tristram Cary had established a pioneering studio at the Royal College of Music, collaborated with Peter Zinovieff and David Cockerell to establish the EMS company, and with them developed the ground-breaking VCS3 synthesizer. He also continued to find time to compose, including the devising of sound environments for the various sections of the British Pavilion at Expo ‘67 in Montreal. In January 1968 Cary was featured in the first major electronic music concert in the UK, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. It is easy to think of Cary as primarily an electronic music composer, but we should not forget his work in film and other media, much of which was not electronic. He scored Ealing Studios’ The Ladykillers (1955), Joseph Losey’s Time Without Pity (1957), Charles Crichton’s The Boy Who Stole a Million (1960), Alexander Mackendrick’s Sammy Going South (1963), Hammer House of Horror’s Quatermass and the Pit (1967) and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), A Christmas Carol (1971), and many more. He also provided music for television costume dramas such as Jane

tristram cary

Eyre (1963) and Madame Bovary (1964). Cary’s early orchestral and chamber music also deserves more attention. These include the Sonata for Guitar (1959), Continuum for tape (1969), the cantata Peccata Mundi (1972), and the orchestral work Contours and Densities at First Hill (1972). It was partly Cary’s frustration in dealing with the conflicting interests of his ‘own music’ and the multiple commissions for film, television, radio and theatre that tipped the balance when he was offered an opportunity to leave England for Australia in 1972. But before he left, Cary yet again demonstrated his eclectic and open-minded spirit. He had accepted a commission from the Olivetti company to compose a piece using the sounds of office equipment. This Divertimento for 16 singers, a jazz drummer and Olivetti machines, was performed live at the opening of the company’s new training centre at Haslemere in Surrey, designed by the architect James Stirling. Tristram conducted the performance for an illustrious audience that included the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. England’s loss was Australia’s gain, and


035

November 2009

Cary’s reputation there, as a composer, teacher and writer is perhaps better established than in this country. But he had mixed feelings about the move, saying in an interview with John Robert Brown for Classical Music Magazine in 2007: ‘I think it was a great mistake to change countries at [the age of] nearly 50... The result was that I hardly get played in England. In England they don’t know what I’ve done since 1975. Here in Australia they don’t know what I did before 1975.’ On April 24, 2008, at his home in Adelaide, South Australia, Tristram died, just nine months after that interview was published. Cary was a few days short of his 83rd birthday. He had a long and eventful life, which any musician would be proud of, whatever Cary’s own misgivings about his reputation. He remains an inspiration to the now third generation of technologically-inspired composers and sound designers whose work is accepted as part of contemporary music, not a threat to it. Christopher Chong, currently a postgraduate student at the RCM, who is equally involved in sonic

tristram cary

art and screen composition, sums up Cary’s legacy: ‘Tristram set the foundations for an environment where today, composers like myself can freely move from instrumental to electroacoustic resources and apply them unreservedly, on the concert platform or in screen-based media such as film and video games. A versatile composer and inspiring innovator, Cary’s ability to move effortlessly from pioneering sonic concepts to scoring music for picture is one that I will continue to aspire to.’ A concert of Tristram Cary’s work is being held at the Royal College of Music on 27 November. For more information see www.rcm.ac.uk/tristramcary


036

November 2009

ryoji ikeda

Bridging the divide Ryoji Ikeda is a rare artist considered a leading practitioner in both visual and sound art disciplines. Ahead of Ikon gallery’s hosting of his installation and performance works, curator Nigel Prince examines his work and discusses the showcasing of sound artists by galleries.

“As an artist and composer, my work has always focused on concepts of beauty and the sublime. For me, beauty is crystal: rationality, precision, simplicity, elegance, subtlety. And the sublime is infinity: infinitesimal, immense, indescribable, unspeakable. Mathematics is beauty in its purest form.” –Ryoji Ikeda, January 2009

Ryoji Ikeda: data.tron (2007-09)


037

November 2009

ryoji ikeda

e: Ryoji ikeda From 15 October to 8 November 2009, Ikon Eastside presented Ryoji Ikeda’s data.tron (2007—2009). Born in 1966, Ikeda initially became known for his work as one of Japan’s leading composers, creating electronic scores that focused on the minutiae of ultrasonic frequencies and the reduction of sound into its purest, most fundamental elements. Since 1995, Ikeda has been intensely active through concerts, installations and recordings, integrating sound, acoustics and sublime imagery. These are often generated from modest means yet consistently focus on the essential characteristics of sound and image itself. Latterly, these installations and performances have explored the interconnectivity between humans and the world that surrounds us — for example, the abstraction and visual reinterpretation of computer operating systems, the human body and a range of our technological communications. Music, time and space are shaped by mathematical methods as he explores


038

November 2009

vision and sound as sensation, pulling apart their physical properties to reveal their relationship with human perception. Ikon’s presentation continues Ikeda’s recent focus investigating the vast universe of data in the infinity between zero and one. data.tron immediately confronts us through its scale and audio-visual presence. Beginning with a graphic representation of human DNA

ryoji ikeda

mapped into series of numbers and diagrammatic forms, the projection alters to become a flickering wall of interference. Moving closer we are engulfed in an intensely detailed image inciting a sense of awe — row upon row of individual numbers are revealed which rapidly change to create random patterns. The viewer is drawn in, immersed in the innumerable permutations and billions of sequences of numbers 20mm


039

November 2009

high. A section towards the end abstracts random web pages into their primary building blocks — bit codes – asserting mathematics as the elemental quality connecting all matter. data.tron leads us to question our ability to comprehend such a vast possibility, challenging the thresholds of our perception. The sound accompanying this sea of ever-changing numerals also has a tangibly physical effect. Intermittent beeps regulate a continual electronic tone, ambient despite its oddly material quality. Following this exhibition is a performance of a new version of Ikeda’s ongoing work datamatics [ver.2.0] on 24 November, an audio-visual concert at the CBSO Centre, hosted by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. This will be his first concert in the UK since 2006. The sound and visuals generated in this performance are routed in the pure, invisible data surrounding us. Translated into a series of schematic representations, they are often reminiscent of constellations or some kind of galactic space. Exploring again the infinitesimal possibilities of numbers — like stars in the universe — Ikeda reveals everyday experiences as coded. Life itself is reduced to binary information.

ryoji ikeda

The sound ranges from barely audible high-pitched electronic tones, through to orchestral stabs of white noise. The multiplicity of the piece, both in concept and in realisation, reflects the complexity and sheer volume of data that permeates our material world. The demanding potential of this work is not reserved exclusively for its audience; fast frame rates and rapid generation of information also test to their limits the processing capacity of the computer drive and working parameters of the technical equipment. Ikeda operates at the very edge of our understanding. An essential component of Ikon’s programme reflects those individuals who have an interest in cross art-form work. We are consistently interested in this approach and methodology, having worked with Pierre Huyghe, Jürgen Partenheimer, Kevin Volans, Martin Creed and Howard Skempton to name but a few of the artists, musicians and composers featured in our past programme. Following on from Ikeda, in 2010 we will present a new commission from Florian Hecker in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery, London, and performances from radical 60s composer


040

November 2009

ryoji ikeda

Charlemagne Palestine, as well as a new film work developed between Andrew Cross and Carl Palmer. Florian Hecker’s work is concerned with how to manipulate psycho-acoustic effects in order to distort and shift spatial perception. Working in performance, studio and installation, collaboration is core to Hecker’s practice. He works frequently with software engineers and scientists as well as other artists such as Russell Haswell, Carsten Holler and Cerith Wyn Evans. Ikeda too has worked with Carsten Nicolai amongst others. Often spoken of in relation to the avant garde composer Iannis Xenakis, Hecker explores old and new systems of creating and working with sound. Hecker’s solo work in the gallery continues to explore ways of sound invention and sonic imaging through complex organisation and development processes in relation to the spatial concerns of sculpture and architecture. Clearly these are shared concerns with strictly ‘visual’ artists, albeit manifest through differing media. Art and music have strong historical precedents establishing a broad spectrum of partnership and connection. This is not a

Installation view, Ikon Eastside 15 October – 8 Novemb

peculiarly post-modern affair; earlier trends within modernism are well documented. In times when hybridity and/or collaboration appear as a condition of contemporary practice, it seems essential to reflect on this. Likewise partnerships with other organisations — choirs,


041

November 2009

ryoji ikeda

artist articulates their proposition. As such this asserts the continuum between art and life. While there are dedicated qualities and concerns discrete to each discipline, the opportunity to produce work in a manner most appropriate to the idea, regardless of traditional boundaries, seems an all too human desire. An exhibition of Ryoji Ikeda’s work is at Ikon, Birmingham, until 8 November, and a performance of his work takes place on 24 November at CBSO Centre. www.ikon-gallery.co.uk

ber 2009

Photography: Stuart Whipps

orchestras, music ensembles of various kinds — play a key role in enabling artists to work in an arena pertinent to realising ideas. To argue for one position to be maintained over another seems irrelevant; attention should fall towards examining the quality and precision with which an


042

November 2009

From the blogs

16/10/2009 Too much too young? Do modern composers have too many musical influences competing for their ears? A Jorge Luis Borges’s story tells of a nineteen-year-old who is thrown from his horse and paralysed, from which point on he remembers everything he has ever seen, read, felt, heard and known. This seems to me a powerful metaphor for the quandary of modern composers. The instant access to virtually all music recorded since recording began through websites like Naxos Music Library, Spotify and iTunes, is more likely to paralyse than inspire. Older generations enjoyed an Eden-like ignorance of the burden of history, but we have now all tasted the forbidden fruit. When I was at school - and I’m not all that old - all the classical music I was aware of came from the radio or the cassette collection of my local library. Students I teach know far more music than I did at their age, but perhaps value it less as a result.

THE EARWIG by Bernard Hughes

To read more blog visit the Sound and Music blog.

Because music is now so accessible, it seems a crime not to access it, even though there are several lifetimes’ worth of unknown byways waiting to be explored, let alone keeping pace with the new music being created. Borges’s character “died in 1889, of congestion of the lungs”. Perhaps we are all in a similar danger of succumbing to a congestion of the ears.


gs, d

043

November 2009

22/10/2009 Nights at the Chinese Opera The problem with orientalism. Before 1978, ‘orientalism’ was a harmless term, but Edward Said adopted it to describe the appropriation or pastiche of eastern art and literature within western forms, in which the orient is established as an Exotic Other, not bound by the rules and mores of the ‘enlightened’ west. Said’s theory remains controversial but Puccini’s Turandot embodies orientalism as Said defines it, and makes for some uncomfortable viewing in the current ENO production. Orientalist opera generally presents two types of transgressive behaviour: expressions of ruthless violence and of unrestrained sexuality, against which we can measure our own, more ‘advanced’, morality. Princess Turandot embodies both of these tropes. Puccini’s oriental references are clichéd and a bit embarrassing –

From the blogs

passages of parallel motion in the pentatonic mode, and orchestration featuring percussion instruments such as xylophone and triangle. Rupert Goold’s setting in a Chinese restaurant does not mitigate the orientalism. So can contemporary composers take eastern stories or settings without falling into the trap of orientalism? Or should this operatic archetype be abandoned? Two operas show what can be done. In Nixon in China, John Adams inverts the normal assumptions. Here a representative westerner – the superficial, image-obsessed Richard Nixon – is the Occidental Other, unfavourably compared with his Chinese hosts. Approaching from a different angle is Judith Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera. Weir uses an authentic Chinese story, and engages with the tradition of Chinese opera, whose stylised performing conventions are imaginatively re-created. But where Chinese opera trades on narrative familiarity, stock characters and clearly delineated genres, Weir sets


044

November 2009

herself apart from the Western operatic canon, managing both to have her cake and eat it. Interestingly both Nixon in China and A Night at the Chinese Opera use the convention of the ‘play-within-the-play’ at their heart. This allows their cultural borrowings to be framed as artefacts within the opera as a whole, making their engagement with orientalism at once more complex but less problematic.

31/10/2009 Setting the pace The Winter 1999 issue of The Musical Times carried a guest editorial by the pianist Ian Pace, a state-ofthe-nation critique provoked by his having ‘heard numerous protagonists proclaiming that contemporary British music is the finest in the world’. As a committed and persuasive performer of contemporary music, Pace’s remarks carry weight, and I thought

From the blogs

it would be interesting to re-visit his comments a decade later. In his 1999 article, Pace clearly seeks to shake the new music scene out of its perceived complacency, and he takes a polemic tone from the off. He starts with money; music, he says, ‘is poorly funded in Britain, and Tony Blair’s government shows no sign of improving the situation.’ Financial support for young composers ‘is meagre or non-existent’ so many have to find a day-job, after which their composing is ‘never likely to be taken seriously.’ Therefore ‘those who survive’ are ‘those (usually male) who have independent wealth to fall back on.’ He then targets ‘the empirical or positivistic tradition of British thought’ which rejects ‘the intellect and the emotions’ in favour of ‘the found, the already-known’. This, Pace says, leads to composers to rely on ‘the tried and tested’ to avoid charges of incompetence. He then swerves towards those who attend new music concerts - ‘it is difficult to imagine that many of the self-styled aficionados at such occasions really care for or enjoy


045

November 2009

music’ - before lambasting ‘many student and professional pianists: fingers always very close to the keys, elbows in, wrist fixed’. It is quite a hit-list. But, without dwelling on the validity of these points in 1999, are they (still) true today? Well, yes, serious music is still underfunded. This is as true as it was in 1999, or 1989 - or indeed 1899. But there are still more musicians training in music colleges and universities than could ever make a living in music, and most must know it. In particular, there are many more composers studying in universities than could possibly earn any money at all, let alone a living, from composing. I don’t know, but I would guess that the number of British composers whose entire income comes from commission and performance fees is in single figures. So I don’t think there can be too much discrimination against composers with a day job, as that is virtually all of them. And yet composers continue to put themselves forward, whether they

From From the the blogs blogs

receive any encouragement or not. In the last decade they have found considerable assistance from technology. Amazing improvements in Sibelius and Finale mean composers can create scores which look better than professionally printed scores in the 1990s, and expansion of the web enables composers to put audio clips and other content online without any cost. It doesn’t follow that these composers are writing better music, only that there is a more level playingfield for self-published composers. And while it is true that writing art music is never going to make you rich, neither am I aware of composers with ‘independent wealth’ dominating the compositional world. But I was completely gobsmacked by Pace’s swipe at those who attend new music concerts, his ‘self-styled aficionados’ who don’t ‘really care for or enjoy music’. This is extraordinary. The avant-garde having chased away a general audience, one of its strongest advocates then rounds on the remaining congregation of the faithful and accuses them of being there for the wrong reasons (is there even a


046

November 2009

‘right’ reason?) Yes there are familiar faces at a lot of events, and maybe some of those faces may like to be seen to be there, but are people really so perverse as to seek out concerts they actually hate, just for effect? I hope not. Although I am not qualified to offer an informed opinion on whether pianists still have their wrists locked and their fingers too close to the keyboard, I do know a number of pianists and other performers giving wonderful performances of contemporary repertoire however they are sitting, managing to rise above what Ian Pace calls ‘the deadening machinery of British performing traditions.’ I recently saw and reported on a contemporary opera in a major operahouse playing to capacity audiences who received the work with delight and genuine enthusiasm. This success would doubtless be seen by some as evidence of a sell-out, of ‘populism’. But I think more could be learned from examining the success of Le Grand Macabre than pursuing some of Ian Pace’s straw men. His

From the blogs

final, constructive, paragraph recommends that composers need to pursue the expression of powerful emotions, ‘an openness to the conceptual dimension of music’, an engagement with contemporary music of continental Europe and ‘a proper appreciation of the true radicals of period performance such as Harnoncourt or Koopman’. All admirable aims. But where is the ambition for bringing new audiences to contemporary music without upsetting – or impugning the motives of – those who already enjoy engaging with new music?


047

Hear & Now

7 November: Berlin Special

Ivan Hewett reports on the vibrant new music scene in Berlin, 20 years after the Wall came down, talks to local composers and introduces music by Helmut Oehring, Enno Poppe and Reinhold Friedl.

Saturday nights at 10.30pm on BBC Radio 3 21 November: Two American Mavericks

14 November: Sonic Expolorations at Kings Place

Robert Worby explores the music of James Tenney and Pauline Oliveros, both born in the 1930s in the American South West, and both pioneers in tape music. The programme includes an archive interview with Tenney, who The logo is made and up of a twoconversation components, died in 2006, with Oliveros which should separated: recorded atnever the be Deep Listening Retreat she led the symbol and the name. in Devon this summer. min 8 mm.

Mira Calix: ort-oard; Duncan Macleod: Good Boy, Bad Boy (WP); Jonathan Harvey: Other Presences; Karlheinz Stockhausen: Poles for 2; Emily Hall: Put Flesh On!; Natasha Barrett: Deconstructing Dowland (UKP); Claudia Molitor: it’s not quite how I remember it (WP); Luciano Berio: Naturale. Performed by Oliver Coates (cello), Paul Silverthorne (viola), Paul Archibald (trumpet), Huw Davies (guitar), Sam Walton (percussion), Sound Intermedia. Also features Symbol Name WKH ¿UVW LQ D VHULHV RI GLDU\ SLHFHV IURP composers Mira Calix and Larry Goves as they embark on their year-long collaborative project, Exchange And Return. Colour options:

The minimum exclusion zone

is equal to half the height of the symbol. 1RYHPEHU +XGGHUVÂżHOG No text or other visual elements should appear within this space. Music Festival Contemporary

The recommeded exculsion zone Live broadcast from Bates Mill. Jonathan is equal to the height of the symbol. Harvey: Bhakti; Richard Barrett: Mesopotamia (WP). Performed by London Sinfonietta, Sound Intermedia, Examples of colours: Pierre-AndrĂŠ Valade.

Corporate Symbol: Pantone 2995 Name: Pantone 295

BURSARIES TO COMPOSERS Two-colour Symbol: any colour Name: Pantone 295

Single-colour Symbol: any colour Name: same colour

British Council Ukraine corporate

Colours that are tonally close to the background colour should be avoided.

Deadline for applications: 30 November 2009

If you’re a British composer, resident in the UK, and you want to travel OVERSEASĂľTOĂľATTENDĂľSIGNIĂ˜CANTĂľPRESENTATIONSĂľOFĂľYOURĂľWORK ĂľYOUĂľCANĂľ Objects to use: Logo size: apply for funding from the British Council’s Bursaries to Composers Paper Logo Page scheme, administrated by Sound and Music. size size margin A2

200%

25 mm.

A4

100%

15 mm.

A5

90%

10 mm.

A6

80%

8 mm.

DL

90%

10 mm.

More information: A3 130% 20 mm. www.soundandmusic.org/learning/development/bursaries Sound and Music

The black version should be used when the logo

The reversed version should be used when

Minimum height of this version of the logo is 8 mm.


048

November 2009

OPPORTUNITIES

Opportunitie John Surman Masterclass Event on: 14/11/2009

NoiseFloor Festival Call for Works Deadline: 20/11/2009

As part of the London Jazz Festival, one of Britain’s most celebrated jazz musicians, multi-reed virtuoso Surman talks about his amazing career and demonstrates some of the secrets of the saxophone. Date: Saturday 14 November Time: 11am Venue: Southbank Centre / Spirit Level Tickets are £5 and can be purchased from the Southbank Centre website.

Staffordshire University Music Technology department is pleased to invite submissions of fixed media or live works for the very first NoiseFloor Festival. Stereo and multi-channel audio or audiovisual works (up to 8 channels + sub) are invited for consideration. Equipment needed for diffusion of fixed media and audio-visual works will be provided; composers will need to provide their own laptop and performers for live pieces.

www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Open Call for Submissions to Cryptic Nights Deadline: 01/11/2009

Cryptic Nights is a platform for emerging artists, crossing creative boundaries every first Thursday of the month at CCA Glasgow. We are now seeking emerging artists to take part in 2010. Submissions are welcome from across art forms; from film makers to musicians, and from visual artists to performers. www.crypticnights.org.uk

http://www.soundandmusic.org/network/opportunities/129035

INTO magazine: Call for article proposals for ‘How To’ section Deadline: 01/12/2009

If you would like to show or tell us how to do something, please email a short (one paragraph) proposal to shoel.stadlen@ soundandmusic.org. We welcome articles, videos and photo stories on any relevant subject in which you’re an expert. So far we have had articles on how to create a hydrophone and how to build sonic sculptures. We’d also welcome articles on the following list – by no means exhaustive, so do suggest others – of subjects:


049

November 2009

How to write for particular instruments How to use specific technology How to learn particular performance techniques How to promote yourself How to raise funding How to market your music/ensemble/ events

SAW- Sonic Artists in Wales Electro-acoustic symposium Deadline: 05/12/2009

Call for works for the Electroacoustic Symposium 2010, presented by Sonic Artists in Wales in collaboration with Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama on 25 & 26 March 2010. www.rwcmd.ac.uk/saw

WAKTM

Deadline: 31/12/2009 WAKTM is a musical / opera / film / performance in progress. Based on a book by Chris Eales, we are looking for artists in any form, styles, from any locations, backgrounds, religions, languages, races to collaborate with us to create the work. www.waktm.com/waktm/weallknowtoomuch.htm

OPPORTUNITIES

Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize Deadline: 31/03/2010

Offers four x £3,000 commissions. Three of the winning composers will join the Philharmonia’s Young Composers Academy, in partnership with the Royal Philharmonic Society, and will be commissioned to write a piece for members of the Philharmonia to be performed as part of the Music of Today Series. They will also attend regular workshops and seminars throughout the year. The fourth winner will receive the Susan Bradshaw Composers’ Fund commission to write a chamber work for the 2011 Cheltenham Festival, plus a workshop and performance of the commissioned piece. Open to composers under the age of 29 who are studying, or have studied at any conservatoire or university in the UK. See RPS website for more details. www.royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/ composers


do something different

www.barbican.org.uk/music Box Office 020 7638 8891

Total Immersion George Crumb Sat 5 December 2009 Hans Werner Henze Sat 16 – Sun 17 January 2010 Wolfgang Rihm Fri 12 – Sat 13 March 2010 Plunge into the unique sound-worlds of three groundbreaking composers as the BBC Symphony Orchestra and guests take you on a journey through their lives and music.Three special events packed with concerts, film and discussion.

bbc.co.uk/totalimmersion for full details

Present Voices

UK premieres of operas by three of today’s most distinctive voices

Phaedra © Ruth Walz

Angels in America © Marie-Noëlle Robert

After Life © Hans van den Bogaard

Sun 17 Jan 2010

Fri 26 Mar 2010

Sat 15 May 2010

Phaedra Hans Werner Henze

Angels in America Peter Eötvös

After Life Michel van der Aa

Ensemble Modern Michael Boder conductor Cast includes: Maria Riccarda Wesseling John Mark Ainsley Lauri Vasar Axel Koehler Marlis Petersen Concert performance Part of Total Immersion: Hans Werner Henze Sat 16 – Sun 17 Jan 2010

BBC Symphony Orchestra David Robertson conductor Cast includes: Scotty Scully David Adam Moore Omar Ebrahim Julia Migenes Kelly Anderson Brian Asawa Ava Pine Concert performance

ASKO Schoenberg Ensemble Otto Tausk conductor Cast includes: Claron McFadden Helena Rasker Margriet van Reijsen Yvette Bonner Richard Suart Roderick Williams Semi-staged performance


Thursdays, 29 October to 3 December Plus Sights and Sounds, Saturday 14 November The Warehouse, London, SE1

Outstanding concerts of new music from UK composers alongside modern classics by Xenakis, Cage, Kagel and Feldman. ‘Unmissable’ Time Out

‘consistently innovative... mouth-watering’ The Guardian

www.soundandmusic.org


The magazine of


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.