June 2010
What you’re into if you’re into sound and music
ALDO CLEMENTI Suspended animation
The magazine of
PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD Past, present and future KEN HOLLINGS Spaceship UK PRSF NEW MUSIC AWARDS Sounds of the new
Welcome to the June issue of INTO The final stages of putting together INTO have had an intriguing musical accompaniment. The room where we edit the magazine is also home to a collection of archive recordings currently being transferred from Betamax tape to digital, and I’ve been listening in on this fascinating process. So far, a favourite has been a recording of composer Tristram Cary, the subject of a feature in INTO last year, who crops up this month in Ken Holling’s Spaceship UK, an imaginative survey of early British electronic music as space exploration programme. This alternate history of oscillators, aliens and “Special Stereo Effects” is an abridged version of an essay commissioned by Sound and Music for this year’s Sonar Festival, which comes with a limited edition record featuring Daphne Oram and Belbury Poly. James Weeks’ profile of Italian composer Aldo Clementi also uncovers a secret history, celebrating his “enigmatic presence” ahead of concerts at Spitalfields Music Summer Festival Published by Sound and Music www.soundandmusic.org Contact: into-magazine@soundandmusic.org
later this month. James provides a way in to Clementi’s intricate, often mysterious universe in a sensitive essay and exclusive video, which also features British composer Chris Newman. A similar drive to bring to light challenging new music is shared by pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, director of the Aldeburgh Festival, with whom Shoël Stadlen shares an in-depth conversation about his life and work, including interpreting Ligeti’s Études. Last month’s announcement of PRSF’s New Music Award nominees revealed a line-up of contrasting artists who take inspiration from, and in some cases directly work with, the cutting edge of science, technology and communications. We speak to them about working across boundaries and challenging expectations. Frances Morgan Editor
Managing Editor: Shoël Stadlen Editor: Frances Morgan Designed by: Trond Klevgaard Original Design: PostParis, www.postparis.com
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Cover Image: Aldo Clementi photographed by Mario Clementi (reproduced with permission of Edizioni Suvini Zerboni – SugarMusic S.p.A., Milano) 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.
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CONTENTS
C ntents WHAT WE’RE INTO PAGES 6–7
SPACESHIP UK PAGES 20-29
NEWS PAGES 8–19
PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD PAGES 30-39
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CONTENTS
ALDO CLEMENTI PAGES 40-48
PRSF NEW MUSIC AWARDS PAGES 50-59
FROM THE BLOGS PAGES 60-67
OPPORTUNITIES PAGES 68-73
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WHAT WE’RE INTO
An oral history of Detroit’s electronic music festival
Jace Clayton aka DJ Rupture on audio artist Gregory Whitehead
What we’re INT What we’re INTO is a small monthly round-up of some of the new music and sound that we’ve been enjoying at Sound and Music. Follow the links to see and hear our audio, video and interactive selections. If you would like to submit your work for consideration, see the open call on our website.
Central Station, Scottish online arts community The Many Moods of Otomo Yoshihide
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WHAT WE’RE INTO
Yvonne Loriod performs Messaien’s Des Canyon aux Etoiles in 2008
Susan Philipsz, The Lost Reflection Daytrip Maryanne – a collaboration between Maryanne Amacher and Thurston Moore
Longmont Potion Castle
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NEWS
NEW TURNER NOMINATION PUTS SOUND ART IN THE NEWS de la Cruz and Dexter Dalwood at Tate Britain, where the artists will exhibit from October 2010 until January 2011.
SUSAN PHILIPSZ, THE LOST REFLECTION
Nominees for the Turner Prize 2010 include Susan Philipsz, a Glaswegian artist whose work uses her own singing voice as source material. Previous installations have seen Philipsz play recordings of songs over supermarket tannoys, in the Acropolis and under a Glasgow bridge, as well as in gallery settings; she will join other nominees The Otolith Group, Angela
Philipsz’ nomination indicates a growing interest in sound art, according to Sound and Music’s creative director John Kieffer, who celebrated the artist’s inclusion on the list in a recent article in The Independent: “Those of us who have long been immersed in the world of sound, and are investing in its future, are grateful to the Turner Prize judges for bringing the genre into the limelight.” The winner of the Turner Prize will be announced in December 2010. www.tate.org.uk
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NEWS
PROGRAMME ANNOUNCED FOR NEW MILTON KEYNES INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL EVELYN GLENNIE AND FRED FRITH
A new international ten-day festival of music and art, IF: Milton Keynes, launches next month, making use of the city’s buildings and outdoor spaces in a celebration of its unique architecture and utopian ‘new town’ origins. Concerts and free events will take place between 16 and 25 July, including a number of large-scale visual pieces from artists such as InStallation – a Swiss collective of aerial and high wire artists – and Architects of Air, who will construct a walk-in luminarium. Many events, such as the opening day’s World Picnic, are suitable for families. Music and sound play a part in the festival, with improvised concerts in the City Church and a performance by Fred Frith and Evelyn Glennie at the Stables, Milton Keynes’ well-known music venue that this year celebrates its 40th birthday. Sound artist (and INTO contributor) Janek Schaefer, the festival’s artist-inresidence who grew up in Milton Keynes, will create Asleep at the Wheel, an installation in a disused supermarket, which is supported by Sound and Music. www.ifmiltonkeynes.org.
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NEWS
NEW BRITTEN IN CONTEXT AT LIVERPOOL HOPE CONFERENCE Benjamin Britten is the subject of a conference at Liverpool Hope University, taking place from 10 to 12 June. Speakers have been drawn from both national and international universities, and the conference will open with an interview with Opera North’s Richard Farnes, on the subject of staging Britten for modern audiences and Opera North’s plans for the Britten centenary in 2013. www.hope.ac.uk
ENO AND PUNCHDRUNK CREATE THE DUCHESS OF MALFI A new, “immersive” opera commissioned by ENO will have its first performance on 13 July 2010 in the London borough of Newham, at the Great Eastern Quay, Royal Albert Basin. Composer Torsten Rasch and innovative theatre company Punchdrunk have created The Duchess Of Malfi, based on John Webster’s 17th Century tragedy, as part of CREATE 10, a summer festival taking place in the five Olympic boroughs of Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest. The aim of all involved is to reach out to new audiences – Punchdrunk’s history is one of forming new and challenging relationships with audiences, while ENO has recently collaborated with the Young Vic theatre – and the production promises to be an adventurous experience in which the audience are at the heart of the action, following the opera at their own pace through the venue. The Duchess Of Malfi will run for 13 performances from 13 July. www.eno.org
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NEWS
SOUNDING OUT CALLS FOR NEW SOUNDWORLDS JONATHAN HARVEY
from 8 to 10 September 2010, and submissions for papers and panels are now being considered, as well as a call for audio and audiovisual works on the theme of Soundworlds – Sonic Arts, Film and Radio. Works that are chosen will be played continuously in the university’s Atrium Gallery, before, during and after the conference. Sounding Out is a forum for practitioners, artists and academics working in the field of sound. This year’s keynote speakers include Chris Chafe, Jonathan Harvey and Kaye Mortley, and topics covered include acoustic ecology, sound on film and electroacoustic composition.
The fifth edition of the Sounding Out festival of sonic arts, film and radio will take place at Bournemouth University
www.soundingout. bournemouth.ac.uk
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NEWS
NEW LONDON LABELS GHOST BOX AND BO’WEAVIL RELEASE SEVEN-INCH SERIES
Jazz, folk, improvised and experimental music label Bo’Weavil is releasing a series of five seven-inch records by acoustic guitarist Chris Joynes and various collaborators including avantgarde harpist Rhodri Davies, sound artist Babygrand and composer and flautist Glen Hall. Each record features Joynes solo and with contributors, and is limited to 350 copies, with hand-cut sleeves and coloured vinyl.
The single is proving to be popular choice for small labels usually associated with longer releases, as two of London’s foremost underground labels release seven-inch series this month. As well as the collectible, tactile nature of the seven-inch single, the series format allows for labels and artists to produce one-off recordings and collaborations with a more collective identity.
Ghost Box, widely regarded as the pioneers of the ‘hauntology’ genre, are planning to release a series of seveninches and downloads provisionally entitled The Study Series from the end of June, featuring music from Mordant Music, Moon Wiring Club, Hong Kong in the 60s, Seeland, James Cargill and Trish Keenan of Broadcast, with more to be confirmed. www.boweavilrecordings.com www.ghostbox.co.uk
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NEWS
GAMELAN MEETS ELECTRONICA AT ARNOLFINI The Southbank Gamelan Players join forces with Warp Records duo Plaid in a collaborative performance to take place on 10 June at the Arnolfini, Bristol. A new work has been created with Indonesian composer Rahayu Supanggah, in which Plaid (Andy Turner and Ed Handley) will build a soundscape around the rhythms of the Javanese gamelan and processing the sounds of the gongs. While gamelan music has been influential on many artists in the more experimental reaches of rock and dance music, it’s rare that the two genres come together in performance. As well as making innovative dance music, Plaid have been involved in installation work and collaborations with artists from other genres, while the Southbank Gamelan Players have established an international reputation both for their performances of traditional Javanese music and for their championing of new music for gamelan. This project was originally commissioned by the Southbank Centre for Ether Festival 2009. www.qujunktions.com
TAKE TO THE STREETS WITH PRIDE PROJECT Matthew Lee Knowles is calling for participants for Street Scenes, a ‘happening’ to take place in Old Compton St as part of Pride London on 26 June. The plan is to construct a piece which starts at one end of the street and ends at the other, with performers devising characters that they will take on during the piece. Musicians, actors, poets, artists, exhibitionists, joggers, walkers, crawlers and runners should contact matthewleeknowles@yahoo.co.uk to find out how to get involved.
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NEWS
NEW THE VISUAL ART OF JOHN CAGE COMES TO LIFE AT BALTIC CENTRE presents over 100 works including the Ryonaji series of prints and drawings that Cage made in the 1980s using stones as source material. In reference to the ‘chance’ methods frequently used by the composer in both music and visual art, the exhibition, entitled Every Day is a Good Day, has been laid out using chance operations, via a computer-generated random number programme similar to the I Ching. Cage’s 1992 Los Angeles exhibition, Rolywholyover, employed the same method, which results in works being hung in unusual arrangements and groupings. JOHN CAGE, 75 STONES (1989)
The first major survey of John Cage’s visual art opens this month at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, before touring to Cambridge, Huddersfield, Glasgow and Bexhill-on-Sea. Organised by Hayward Touring in collaboration with BALTIC and the John Cage Trust, the exhibition
As the tour continues, corresponding musical events will be programmed at each venue, and a new publication covering all aspects of Cage’s graphic art has been published to accompany the exhibition. www.southbankcentre.co.uk
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NEWS
YVONNE LORIOD DIES AGED 86 Music critics have paid tribute to French pianist and composer Yvonne Loriod, who died on 17 May 17 aged 86. The wife of Olivier Messaien, she was also an acclaimed musical force in her own right, as a pianist and mentor to other composers and musicians including George Benjamin and Pierre-Laurent Aimard. In a Guardian blog Tom Service remarks on how her playing inspired some of Messaien’s key compositions, and an obituary, with a list of Loriod’s many recordings, can be read here.
LONDON CONTEMPORARY ORCHESTRA SOUNDTRACKS BROTHERS QUAY AT SPITALFIELDS Lech Janowski’s revised score for Street of Crocodiles, regarded as one of the key films of directors and animators the Brothers Quay, will be performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra alongside a screening of the film on 25 June at Spitalfields Music Summer Festival.
Part of a programme that includes Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No 1 and Claude Vivier’s Zipangu (1980), the event at Village Underground includes a pre-concert talk by Stephen and Timothy Quay. www.spitalfieldsfestival.org.uk
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SOUND AND MUSIC NEWS
NEW SHORTLIST COMPOSERS AT CHELTENHAM FESTIVAL
WORKING WITH TOEAC ACCORDION DUO IN COPENHAGEN
Three Shortlist composers have been commissioned to produce new works for the Cheltenham Festival, to be performed by young artists (supported by the Clifford Taylor Young Artist Series). Haris Kittos is creating a new work for Milos Karadaglic, while Edd Caine and Nina Whiteman are composing for TOEAC, a Dutch accordion duo currently based in Copenhagen.
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“It’s been really exciting writing for the accordion for the first time,” says Nina Whiteman who, with Edd Caine, has recently returned from rehearsals with TOEAC in Copenhagen. “The piece is concerned with evolving transformations between contrasting material, and I was interested in creating a kind of stereo panning between the two instruments. Renee [Bekkers] and Pieternel [Berkers] have been great fun to work with; they were happy to try out ideas, and proposed alternative ways of creating similar sounds.” “The accordion is an exciting, versatile instrument with so many facets and techniques, and to have two accordions is a composer’s dream come true - so many rhythmic and timbral possibilities present themselves,” adds Edd Caine. He describes his piece, [squeezeBox]2, as focusing on the mechanism of the accordion’s bellows, and exploring “the theatrical nature of the instrument.” TOEAC,
SOUND AND MUSIC NEWS
he says, were “keen and very welcoming; also, given that I’m specifying bellows movements – the equivalent of specifying bowing to string players – very patient and amenable to working out compromises.” Haris Kittos and Milos Karadaglic met for the first time recently and found, says Haris, much common ground: “We share a similar background and agreed to create a reference to that in the piece,” he explains. “This is where the repetitive and ritualistic character of the piece comes from: like in folk music, the soloist repeats the same material but keeps adding new variations. It’s my first time composing with guitar, which is exciting! It’s very inspiring to see what a huge variety of sounds and techniques the guitar has.” Performances will take place on 6 July and 14 July, and further information can be found here. www.cheltenhamfestivals.com
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SOUND AND MUSIC NEWS
NEW ADOPT A COMPOSER PERFORMANCE AND NEWS
CITY UNIVERSITY SEMINAR FOR MUSIC AND MEDIA
A new work by Paul Fretwell, from Sound and Music’s Adopt-a-Composer scheme, will be performed for the first time on 30 June by St Albans Rehearsal Orchestra at the Sandpit Theatre, St Albans.
Making Sound Work, two days of discussions, presentations and music co-organised by Sound and Music and the Screened Music Network, takes place at City University, London, on 22 and 23 June.
The Adopt-a-Composer scheme pairs an amateur music group with an emerging composer, and over the following year the partnership collaborate to produce a new work especially for the group to première. The scheme, which is run by Sound and Music with Making Music and funded by PRSF, is in place all around the UK, and is now open for submissions for its 10th year.
The seminar, associated with City University’s MA in Composition and Creative Practice, brings together musicians and composers working in film, media and digital music. Day one’s programme, put together by the Screened Music Network, includes a panel discussion on Music, Media and Opportunities, including music for film, television and adverts. Sound and Music hosts the second day of the seminar, with an interview with Chris Watson and presentations by electronic musicians and multimedia artists including Scanner, Light Surgeons and Helena Hunter. Tickets are £5 per day, with free admission for students and members of Sound and Music and Screened Music Network, but places must be reserved in advance.
The scheme has been exclusive to Sound and Music’s Shortlisted Composers in previous years, but this time around we are making applications open to everyone; two of the six places for 2010/11 will be given to composers not on the Shortlist. Information on how to apply can be found at www.adoptacomposer.org
makingsoundwork.wordpress.com
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SOUND AND MUSIC NEWS
20 X 12 – CALL FOR NEW MUSIC FOR THE CULTURAL OLYMPIAD PRS for Music Foundation’s New Music 20x12 scheme in collaboration with Sound and Music, BBC Radio 3 and LOCOG was launched last month, and is now open for proposals up until 1 October 2010. 20x12 celebrates the UK’s musical community with 20 works, each lasting 12 minutes, commissioned by organisations from across the UK. The call for proposals invites music organisations, festivals, ensembles, promoters or venues from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to present an idea for a new work, in any musical genre, that they would like to commission from a UK-based composer. Each work will premiere in 2012 and receive at least two additional performances. All of the works commissioned through this programme will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and some may be considered for inclusion in other official events relating to London 2012. It is hoped that the scheme, part of London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, will increase public interest in new music and raise the profile of British composers. PRS for Music Foundation are working with Sound and Music to create professional development opportunities for the network of organisations created by this scheme in 2011/12. To find out more, and to download application guidelines, visit the PRS for Music Foundation site. www.prsformusicfoundation.com
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SPACESHIP UK
JOE MEEK
SPAC
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SPACESHIP UK
In this edited extract from a specially commissioned essay for the Sonar festival, music critic and Welcome To Mars author Ken Hollings links the UK’s rich electronic music heritage to the 1950s and 1960s fascination with alien life forms, futuristic technology and voyages into outer space, charting the early days of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop and library music, and seeking out today’s artists whose work echoes this futuristic past.
CESHIP UK Illustrations: Julian House
The British space exploration programme as musical exploration
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1. During the latter part of 1958, work being carried out on the foundations of a new office block in Knightsbridge leads to the discovery of an alien spacecraft buried deep inside the London clay where it has lain hidden for over five million years. Although little now remains of its propulsion system or controls, the hull itself shows no signs of corrosion – in fact, it seems to be alive in some way. An attempt to drill through the bulkhead produces unearthly sounds never heard before by the human ear. Nigel Kneale’s script for the BBC’s television serial Quatermass and the Pit refers to a
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“wailing screech” to which is added “a deep thudding vibration” that grows in intensity. Those within earshot are thrown into strange convulsions. Only when drilling stops do the strange sounds subside. Originally screened from the end of December 1958 through the first few weeks of 1959, Quatermass and the Pit is very much an echo of its times. The third adventure to feature British rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass, it manages to speak to an audience of viewers already becoming uncomfortably familiar with the accelerating pace of modern change. The universe
JUST AS THE MODERN OFFICE BLOCKS GOING UP IN THE UK’S MAJOR CITIES CONSTITUTE AN EMERGING ARCHITECTURE OF THE FUTURE, THIS ELEMENTARY FORM OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC HAS BECOME THE SOUND OF SPACE ITSELF.
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suddenly seems to be pulsating with an energy that had previously gone undetected: one that is so new and unfamiliar that it can still only be heard. Not surprising then that the alien spacecraft in Quatermass and the Pit should first exert its influence through the medium of unearthly sounds, or that the newly-formed BBC Radiophonic Workshop should be given the task of making them. Established, according to the official press release, to produce “a new sound – suggestive of emotion, sensation, mood rather than the literal moaning of wind or the opening of a door”, the unit has only been in operation since May 1958. Quatermass and the Pit is consequently one of the first major television series to make a prominent feature of these “suggestive” sounds. To produce them, Workshop cofounder Desmond Briscoe, assisted by Dick Mills, utilises one of the most significant developments in sound technology to emerge since the end of the Second World War: the commercial tape recorder. “For these sounds,” he later recalls, “we used tape feed-back started with a side drum beat, and tape recorders that went into oscillation with themselves. We also connected and disconnected amplifiers to make great splats of sound. Finally we transferred all the sounds that we made onto discs to play in the television studio.” The process Briscoe describes here is one in which
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the production of sound becomes wired into itself. Electric and acoustic pulses are simultaneously recorded and then played back over themselves; the resultant repetitions mutate and decay, giving the impression of eerie distortions rebounding over a measureless and artificial distance. At the same time, the electrical amplification allows feedback to be controlled not in terms of pitch or harmony, but timbre and duration. Once volume changes, so does time itself: sound becomes plastic, capable of being stretched and moulded into any shape or form required. Just as the modern office blocks going up in the UK’s major cities constitute an emerging architecture of the future, this elementary form of electronic music has become the sound of space itself: echoing and vibrating, breathing and alive. 2. Also charting the hitherto unheard depths of the cosmos innovative young record producer Joe Meek is busily at work in 1959, recording I Hear A New World: An Outer Space Music Fantasy in his home-made studio on London’s Holloway Road. Only part of this ambitious project is initially released to the public, on an Extended Play disc in 1960, but its contents hint at a troubled loneliness. A sense of isolated introspection clings to the dry static and radioactive clicking
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of compositions such as ‘Magnetic Field’ and ‘Orbit around the Moon’. To help fill this universal emptiness, Meek employs a steel guitar, on loan from the Cavaliers: the first combo to feature the instrument on a UK pop record. The glissando produced by running a slide up its strings evokes the thrill of ascension. Its bent notes, clear tones and extended lines, capable of going from the particular to the infinite in a matter of seconds, will become some of the quintessential sounds of the Space Race. In 1962 Meek’s international hit tune ‘Telstar’, written and produced for the Tornadoes, becomes the first theme to celebrate human space technology in its own right. Titled after an American telecommunications satellite, its vaulting theme is played back on a Univox Clavioline, an early electronic keyboard, while the sense of vast distances covered is once again conveyed by the increasingly familiar sound of tape echo feeding back on itself. ‘Telstar’ refers to a very different universe: one that emits manmade sounds. ‘Life on Venus’, released the following year, takes this a stage further. “News flash!” an urgent voice announces over looped electronic tones. “Signals have been received from the planet Venus. These resemble sounds similar to those created by a musical instrument such as an organ, so perhaps there is life on Venus.” In one simple move, Meek
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has reduced the occupants of outer space to their machines. In 1963, another machine materializes for the first time on the UK’s television screens. Able to shift through different dimensions of time and space, the TARDIS makes an unearthly noise when in operation: the looped recording of a piano string being rubbed by a house key, courtesy of the BBC Radiophone Workshop, whose staff now includes the likes of Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire, who is also responsible for realizing Ron Grainer’s evocative Dr Who title theme with assistance from Dick Mills. As it steadily unfolds, the history of electronic music increasingly becomes a series of intersections with other forms of media, thereby rendering all notions of its inherent purity academic in just about every sense of the word. Dr Who is yet another example of how popular culture becomes a carrier signal for what is becoming an alien musical invasion. The material produced by the Workshop for the show during its first six years bears all the marks of having been carefully dubbed, processed and assembled on tape using only household junk and primitive oscillators as sound sources. Throughout the 1960s, electronic music continues to evolve slowly into a medium for new and unworldly experiences: ones for which the hit parade and television science-fiction serials have only
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partially prepared them. By 1967 Hodgson and Derbyshire are taking part in The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, a multimedia electronic arts event held at the London Roundhouse on 28 January and 4 February 1967. One figure conspicuously absent from the event is Joe Meek. On 3 February, beset by bus-iness worries and subject to fits of depression, the legendary record producer fatally shoots his landlady in the chest with a shotgun before turning the weapon upon himself. That same month Hammer Film starts principal photography at MGM Studios Borehamwood for its updated movie adaptation of Quatermass and the Pit. The man responsible for creating the
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otherworldly sounds of the Martian spacecraft this time is composer Tristram Cary, who recreates the deep throbbing vibrations of the Martian hull in the new Electronic Studio he has helped establish at the Royal College of Music. These sounds seem deeper, richer and more alien than might have seemed possible even five years before; but they also come shadowed by some of the more recent changes to take place within the Spaceship UK programme. 3. Having been a radio enthusiast in his teens and trained as a radar operator during the Second World War, Cary already knows his way around a circuit
‘NEWS FLASH! SIGNALS HAVE BEEN RECEIVED FROM THE PLANET VENUS. THESE RESEMBLE SOUNDS SIMILAR TO THOSE CREATED BY AN ORGAN, SO PERHAPS THERE IS LIFE ON VENUS.’
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‘RECENT ALBUMS BY BELBURY POLY, THE FOCUS GROUP, ROJ AND THE ADVISORY CIRCLE ALL SEEM TO HAVE EMANATED FROM SOME OBSCURE CATALOGUE OF RECORDINGS THAT EXISTS IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE.’
DELIA DERBYSHIRE
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diagram. In 1969 he joins Dr Peter Zinovieff and David Cockerell in founding the Electronic Music Studios (EMS), the company responsible for developing the VCS3: one of the first commercially available portable synthesizers. A distinctive array of oscillators, patch panel and joystick, tidily arranged with a free-standing wooden box, the EMS VCS3 is the shape of things to come: its introduction at the end of the 1960s marking a rshift in the exploration of sound in space. One of the first recordings to test the EMS VCS3’s potential is Electric Storm by White Noise: a collaborative project featuring “Production Coordinator” David Vorhaus, also in charge of “Special Stereo effects”, with Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson on ‘Electronic Sound Realization’. Electric Storm exists in an alien iciness of its own making. Compositions such as ‘Love without Sound’ and ‘Firebird’ have all the breathy charm of psychedelic pop songs but feel as if they had also been cryogenically frozen for long-haul spaceflight. The same intensity can be found in Derbyshire’s contributions to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop album, released around the same time. Her manipulation of sound on tape, notable in the darkly brooding expanses of The Delian Mode and Blue Veils and Golden Sands, both created for the BBC, fit the times so closely that they almost pass unnoticed.
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Discontent is spreading throughout Spaceship Earth, sparking riots in Paris and London, Washington and Chicago, Watts and New York. Satellite telecommunication systems mean that the whole world can now participate in what is happening; meanwhile pictures of our world sent back from the Moon during the summer of 1969 show a Global Village that is at once peaceful, remote and still. Although synthesizers become progressively cheaper and more compact, a lot still separates their sounds from what they are intended to accompany. What often fills the gap between the two is the actual business of making the music itself. Thanks to the growing supply of new electronic instruments, publishing companies like Music de Wolfe, KPM, Chappell and Studio G are now able to supply the commercial TV and radio industries with vast libraries of pre-recorded material. David Vorhaus, Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire have collaborated on an album of electronic space effects for the Standard Music Library, all of which will feature on the ITV children’s science-fiction serial The Tomorrow People, starting in 1973. Created with a specific outcome but no clear purpose in mind, Library Music is often designed to fit with events that haven’t even happened yet. Its creators do not trade in moods or emotions; they
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merely hint at them and leave the listener to do the rest. The audio equivalent of astronaut food, this is music that has been freeze-dried and vacuum-packed for future consumption. 4. The history of electronic music has expanded to fill the space provided by it. Library Music archives, especially those from late 1950s to early 1970s, are continually probed for fresh recordings to be sampled, studied or stored on compilation CDs. In 2004, taking the whole process a stage further, Jim Jupp and Julian House of Ghost Box Records access the music of the past by the simple expedient of creating it for themselves. Recent albums by the likes of Belbury Poly, the Focus Group, Roj and the Advisory Circle all seem to have emanated from some obscure catalogue of recordings that exists in a parallel universe. By giving narrative shape to such spectral emanations, Ghost Box releases always feel more like transcriptions of past events: mere fragments of voices, the outlines of a few phantom gestures and shared memories. Picking up the ancient Martian pulsations first heard in Quatermass and the Pit over fifty years ago is Ghost Box’s reissue of Mount Vernon Arts Lab’s The Séance at
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Hobs Lane (2001). Brainchild of Glasgow-based composer Drew Mulholland, its title references the precise London location where the Martian hull is first unearthed. Mulholland conjures up sinister whirring vibrations that seem to come from somewhere deep beneath the ground, hinting at a music whose history has yet to be written. With Tristram Cary’s early electronic work available for the first time on CD and Delia Derbyshire’s recordings being archived by the University of Manchester, its origins are still only just being unearthed. An extended version of this essay appears as part of a special Sound And Music vinyl and text publication to coincide with the 2010 Sonar festival. Ken Hollings’ essay will be available alongside a 12-inch record that features Belbury Poly and two previously unreleased tracks by BBC Radiophonics composer Daphne Oram. The vinyl/essay publication has been designed by Julian House of Ghost Box and The Vinyl Factory www.thevinylfactory.com
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Listening post
Quatermass and The Pit (1958)
What The Future Sounded Like – EMS documentary
Delia Derbyshire – Blue Veils and Golden Sands
Joe Meek – I hear a New World
Belbury Poly – The Willows
Ghost Box Records
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PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD
Photography: Malcolm Watson
PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
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PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD
Pierre-Laurent Aimard is one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary piano music, a champion of new composition who retains strong links to music of other eras and genres. As he prepares for 2010’s Aldeburgh Festival, which he directs for the second time this year, the pianist talks to Shoël Stadlen about crossing boundaries, musical collages and lessons learned from Ligeti.
I’ve read that you began playing what would usually be called new music on the piano aged around eight, starting with Schoenberg. How did this come about and how has it shaped your musical outlook? I do not see boundaries between new and old music, and I owe a lot of this to my first piano teacher, with whom I studied from the age of five. In fact she wasn’t really a piano teacher – she played the flute and used to play the organ and she composed music for the theatre, and she was only 18 years old herself when we started, so she was learning piano teaching with me. The theatrical scene in Lyon at the time was a very exciting one, and she was interested in all kinds of things – old music, new music, world music and theatre. She was very open minded, brought me recordings of music from India and other places, as well as new music. And she educated me without any borders between what was old and what was new. So for me it was completely natural for me to be interested in different repertoire, including new music. There was no
aesthetic or psychological border. When I played Schoenberg, it did not feel like a big break with the past – it felt natural, just as later on I found it completely natural to play Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen and others. Do you think this attitude to new music is unusual? Yes, because unfortunately classical music education and “classical music” remain extremely conservative. That’s a pity. What do you think could be done about that? It needs to be changed! We have to change the way we teach classical music. If we continue having too many people thinking that good music stops at the end of the tonal system, well then we’ll go on having a musical world that is very narrow-minded. But if we give people an appropriate musical education, people will develop much more open attitudes. What’s most exciting for you amongst music that has been written recently?
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For me music that is creative and which opens new doors is the most exciting. Can you give examples of music that opens new doors for you? Composers who have the courage of their own independence, and who don’t sacrifice their originality to commercial issues. As today there is no longer any common language, you can therefore find as many musical languages as creators. But I think when a creator accepts that he has to be true to himself, and goes on and on regardless of how successful he is in a business sense, that can be very exciting. It sounds like you don’t want to give specific examples! As a performer, do you enjoy getting inside these new musical languages which, as you said, can be as many and various as the composers who create them? Yes, very much. We interpreters have more and more had to become polyglots. And this is perhaps one of the barriers that prevents more performers playing more new music, because instead of learning one language, which was used
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in lots of different ways, you have to learn different languages. This makes learning and interpreting pieces convincingly a lot more work, but also makes the whole process extremely exciting, because you are constantly learning and discovering new things. If we’re talking about live performance, is there a problem with the fact that you, the performer, spend months getting inside the musical language of a new piece, by Olivier Messiaen or György Ligeti or Elliott Carter, for example, whereas the listener simply hears the piece in real time and often has to take in several new musical languages in a single concert? Is this difficult for listeners? Yes and no. Yes in that you have to be permanently in a state of alertness and wakefulness. But this is the most marvellous thing about new languages. No, because as a listener, you need to know less than I need to know as an interpreter. Even if you enjoy it more if you know more, you can still enjoy it without this knowledge. But everyone knows that after you have learnt a certain number of foreign languages, the next foreign
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Photography: Malcolm Watson
PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD WITH ELLIOTT CARTER
language will be much easier to learn. So it makes sense to invest in the first experiences of these foreign musical languages – and this goes for performers as well as listeners. So if you want to be able to learn these new languages, where would you recommend that people start? You can start anywhere, really. The music of different composers in the classical tradition is different in different countries, as it also is in the traditional musics of different countries, and as it was in older
music – Renaissance polyphony, for example – where there were differences in traditions even though there were some common roots. It’s the same with new music. However, I might suggest starting with music that is very direct in communication; in which the compositional process is very close to the per-ception process, as is the case with Beethoven, for example. Ligeti would definitely fall into this category – he is a very easy way to start because he has a very strong ability to communicate.
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Photography: Malcolm Watson
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So if Ligeti is easy, what is more difficult? The most difficult thing is when the music doesn’t correspond to your own world, in terms of feeling, culture, intelligence, etc. So everyone has to make their own way. And this is very interesting, because it’s a way to look for enrichment and freedom.
Well, I think we’re one of the actors who are trying to do this. Aldeburgh has a fantastic mixture of the old and the new, the traditional and the experimental and the serious and the relaxed. One of my responsibilities and pleasures is to bring some new music closer to the audiences.
Do you think you provide an enriching journey as part of your curating of the festival?
What are you particularly looking forward to in the festival? This year the new music legend Pierre
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‘Aldeburgh has a fantastic mixture of the old and the new, the traditional and the experimental. One of my responsibilities and pleasures is to bring some new music closer to the audiences.’ Boulez will make his first visit to the festival – it’s surprising that it’s his first visit given that Aldeburgh is so dedicated to new music – and he will give the premiere of a new song cycle, What are Years?, by Elliott Carter, the second of a pair of pieces that Carter has written for us. Last year we had a piece for baritone and ensemble and this year it will be for soprano and ensemble. As I think that I’ve been chosen to look at the UK musical life with the eyes of somebody coming from outside, I will put a strong accent on somebody who seems to me to be a major creative figure in the UK, George Benjamin, and also invite another ‘giant’ in the scene, John-Eliot Gardiner, who will close a small Bach theme in the festival with the Mass in B-minor. We’ll have significant residencies from two great musicians, the great American pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher, who is another musical legend, and Austrian violinist and conductor Thomas Zehetmair, who is from a completely different generation from Fleisher and Boulez, but who demonstrates how one can be a total musician.
You’ve contributed greatly to new music in France over the last thirty years. What memories do you have of collaborations with composers? Well, I’d start by saying my links certainly weren’t particularly with France, and that although of course I had relationships with many French composers, like Boulez and others, I was equally involved with composers from Mitteleuropa, like Kurtág from Hungary, Marco Stroppa from Italy, and many others. But certainly the most productive and significant collaboration I’ve taken part in was with Ligeti, as these gave birth to the composition of a number of his Études as well as the recording of his entire works for piano under his artistic direction. Of all my collaborations, this one has taken up the largest amount of my life. How do you feel about the Études being performed so widely now, and as show pieces for pianists, while when you started performing them, you were one of a very few performers willing to take them on? I am very happy that these pieces have become so successful so quickly.
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‘We have to change the way we teach classical music. If we continue having too many people thinking that good music stops at the end of the tonal system, we’ll have a very narrow-minded musical world.’ Of course, as a witness to the workings of Ligeti, I am always concerned they are performed in the right style, and if you know how Mr Ligeti could be unhappy sometimes, this shows how much one should work on the style, more than on just the brilliancy of the piece; on the sense more than on the glamour. I think now I would really like to create a book or a DVD or find a way to communicate, in a more wide-reaching way than just by my teaching, all of what I learnt about this music from my work with Ligeti over the course of 15 years. Did you have any input into the creation of the Études that Ligeti wrote for you? Oh, I had no place to input creatively into the composition! The composer was the composer, and he was a great composer, knew exactly what he wanted to do and was very severe with himself. The only thing I could do was to answer as best I could questions like “Is this playable?” [laughs], questions about tempi, and to be present when he heard the pieces for the first times, looking for an acoustic result that coincided with what he had originally imagined – that means to be
there at his disposal so that he could find the metaphors, the words that could fully describe his visions. What do you remember of the first performances of the pieces? I did the best I could, but sometimes probably it was not enough [laughs]! But in some cases he was not happy with himself so he refused to have the piece played and composed another piece instead. It was fascinating to see how demanding he was with himself. In your experience, when the result doesn’t match their expectations, do composers generally know whether problems are their fault or the performer’s? It depends very much on the composer. Some of them want their pieces to be completely playable and under control, and even if they write, for example, the performance instruction “as fast as possible”, this will mean “as fast as possible in terms of what you can play”, so things are always relative. For other composers, the challenge is more burning, I would say, and so the “as fast as possible” is a more risky thing.
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Photography: Angela Moore
SNAPE MALTINGS CONCERT HALL
Obviously, Ligeti was one of the most extreme examples of composers in this second category. He loved high virtuousity and dangerous situations and he loved his interpreters taking risks – but of course calculated risks. So it sounds like Ligeti wasn’t after much creative input from you. Have other composers wanted you to be more creatively involved with works they’ve written for you? If you have very experimental composers, who really know their craft well, who know the instrument they are writing for
well – and who often play the instrument as well – as a performer you need to be fairly modest about your role. The place given to the interpreter today is an exaggerated one – it’s a ridiculously exaggerated place. The composers are important; we are much less important. However, sometimes you can know about certain specificities that you could indicate, or that the composer could observe, in order to put the final polishing touches to their compositions. How do you feel about pieces involving improvisation? Does that force you to
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‘The role given to the interpreter today is an exaggerated one. The composers are important; we are much less important.’
take a less modest role in the creation? That’s another dimension. If you have a piece that involves improvisation, then it’s your role to do it. But if you have a piece that is compositionally achieved, then your role is another one. Returning to this year’s festival, can you tell me about the Collage-Montage project, which will see you create a free-form sequence of bits of pieces from musical history, both old and new? I wanted to do this because it’s a way to be in contact with many pieces and many styles and to “play” with them, in all the senses of the word. With reflection, with humour, like a moment of thinking about correspondences in the history of music. But also having fun, making jokes… So trying to create a really alive moment and something that is very personal, allowing me to travel between different periods and different moments in our history of music and playing a kind of free compositional game with small crumbs of musical material. I did this in a chamber music version last year and am going to do in a solo piano version this year. And I will create another version next year.
Are there unexpected correspondences? Well, this you’ll have to discover on the night! But each part of the evening will be different, with very different things played one after the other on some occasions, and on others almost imperceptible changes between the music of one composer and another. You’ve said that Aldeburgh chose you for your external view of the UK music scene. What do you make of it? I don’t live in the UK and I don’t have anything to say about the scene in Britain that everyone doesn’t already know: that it is a very special, very particular country by chance; that it is a very special, very particular scene, with its traditions, with its tastes, its priorities, its composers. While its musical tradition is very particular, in terms of its new music, the styles are very varied. And like anywhere else, if you want to develop the tradition and be a good actor, you need to really understand this tradition and this particularity. It’s sometimes said that the British contemporary classical scene is parochial and does not engage enough with
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Listening post
Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays three Ligeti Études
Pierre-Laurent Aimard performs Boulez’s Piano Sonata no.1:
Pierre-Laurent Aimard performs Elliott Carter
Ensemble InterContemporain, conducted by Pierre Boulez
the music of the rest of Europe and the world. Would you agree with that? There is a danger of this, and I think that’s why I’ve been chosen. There is a huge amount of respect for the Aldeburgh tradition, with a marking of the Peter Pears anniversary and a series focusing on previous festival directors, from Benjamin Britten to Thomas Adès.
But I also bring to the festival people like Ensemble Intercontemporain, Huelgas Ensemble, soprano Christiane Oelze and the Arcanto Quartet, artists who represent not only a way of playing or a choice of repertoire, but an attitude to music making which is, I think, different. www.aldeburgh.co.uk
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ALDO CLEMENTI
Suspended animation Italian composer Aldo Clementi has often gone unnoticed, his work eschewing grand gestures in favour of intricate and haunting canons that imbue ‘found’ melodic fragments with infinite possibilities. James Weeks, who has put together a programme of Clementi for this month’s Spitalfields Music Summer Festival, uncovers the hidden treasures in Clementi’s music, revealing how its hermetic nature is a vital part of its enigmatic charms. In a specially made video that you can watch on page 50, he discusses the work of Clementi and maverick British composer Chris Newman, who is also featured at Spitalfields.
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Photography: Bruce Amos
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Who is Aldo Clementi? Aldo Clementi is one of new music’s secrets. Hidden behind another composer’s surname, born in the same year as Boulez – and thus celebrating his 85th birthday this year as usual in the latter’s giant shadow – Aldo Clementi is one of my heroes. Composer of calm, low-key music voided of drama, bombast or expressionistic exhibitionism, it seems to be Clementi’s fate to go unnoticed by all but a few, who stumble across him and become hooked. In an age of total information and instant access, he remains an enigmatic presence, partly obscured even to his admirers – the cult figure par excellence. What does he write? Clementi writes canons. Not exclusively, but this is what he’s best known for. Dense contrapuntal weaves of instrumental lines, chromatically saturated to the point where individual intervals and motifs are near-inaudible. Steadystate textures of teeming polyphony and highly refined and delicate timbre, veiled in piano dynamics. Such works, audibly obedient to
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the demands of the most rigorous of contrapuntal techniques, seem to inhabit their own mysterious, closed universe, remote from the concerns of the listener. But we are nonetheless drawn in, by the beauty of the sound and by the flawless unity of the musical object; its clarity – even transparency – of construction offset by the constantly shifting, glinting textures within. But these are not shards from another planet. Since the start of his “diatonic period” in around 1970, Clementi has based many of his pieces on short fragments of found material – Lutheran chorale melodies, Romantic guitar studies, a Swedish folk tune, to name a few – giving the music not the alien air of a serialist Utopia but rather the sense of something quite familiar, with cultural and historical resonances, being taken out of context and placed in a sort of suspended animation. (Even pieces which use other sources of raw material – such as the name of a dedicatee or a repeating, tiny intervallic cell – tend to privilege ‘tonal’ formations.) Nor is this suspended animation
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always completely static. In fact, the classic Clementi blueprint can be characterised as a mechanism which winds down, like a musical box (an instrument of which Clementi is very fond), with each successive iteration of the material being played at a slower and
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Clementi, further saturating the chosen pitch spectrum). The other eight instruments, all confined to the treble tessitura, enter one after another in canon (that is, it sounds canonic, so the listener assumes that it is). The melody is tonal (though each instrument is trans-
‘Music...must simply assume the humble task of describing its own end, or at any rate its gradual extinction’ slower tempo, quieter and quieter, until the music seems just to run out of steam. Take …im Himmelreich, for nine instruments (1993), for example. The music begins with celesta chords marking out a steady pulse (this method of using an instrument to provide a background ‘sound’ or drone is often encountered in
posed differently) and proceeds in equal-length notes (though each instrument is at a slightly different speed): bearing in mind the title (“…in the Kingdom of Heaven”), we assume we are hearing a Lutheran chorale melody, probably slightly altered. The sound-field fills up quickly and within a couple of bars it is no longer possible to
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make out more than snatches of melody. The texture is busy but at the same time luminous and serene; the sound is intensely beautiful, the many diatonic melodies providing an aura of consonance: it is indeed a “heavenly� harmony. The celesta continues to pulse all the while. After a couple of minutes, the music begins to thin out: we have reached the end of the canon. Then what appears to be the same music begins again, starting with the pulsing celesta, but now at a slower tempo. All the same things happen, but now a little quieter and with a little more time to hear inside
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the canonic aggregate. The music thins out again, we reach the end of the second canon, and the music starts a third time, now even slower and quieter, and with the strings now playing sul pont., giving the sound a more attenuated quality. After ten minutes we reach the end of the third canon, the pulsing stops: the end. As the resonance dies away in the mind, we are left with a beautiful mystery. What’s going on? The music is tantalisingly ambiguous. Its self-containment seems to repel enquiry, yet we are attracted by the melodic fragments we recognise,
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by the unmistakably poignant way the music loses energy: something is being said, but what? Clementi himself gives an answer of sorts, in ‘A Commentary on my own Music’, a short document written in Rome in 1973 and published in English in Contact 23 in 1981. “It has been my conviction for a number of years”, he writes, “that Music (and Art in general) must simply assume the humble task of describing its own end, or at any rate its gradual extinction.” Taking aim at composers who continue to think of music in terms of a dialectical discourse, he tells us that such music is “the caricature of an arc describing a useless orgasm. Exaltation and depression have had their day: however you disguise them, they are modest symbols of a dialectic that is already extinct. A forte followed by a piano, a high note followed by a low one, a gentle timbre followed by a harsh one: all per se dialectic…How can one avoid all this?!” Such rhetoric reminds us that Clementi is a man of his time, when disillusionment with the aims and
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achievements of Darmstadt serialism was rife (not for nothing is he sometimes compared with Lachenmann and Donatoni in his experience of this particular aesthetic crisis). Clementi’s response was that of the craftsman, “to start from scratch and from the stylistically ineffable: a finely-wrought compound made from microscopic, jumbled details, an aimless continuum, a texture, a first-class cloth…The march of events must express only itself.” For writers such as the late David Osmond-Smith, who was Clementi’s principal commentator in English, Clementi’s art has a Proustian quality, the use of found materials being nothing less than the recollection of a “petite phrase” from our tonal past in order to obliterate it, a stoic attempt at the exorcising of nostalgia through repetition. In this view, the ritardandi and the diminuendi take on the significations of pathos, loss and decay. But as the American composer Evan Johnson has recently noted, this doesn’t quite ring true with the experience of the music, which
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radiates even in its most desolate moments a pleasure and joy in its craft, and even (one suspects) a fascination with the beauty of the aural result. “Rather than reflexively inferring from Clementi’s most familiar structural paradigm an attitude of nostalgia”, Johnson concludes, “…we can redescribe Clementi’s music as formally celebrating its continuing productivity…with an abiding optimism.” Or as Osmond-Smith puts it, “what appears to be a memorial to ‘le temps perdu’ is in fact a recuperation of music’s potential.” What I hear in Clementi’s music is an aliveness that seems to spring directly from the fervency and rigour of the compositional technique itself. His mysterious mechanisms don’t last long enough for mourning, and the after-image
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they leave on the mind’s ear is one of brightness and clarity. To return to Clementi’s own Commentary: “The end germinates naturally from saturation and fatigue, but it is never definitive: through a desolate familiarity we suddenly fall into the infinite and eternal.” Out of music’s “gradual extinction” itself, Clementi offers us the refreshment of the infinite and eternal life-force of art. The ELISION Ensemble perform works by Aldo Clementi on Friday 18 June at Whitechapel Gallery, London,as part of the Spitalfields Music Summer Festival. www.spitalfieldsfestival.org Hear some audio excepts here
‘What appears to be a memorial to “le temps perdu” is in fact a recuperation of music’s potential’
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ALDO CLEMENTI
Listening post
Aldo Clementi: Madrigale Ives Ensemble HatHut Hat(now)ART 123
Aldo Clementi Capriccio Ricordi Oggi CRMCD 1004
Aldo Clementi/Riccardo Nova (double portrait) Caput Ensemble Stradivarius STR 33336 Italian documentary about Aldo Clementi (2008) Aldo Clementi: Works with Guitar ELISION Mode Records 182
CEMAT profile
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ALDO CLEMENTI
Lo-fi Philosophers of Composition: Aldo Clementi and Chris Newman
Video, 10 minutes. Click the image above to watch online. In a mini-documentary made by Sound and Music in association with Spitalfields Music, composer and conductor James Weeks discusses a series of concerts he is curating at Spitalfields Music Summer Festival 2010 and champions two little-known composers he is programming: Chris Newman and Aldo Clementi. Film by Darren Michael. Produced by ShoĂŤl Stadlen, Sound and Music.
Hear & Now
Saturday nights at 10.30pm on BBC Radio 3
5 June: Nash Ensemble – Birtwistle
Tom Service celebrates 45 years of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s distinguished composing career with a concert recorded at the Wigmore Hall by the Nash Ensemble. Plus a UK premiere from Elliott Carter. Birtwistle: Five Distances for Five Instruments, Oboe Quartet, Duets for Storab for two flutes, Tragoedia for chamber ensemble. Carter: Poems of Louis Zukofsky (UK première). Performed by the Nash Ensemble with Claire Booth (soprano), Julia Watson (reciter), Lionel Friend (conductor).
12 June: Crash Ensemble
Robert Worby presents a concert by the Dublinbased Crash Ensemble, recorded at London’s King’s Place. American minimalists Terry Riley and David Lang are programmed alongside young Irish composers, and the concert ends with an extended work for traditional Irish singer and ensemble by Donnacha Dennehy. David Lang: Forced March, Linda Buckley: Do You Remember the Planets, Terry Riley: Ancient Giant Hairy Nude Warriors Racing Down the Slopes to Battle, Jonathan Nangle: our headlights blew softly into
the black, Donnacha Dennehy: Grá Agus Bás for Iarla O’Lionáird (sean nós singer).
19 June: Sounds New Festival
The Sounds New Festival in Canterbury has become a significant addition to the new music calendar and this pair of programmes highlights the calibre of artists the festival attracts, with performances by Paris-based Ensemble InterContemporain and Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern, playing Gérard Grisey, York Höller and Enno Poppe, plus world premieres by Roderick Watkins and Basil Athanasiadis, commissioned by the festival.
26 June: Sounds New Festival
More from the Canterbury-based Festival with performances from Ensemble InterContemporain and a percussion group led by Julian Warburton. Includes works by Xenakis, Cage and Boulez.
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PRSF NEW MUSIC AWARDS
SOUNDS The PRSF New Music Awards represent a huge opportunity for composers and artists working with new music and sound to realise ambitious projects and make their work widely known. Previous winners – Jem Finer’s Score for a Hole in the Ground and the collaborative, countrywide Fragmented Orchestra – set the scene for this year’s nominees, artists who work with beatboxing, astronomy and automata. As the nominations are opened to a public vote on 18 June, INTO asks the five shortlisted artists about their inspirations and working practices.
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Blue Hippo Media’s Battle of the Wordsmiths will use beatboxing and the human voice to explore African musical traditions. The Birmingham-based organisation has worked in a range of media, including websites, music videos, and filming documentaries in Sarajevo, Jordan and the French Alps. Was there a particular event, idea, connection, moment of inspiration that sparked the idea for your project? Yes – the idea that we fail to draw on ancient wisdom, cultures and thought processes to inform our current thinking, as if all answers have to be created anew and the arrogance that assumes our current society has the option to ignore the lessons of the past. All nominees’ work is very different, but all seem to share a common concern with extended possibilities. How important is this to you? Very important. In some senses nothing is completely new and unique and yet true creative breakthroughs often occur when familiar elements are combined in unfamiliar ways. There also seems to be a theme of engaging with disciplines outside of the usual music and art worlds – for example,science, craft, architecture, other musical cultures...What are the advantages of working across boundaries, and what are the challenges? There is an increasing fusion across areas that once may have been seen as mutually exclusive or incompatible. The advantage is that, rightly combined,
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each magnifies or deepens the impact of the other; the challenge is, get it wrong and it can be a discordant noise! How does your idea engage with audiences – is their involvement an important part of the work? We have several ideas from using local choirs to populate the performance if it was to tour, open workshops for those who may attend the show to work with the artists/performers and experience the process for themselves, and possible “mood sticks” where the audience would interact with the emotional flow of the live performance and have an effect on the lighting displays. Rob Taylor, Blue Hippo Media
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The Organ of Corti is the proposed project of Liminal, composer and sound artist David Prior and architect Frances Crow, and introduces the idea of recycling some of the sound that saturates our surroundings. Liminal was founded in 2003 to create ‘sonic spaces’, integrating sound and architecture both in the built environment and in galleries. Was there a particular event, idea, connection, moment of inspiration that sparked the idea for your project? Our idea came out of a period of research we undertook for the Wellcome Trust where we put together a team comprising two acousticians, a computational neuroscientist, a clinical audiologist and ourselves. We were looking at unwanted sounds and the relationship between unwanted sounds in the head – a prob-
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lem addressed by audiology and to some extent, neuroscience – and unwanted sound in the environment – a problem addressed by acoustics. The research suggested the possibility of a piece of music which, rather than making more noise, recycled existing sounds into new forms. All nominees’ work is very different, but all seem to share a common concern with extended possibilities. How important is this to you? It is important, yes. In our case this comes down to the “extended possibility” of what might constitute a piece of music. In our piece, no new sound is made but The Organ of Corti sculpts existing noise into something new. There also seems to be a theme of engaging with disciplines outside of the usual music and art worlds – for exam-
THE ORGAN OF CORTI
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ple,science, craft, architecture, other musical cultures...What are the advantages of working across boundaries for you, and what are the challenges? Our piece would be inconceivable without the cutting edge acoustic principles which underpin it. But while this piece is explicitly based on the acoustic technology of sonic crystals, it has also emerged from a collaborative research project with another group of disciplines and of course liminal is already a collaboration between a composer and an architect. All of our work in some way attempts to bridge the space between sound and the environment in some way. How does your idea engage with audiences – is their involvement an important part of the work? While the science behind the project might be daunting, we are confident that the experience of it won’t be. The Organ of Corti is both score and instrument, leaving the ‘performance’ of the piece up to the visitor, and we believe that it will invite a playful response and will be able to interacted with and understood in a lot of different ways. The speed at which a visitor passes the structure, their proximity to it and the angle from which it is approached basically define the way in which the piece is heard. David Prior, Liminal
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SATSYMPH, a collaboration between south-west-based composer and artist Marc Yeats, poet Ralph Hoyte and coder Phill Phelps, will allow audiences to create a “satellite symphony” via an iPhone app. The three collaborators come from different disciplines, but all share an enthusiasm for the creative possibilities of new media. Was there a particular event, idea, connection, moment of inspiration that sparked the idea for your project? One of the SATSYMPH collaborators, Ralph Hoyte was in on the beginnings of this new media form (“pervasive” or “context-based media”) and was exploding with excitement at its potential to revolutionise the way artistic and literary content are created and experienced. A chance introduction led to the discovery that Ralph and I were both thinking similarly about how contemporary music and poetry were and could be structured. All nominees’ work is very different, but all seem to share a common concern with extended possibilities. How important is this to you? SATSYMPH doesn’t just extend possibilities – it has the potential to create a paradigmatic shift in the way contemporary music and contemporary poetry are created and experienced. It does this by placing the user at the heart of the creative process: we create the content and the “virtual auditorium” in which the user wanders around, but we don’t, and can’t, determine how this music-poetic matrix is experienced. SATSYMPH enables the user to create his/her own
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performance in the real world by negotiating a space in a virtual one. From the compositional point of view, being able to create music that can be experienced simultaneously by users as well as enabling each user to have a completely individual experience causes one to profoundly re-think how music is written, created and experienced. There also seems to be a theme of engaging with disciplines outside of the usual music and art worlds – for example,science, craft, architecture, other musical cultures...What are the advantages of working across boundaries and what are the challenges? All three of us routinely cross artform boundaries’. My regular practice is as a composer of contemporary classical music, and also as a sound artist, visual artist and painter. I’m also very excited
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that this is (I believe) the first time a poet has been a collaborator in any NMA shortlistings. Ralph and I come from two very different artform backgrounds, but the way we think about composition is remarkably similar, and we spark off each other’s ideas and techniques. Phill’s knowledge of data and logic structures as well as his background in music composition and performance informs his programming with great creativity and insight. How does your idea engage with audiences – is their involvement an important part of the work? Each individual user creates his/her own unique contemporary symphonic experience. The audience member is the maker of what they experience, but only in a sense – it’s not as if SATSYMPH just provides the tools. Rather, it’s as if the
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SATSYMPH “virtual auditorium” is seeded with ambitious, fully authored contemporary music and contemporary poetry fusions played/spoken by the foremost contemporary musicians and voice artists – and the audience member wanders around the auditorium, experiencing whatever their position dictates. An integral part of the SATSYMPH proposal are the three live performance and seminar events at The Lighthouse, Poole, Dorset; at the Sonic Arts Research Centre of Queens University, Belfast; and at the University of the West of England in Bristol. Sampled individual SATSYMPH experiences will be uploadable to the SATSYMPH website and then played by live musicians at these performances. Marc Yeats, SATSYMPH
PRSF NEW MUSIC AWARDS
Robert Jarvis’ aroundNorth is an installation in which the rotation of stars around the Celestial North Pole will be given a musical voice, creating a stellar composition that will play in time in with the earth’s rotation and be installed at the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. His installations have appeared throughout the UK in diverse settings, frequently drawing upon the natural sound patterns of their immediate environments. Was there a particular event, idea, connection, moment of inspiration that sparked the idea for your project? Simon Jefferies, one of the astronomers at the Observatory, was showing me some of his latest research monitoring variable stars around Celestial North. As he showed me time-lapse photographs demonstrating how the stars appear to move around the Celestial North pole it reminded me of the inner workings of a musical box, and I wondered what sort of music the stars might generate. Although, at the time, it struck me as an interesting starting point for a piece of music, it was not until I began to research the idea further that I began to realise how potentially interesting such a composition could be. The concept for the composition has developed from the simple idea of the stars’ positions generating a piece of music to a composition that intentionally allows its listeners to interpret the wider universe in a new way.
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All nominees’ work is very different, but all seem to share a common concern with extended possibilities. How important is this to you? For about the last twelve years or so I have been interested in connecting the initial material that I use for composition, the particular creative process that I choose to use, and the resulting musical work. This has led me to the thought that it could be possible to create musical works that provide more than just an aesthetic function: the idea that new music composition could also offer other meanings. My Echolocation composition works not only as a musical performance, but also as a composition that can be interpreted with the result that it is actually possible to know what the bats are doing at any one time. This is made possible through a process that does more than simply turn data into nice
ROBERT JARVIS
PRSF NEW MUSIC AWARDS
sounds. In like manner, aroundNorth is more than a musical composition inspired by the stars; it is also more than a sonification of astronomical data. The composition will sound musical and do what a piece of music should do; however, as it will also run in synchronisation with the stars and as it makes use of astronomical information, I am hoping it will also be possible to hear the difference between the types of stars, so that you will know whether you are hearing a red dwarf or a blue giant, for example. For me, this compositional process has its roots in a combination of conceptual art and musical composition. There also seems to be a theme of engaging with disciplines outside of the usual music and art worlds – for example,science, craft, architecture, other musical cultures...What are the advan-
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tages of working across boundaries for you, and what are the challenges? The aim behind much of what I do is to encourage my audience to think about their surroundings in a different way. Quite often this means that I need to learn new information in order to ground my initial ideas. This can be exciting, but also very daunting. When I was working on my gr0w composition for the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden I struck upon the idea of interpreting the location through the genetic make-up of the plants. In order to explore this further I had to do a crash course in DNA and Genetics, which was a real challenge. Perhaps therefore, my compositions tend to have a long-ish process and often involve what feels like a deep learning experience... I am also interested in the notion that perhaps we are on the verge of a new Baroque period. Historically, in that period, composers drew from a wider musical palette, from secular as well as liturgical, as they began to express new thoughts and ideas. This new Baroque also draws from a wider palette, but this time it is from beyond the musical world. As a result of my different projects I not only end up with my musical composition, but I learn a lot of information along the way; potentially new information that I am sure could be useful to someone. For aroundNorth I have set up the relationship with Armagh Observatory for exactly this process. There is the potential to learn from each other in our asking of different questions involved in our particular processes, as well as through conversations, debates and presentations, but also
PRSF NEW MUSIC AWARDS
this insight into their practice will help me create a result that might also provide new information to them. How does your idea engage with audiences – is their involvement an important part of the work? Perhaps the most important aspect of my work is that of communication, as I see little point in doing anything that does not at least try to communicate with its audience. For me, the first step in this process is honing the idea behind a composition to something that is clear in essence and ensuring that my intention is easy to grasp. My belief is that this gives the audience a ‘way in’ to my compositions and assists them in beginning their own musical interpretation; it also means that the composition can intentionally work on an extended number of levels. aroundNorth will not only provide listeners with an intriguing piece of music to listen to, but it also relays actual astronomical happenings in real time. There is an intentional purpose of the work therefore to not only connect people aesthetically (or musically) but also to connect them with my subject material, and to encourage new considerations. This is music engineered to facilitate change. Robert Jarvis
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Terry Mann is one of Sound and Music’s New Voices composers, whose work has been performed extensively, and is also an instrument maker. His proposal, Automata Musica, reflects his fascination with the craft of instrument making, but also its potential for creating new music and audience interaction. Was there a particular event, idea, connection, moment of inspiration that sparked the idea for your project? I recently started making a guitar after a long time of not working with wood, and have also been thinking about making some sort of wooden automata. It seemed obvious to combine the two – Automata Musica! The Award was the focus for putting the ideas down.
TERRY MANN
PRSF NEW MUSIC AWARDS
All nominees’ work is very different, but all seem to share a common concern with extended possibilities. How important is this idea to you? Generally it is not an important issue with my composition. I write for instruments and voices, and very rarely ask them to use extended techniques. My acoustic music relies on direct simplicity. However, for this project, it is essential – both the exploration of new sounds as a maker, and the aleatoric nature of the resulting audience performances and interaction. There also seems to be a theme of engaging with disciplines outside of the usual music and art worlds – for example,science, craft, architecture, other musical cultures...What are the advantages of working across boundaries for
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you, and what are the challenges? Trying to design, build and write music for a series of mechanical musical instruments is certainly going to be a challenge. I’ll be thinking of the sounds I can make, and what they might play at the same time as grappling with the technical construction issues. Which will come first – musical fragments or sound creation? I like the idea that I will have an installation piece that has a very visual as well as aural focus. My 2005 New Music Award runner-up piece The Bells of Paradise was a 5.1 surround-sound piece and I would have loved to have worked with a visual artist on the installation at the festivals it toured around the country in 2007/8. How does your idea engage with audiences – is their involvement an important part of the work? My idea is to present a series of mechanical musical instruments contained in ornate wooden boxes that will play fragments of my musical ideas simply by turning a handle. Anyone can play them, and therefore the resulting pieces will depend entirely on physical audience participation – which boxes they play, what speed they turn the handles, for how long, and in which combination. There is no computer technology, no electronics – just straightforward musical instrument technology that relies on people to perform it. Audience engagement is essential! Terry Mann
PRSF NEW MUSIC AWARDS
To keep up with the progress of the nominees and to take part in the public voting process, see www.prsformusicfoundation.com
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FROM THE BLOGS
FROM THE BLOGS
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08/05/2010 The Revolution Might Be Podcasted: West Coast Fog, psychedelia and Great God Pan Take a look at any zine from the 1990s and see how many of the artists and bands and writers are still making art or music or writing. A cursory glance at a 1992 issue of LA zine Ben Is Dead reveals only about a dozen bands, out of possibly ten times that amount, who are still recognisably creative or present on the scene in any way at all. Creativity is easy – establishing proof of same is inescapably difficult. Hence, Erik Robert Bluhm, the editor of long-lost and equally long-lamented zine Great God Pan. It began life as a zine covering everything from punk rock from the South Bay area of Southern California to appearances of Bigfoot and their underlying mystical connotations. Eventually, Bluhm’s
FROM THE BLOGS
interest in the mystical – by way of the psychedelic – manifested itself via his recent broadcast of likeminded music on Luxuria Music, broadcast live from a studio in Silver Lake, California on a programme called West Coast Fog. To give you a general idea of the focus thereat, a recent reasonably breathless e-mail from Fog Central announced, ‘We’re gonna do a kinda “F**k the Pigs” set tonight in tribute to Weather Woman Diana Oughton, Dustin Hoffman’s neighbour, who got blowed up in a Greenwich Village bomb factory townhouse. We were staying around the corner all last week and checked it out. Heavy vibes still, man. Tune in to hear her story in song, plus rare California mid-’60s garage 45s, the mind-blowingest Frisco set yet (Ferlinghetti, Sandy Bull, Savage Resurrection), and some rare Golden State folk rock twang. 99% vinyl for a true ‘head’ experience!” After that fairly piece of eye-catching and mind-boggling copy from this person who has so steadfastly embraced the margins
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of culture for so many years, you have to ask. Do you get paid to do this? No – I guess the DJs used to get paid, but that was before Goldman Sachs ruined everybody. How do most people find out about your programme? It’s been building through word of mouth, and on Facebook; there’s a fan page there (West Coast Fog Old Timey Radio Show). I also post the playlists on greatgodpan.com so there’s some of that crossover as well. Others find it by accident. They listen to Luxuria at work because it’s soothing, loungey stuff and then they get hooked when they hear weird stuff at 7! Is West Coast Fog yet another manifestation of Great God Pan, and how did that lead to this programme of yours? In a way, yes. Great God Pan was just one manifestation of my interest in the history of the West Coast. Of course, a magazine has its limits –
FROM THE BLOGS
it’s two-dimensional and expensive to produce. Radio is less detailoriented, but freer in certain ways. I try and steer listeners into a sort of audio lesson each week with a theme and some pertinent yet obscure information. How far does the West Coast Fog reach, in terms of musical coverage? Baja psych? Oregonian biker rock? Mojave magick? If I can find an angle, I will! The Indian music scene in California is something I’ve been researching for years so we’ll definitely get into that. We did a Pacific Northwest show because a lot of those groups like the Daily Flash and Magic Fern were involved with the ballroom scene in San Francisco. A Beat poetry show, early Bay Area electronics, and even a Swedish one as the West Coast sound was a big influence on the musicians over there, the whole Trad Gras Och Stenar/International Harvester scene. I’m working on an Antelope Valley episode maybe with [1960s70s singer-songwriter] Merrell
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Fankhauser calling in...a YaHoWa 13 story would be good. Oh yeah, and we just revisited the Virginia City/Red Dog Saloon pre-psych scenes with rare recordings from the Charlatans and the Final Solution, when the Museum of Performance and Design in San Francisco were doing something on that. What record is your West Coast Fog holy grail? Maybe the Great Society’s ‘Someone to Love’ 45. That’s kinda the pinnacle of California rock. I’d like to get my paws on an original of Alan Watts’ ‘This Is It’ and the 45s by the Magical Mist, Denise and Company, Dirty Filthy Mud; rare stuff like that. But some of the best records aren’t impossible to find – like the Country Joe and the Fish EP from 1966 which is is just totally amazing. It’ll cost you a little but its totally worth it. ‘Section 43’ just kills. Then there’s things like Henry Jacobs’ Vortex LP on Folkways, Harry Partch’s And On the 7th Day Petals Fell in Petaluma; all three Phil Yost LPs. You can still find those for
FROM THE BLOGS
more-or-less reasonable prices and they’re better than anything being reissued these days. I’m also always on the lookout for Grateful Dead parking lot bootlegs with handdrawn covers. Pre-’74 of course! Can one be psychedelic without the aid of psychedelics? ‘I think so. Some people are just bent naturally!’ West Coast Fog airs every Tuesday evening from 7–9 p.m. PST. http://greatgodpan.com http://luxuriamusic.com David Cotner
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24/05/2010 The Earwig Interviews: episode 3 For my latest interview with professional performers I spoke to the trumpeter Dave Ward. Tell me about a good piece you have played recently. I played in Xenakis’s Nomos Gama at the Philharmonie in Berlin – it was also played at the Proms last year. All the players were scattered around the auditorium – I was right at the top of the gallery. It is a really interesting piece to play, wellwritten and effective heard live. What is your advice for composers writing for trumpet? Some general points – give lots of cues, but from instruments near to the brass, not necessarily the main melody line. It needs to be something we can hear. Keep the score standard if possible: Sibelius can do crazy things and people go
FROM THE BLOGS
to town with strange layouts then players waste rehearsal time trying to decipher them. I always like it when there is a description of the piece on the title page so us players understand what is going on, it can help us to player it better if we understand the piece. Writing for the trumpet I’d focus on the obvious one: give plenty of rests. Too often we are playing constantly then being expected to still have the stamina for a big finish. But brass players like a challenge, so don’t avoid high notes or tricky writing, just make sure there is recovery time in between. What composers write well for trumpet? Britten. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a great score, and Stravinsky is always good to play. To mention a piece I’m not keen on: I don’t enjoy playing Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man. In the trumpet part there are too many notes with not enough opportunity to get your breath. It’s especially tricky as it
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often gets done with amateur or semi-pro players and it asks a lot of them. The Earwig
05/05/2010 Thames Walk by Iain Sinclair and Turner and the Thames by Nicola Moorby from River Soundings talks series 3 Iain Sinclair, celebrated writer, documentarist, film maker, metropolitan prophet, urban shaman and keeper of lost cultures discusses his current work describing a Thames walk. Tate Britain’s curator Nicola Moorby explores the relationship between Turner and the Thames through his paintings. Richard Thomas
FROM THE BLOGS
30/04/2010 Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance by Chris Salter My former professor with whom I studied at Concordia University in Montreal just published a book Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance on MIT Press. It’s a massive heavyweighted reader that I was pleasantly surprised to come upon at the Tate store. From MIT press: This ambitious and comprehensive book explores technology’s influence on artistic performance practices in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. In Entangled, Chris Salter shows that technologies, from the mechanical to the computational – from a “ballet of objects and lights” staged by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1917 to contemporary technologically enabled “responsive environments” – have
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been entangled with performance across a wide range of disciplines. Salter examines the rich and extensive history of performance experimentation in theatre, music, dance, the visual and media arts, architecture, and other fields; explores the political, social, and economic context for the adoption of technological practices in art; and shows that these practices have a set of common histories despite their disciplinary borders. http://mitpress.edu Ashley Wong
26/04/2010 Lost in space To the Barbican on Saturday with a young companion for the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group’s children’s concert Serenade for a Satellite. The concert,
FROM THE BLOGS
presented (a bit diffidently) by composer Peter Wiegold, was a multimedia affair with a big screen, onstage mixing desk and the vague theme of ‘space’. But, like much of the music, the theme was too diffuse to make a real impact There were pieces about satellites, constellations, the moon – any one of which would have been enough material to base the whole event around. The visuals were the highlight, credited to ‘theatre-maker’ Graeme Miller. The stage was set up as a mission control room, with two co-presenters in white shirts and ties filming events, their pictures mixed live with space footage on the big screen. They also contributed ‘space facts’ between pieces which sat slightly uncomfortably alongside music more interested in exploring the numinous and ethereal than the concrete and statistical. Some effects were very striking: a camera looking up through a glass of water as an Alka-Seltzer tablet dispersed into eerie constellations,
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and a camera attached to a balloon spinning above the stage. Unfortunately the visuals often showed more originality than the music, which was mostly floaty, flutey, squeaky stuff. Some pieces had improvisatory elements, but you couldn’t have told which just by listening. The BCMG players can clearly improvise lines in the BCMG ‘house style’, almost obviating the need for composers. The most striking piece was Param Vir’s Constellations, the only one to combine a full sonic range and a vigorous energetic profile. Overall, the concert left me disappointed, coming over as a combination of a Royal Institution Christmas lecture, groovy art installation and well-meaning but slightly chaotic science lesson. I noticed more engrossed parents than children; I don’t know how many junior converts to contemporary music will have emerged at the end. My son declared it “alright” but afterwards could only remember things he’d
FROM THE BLOGS
seen. For all the attention to detail the project seemed to lack confidence in itself, and have a hole in the middle where the music should have taken charge. The Earwig
01/06/2010 In praise of Glee I’m seriously into Glee. Some may deride it as trashy cheerleading nonsense, but boy, can they sing and pull some moves! On a serious note, this programme is a real inspiration for music teachers: repositioning the geeky school choir into something cool. Even Woman’s Hour is talking about it! www.e4.com/ Becca Laurence
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OPPORTUNITIES
Opportunitie Aldworth Philharmonic Orchestra – Young Composers Award
commission will be £750. APO will cover the printing and binding of parts and score.
Deadline: 04/06/2010
The Aldworth Philharmonic is an innovative amateur orchestra based in Reading, Berkshire, formed in 2002. One of our aims is to raise the profile of contemporary music by supporting talented young composers. Since APO’s inception, we have commissioned nine works by seven talented young composers. Our most recent work was a concerto for orchestra, The Mysterious Kiss, by Max Charles Davies of Cardiff University. Applications for the 2011 award are invited from composers who are aged 30 and under on 31 August 2010. The award will be for one commission, to be performed on Saturday 22 January 2011, at The Concert Hall, Reading. Score to be completed by 21 November 2010. The commission will be a 15 minute piece for wind and brass only (although may include some percussion), to complement the rest of our programme, which is Poulenc Organ Concerto and Tchaikovsky Symphony No 6 Pathétique. The payment for the
For further details contact Andrew Taylor, Music Director, 07970 625971, musicdirector@ aldworthphilharmonic.org.uk or Becky Stewardson, Chairman, 07966 661492, chairman@ aldworthphilharmonic.org.uk Deadline of 4 June may be extended due to late posting of call, but please apply directly to the Chairman for consideration.
Informal – call for orchestral musicians Deadline: 04/06/2010
We are looking for good volunteer musicians to take part in two unusual performances this summer. Hour Angle, to be performed on summer solstice (21 June) at Royal Observatory, Greenwich, generates music by calculating the sun’s declination in relation to the earth. The performance sonifies the precise moment of the solstice. Flood Tide, at Southbank Centre, 4 July, makes music from the flow of the Thames, involving orches-
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tral musicians, taiko drummers, voices, and jazz musicians. The performance will form part of the See Further festival. There is a short video of last year’s Flood Tide performances available to view here. Please contact Informal for rehearsal dates and instrumental requirements: John Eacott john@informal.org 07950 953 852 Natasha Bird natasha@informal.org 07732 686 179 Informal create music performances by gathering environmental data and turning it into music. www.informal.org
Kettle’s Yard and the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge – New Music Associate Deadline: 16/06/2010
Kettle’s Yard and the Faculty of Music of University of Cambridge wish to appoint a composer as New Music Associate for the 2010–11.
OPPORTUNITIES
The post-holder will be expected to develop and present the New Music programme at Kettle’s Yard, to teach composition in the Faculty of Music, to assist with compositionrelated outreach projects, and to play a leading role in the Faculty’s New Music Ensemble. Grade 7 £27,183–£34,435 pro rata to a maximum of 600 hours over 12 months More information and an application pack are available from www.kettlesyard.co.uk
Up The Wall 2010 – call for proposals Deadline: 17/06/2010
Up the Wall is an evening festival of live art, intervention, installation and new media works taking place in Chester from 22 to 23 October. It is a site specific celebration of the city’s heritage and architecture presented as a moving festival of installation and live art. Along the interactive route audiences will be treated to a range of the interesting, offbeat, unusual and sometimes bizarre.
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OPPORTUNITIES
Opportunitie Chester Performs is now inviting artists to respond to the idea of the wall and the provocation detailed in the artist brief (available via the link below) to create site-specific works. Intervention, live art, contemporary performance, sonic art and multimedia, site-specific works, walking tours, architectural projection, mapping projects all are encouraged. Chester Performs is a leading producer of diverse performance and media events and projects in and around Chester. For further information, and to download the Up The Wall artist brief and proposal form please visit: www.chesterperforms.com If you have any questions please contact Caroline Smith caroline@chesterperforms.com or call 01244 409113.
Wet Sounds – call for works and commission Deadline: 26/06/2010
Wet Sounds is embarking on its third UK tour to install deep listening sessions at nine swimming pools across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during January and February 2011.
The listening space is split into two distinct spaces. Underwater, sound fills perception but, despite it being absorbed by the ears and body, listening is a silent and detached yet intimate experience. Overwater, sound interacts with the resonant swimming pool space. Other people’s actions such as moving in the water or talking become part of the listening experience. Listening shifts from an internal experience underwater, to an external one outside, uniting in the mid point in a floating position on the water surface. The theme this year is Reverse: exploring basic dichotomies and the link between them. Call for sound work A public event sound art work which responds to the theme and considers the special listening attributes of underwater listening: omni-directional, immersive, low response to frequencies under 100Hz. Maximum duration 8 minutes. Commission In addition to the open to the public event Wet Sounds is looking to commission a few artists for the ticketed events in most of the cities. Particularly good work will be commissioned and used repeatedly. Catego-
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OPPORTUNITIES
ries: live sound performance – work which responds to the theme and takes advantage of the dual soundsystem effect which creates two distinct sound spaces joined by the listeners as they float on the surface; performance artists – for nautical and water related character performances/appearances inside or outside the water; performance artists: for more elaborate theatrical themes using the swimming pool space as a whole.
mat, and so 45 minutes of real conference time will resemble 45 minutes of virtual browsing time.
For further information email applications@newtoy.org
To enter your project for 9 x 5, go to the Sound:Site blog and enter your information on a comment to the 9 x 5 post.
www.wetsounds.co.uk
9x5 – call for presentations Deadline: 30/07/2010
On 2 October 2010, South Hill Park, Berkshire, UK will host the Sound:Site festival, featuring artists Patrick McGinley (Framework), Kathy Hinde, British Library UK Sound Map project a.o. One part of the event will be opportunity for nine artists or organisations to present their web project in a 5-minute micropresentation for-
A chance to showcase web-based projects, communities and technologies. 9×5 at Sound:Site provides an opportunity to talk up your work and let an audience know your take on using the web as a platform, delivery tool, network, or source of information.
Call for submisions Further information at http://soundandsite.wordpress.com and www.digitalmediacentre.org www.southhillpark.org.uk
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OPPORTUNITIES
Opportunitie 13th London New Wind Festival – call for pieces and call for groups/solo artists
South Hill Park – artist residency
Deadline: 16/08/2010
Deadline: 05/08/2010
Call for pieces:13th London New Wind Festival, taking place from September to November 2010, invites scores for any combination (from solo to full ensemble) of the following instruments. Usual doublings apply: flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, trombone, piano, tape, electronic Call for groups/solo artists: 13th London New Wind Festival and Women In Music will collaborate early November. Any group or soloists who can present a programme of music by women composers please get in touch with us. Please do not send scores by email. Please send scores to Catherine Pluygers, London New Wind Festival, 119 Woolstone Rd, Forest Hill, London SE23 2TQ catherinepluygers@hotmail.com www.londonnewwindfestival.org
The aim of this I/O Digital Development Residency is to provide an opportunity for an exceptional early or mid-career artist to absorb the practical potential of new technologies, network with specialist practitioners, have regular time and space to experiment and develop their own work, benefit from critical discussion with a dedicated advisory group of artists and creative industry professionals. We offer stimulus and technical input, and in return aim to boost the development of new artistic thinking for the selected artists, with the ambition that this begins an ongoing relationship between the artist(s) and South Hill Park as contributors, advisors and associates. The INPUT stage provides opportunity to attend a range of creative technology workshop sessions over October-November 2010. The OUTPUT stage offers space, facilities and positive critical discussion about the developing work.
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OPPORTUNITIES
The residency is managed by South Hill Park’s Digital Media Centre and runs from October 2010 to early 2011.
ducted by Michel Tabachnik, on 29 September 2011 at the Théâtre Royal in Mons. This concert will include one or more of the works selected.
Further information and application details can be found here.
For further information and an application form see the [‘tactus] site at:
www.southhillpark.org.uk
www.tactus.be
[‘tactus’] Young Composers Forum – Call for Works Deadline: 15/10/2010
[‘tactus’] is seeking submissions for its 2011 working sessions with the Brussels Philharmonic and conductor Michel Tabachnik in Brussels 24 to 29 January 2011. Up to six composers will rehearse up to ten minutes of an orchestral work and workshops will be followed by discussion in the presence of internationally renowned composers. Lectures will be given on aspects of composing for symphony orchestra. One or more works will be selected following the workshops for possible inclusion in the programmes of the Orchestre National de Lille, the Brussels Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The sessions will end with a closing concert given by the Brussels Philharmonic, con-
The magazine of