Pond Corpse
Pond Corpse
New works by Jack Sheen, Eleanor Cully Boehringer, Haunted Network Research
InitiatIve + Patricia Auchterlonie + Stardard Issue
Open Recording Session
Saturday 29 April 2023
5.30–7pm
Rose Lipman Hall
Rose Lipman Building
43 De Beauvoir Road
London N1 5SF *
Doors and bar open 5.30pm
Live recording session 6–7pm
Doors and bar close 8.30pm
Pond Corpse is Musarc’s second collaboration with composer and conductor Jack Sheen. The programme brings together new works by artists Eleanor Cully Boehringer, Haunted Network Research Initiative and Jack Sheen, and developed alongside a series of vocal practice and workshop sessions with singer and performer Patricia Auchterlonie
As a body of works, Pond Corpse resembles an exquisite organism, animated by different identities at different times. At one time it is small and gentle, listening in on itself, watching snow-drop semi-tones spiralling quietly out of a conch shell. It is grotesquely funny and wild at other times, a cryptozoological creature that worms, gargles and hums. At other times yet it becomes space, long and wide, hung up in networks and small devices, quietly mumbling to itself:
Jesu, meine Freude
The programme is part of the Musarc’s commitment to commissioning, broadcasting and touring new and experimental choral music. Pond Corpse will be recorded by Resonance Extra – the UK’s only 24/7 digital broadcasting platform dedicated to sound art, radio art and experimental musics. The recording session runs all day, and opens to a live audience at 5.30pm. Followed by drinks.
Haunted Network Research Initiative
Pond Corpse (encounters the skimmington), 2023
Eleanor Cully Boehringer
Snowdrop
and Swan II, 2023. Lyrics by Sarah Boulton
Slow Flower III (Spiral), 2023
Jack Sheen Crop, 2023
Director of Music
Jack Sheen
Creative Director
Joseph Kohlmaier
Voice Coach
Patricia Auchterlonie
Rehearsal Accompanist
Steve Potter
Sound Engineer
Julian Sanders
Musarc Ensemble
Jessica Barker-Wren
Sam Belinfante
Thomas Boudier
Douglas Cape
Ginevra Chelli
Ilenia Cipollari
Agnieszka Cybul
Sandra Djukic
Belen Duran
Rebecca Faulkner
Kirsty Ferguson-Lewis
Aranzanzu Fernandes
Emily Foster
Anastasia Glover
Stephen Graham
Annie Gregoire
Standard Issue
Michelle Hromin, clarinet and artistic director
Tilly Coulton, flute
Matilda Sacco, violin
Amalia Young, violin
Carys Underwood, cello
Rebecca Burden, cello
Archie Bonham, piano
For Resonance Extra
Milo Thesiger-Meacham
Additional Choral Workshop
Cathy Heller Jones
Toni Gutman
Dan Knight
Joseph Kohlmaier
Judith loesing
Helene Lomenech
Carol Mancke
Paul Martin
Jakub Modrzejewski
Toby O’Connor
Steve Potter
Andrew Price
Kristina Rapacki
Derk Ringers
Natalie Savva
Anna Schabel
Siobhan Stone
Ashmi Thapar
Dominic Thurston
Joanna Ward
Musarc is one of the UK’s foremost experimental choral assemblies. Founded by Joseph Kohlmaier at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University in 2008, the ensemble has developed a distinct reputation for its interdisciplinary, open-minded and research-led approach to music and performance, and the space it affords artists and singers to experiment with new ideas. Since its inception, the choir has collaborated with more than one hundred artists and composers, including Jennifer Walshe, Peter Broderick, Lin Chiwei, Jack Sheen, Laure Provost, Ed Atkins, Jenny Moore, Lina Lapelyte, Sam Belinfante, Fritz Hauser, Neil Luck and many others; and numerous festivals and arts organisations in the UK and abroad – including the BBC Proms, London Contemporary Music Festival, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Royal Academy, CCA Goldsmiths, Post Disaster Rooftops (Italy), Museum of London, Extra City (Antwerp), Serpentine Gallery, MK Gallery, Wysing Polyphonic, STUK (Leuwen) Cafe OTO, Bold Tendencies and Whitechapel Gallery. Musarc us open to everyone and does not audition. Over the years, the choir has enabled more than 300 singers to be part of contemporary art and music in the making.
Jack Sheen is a composer and conductor from Manchester. His music encompasses concert works for orchestras, ensembles, and soloists, alongside immersive loudspeaker and performance-installations, with most recent work existing in both formats.
Recent projects include Sub, a 50’ concert work and performance-installation for Octandre Ensemble released on CD by SN Variations later this year, a soundinstallation for the Venice Biennale Musica featuring Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, and a four-hour work for Casa de Serralves (Porto) for 50 voices and ensemble. He has written music for ensembles including the London Symphony Orchestra, Manchester Camerata, Apartment House, and EXAUDI. Awards include PRS Composers Fund (2021), Arts Foundation Fellowship (finalist 2020), Manchester International Festival Jerwood Fellowship (2019), Rovaumont Voix Nouvelle Composition Prize (2018), Royal Philharmonic Prize for Composition (2016), and BBC Young Composer of the Year (2011).
As a conductor, Jack recently made his debuts with the LSO, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Basel Sinfonietta, Britten Sinfonia, Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, and FontanaMIX Ensemble in diverse programmes including premieres of his own music. In 2022 he will return to perform at Lucerne Festival and Tanglewood Music Centre (USA), and work with the BBC Philharmonic and Ensemble 10/10.
From 2018–2023 Jack was the Co-Director of London Contemporary Music Festival (‘the capital’s most adventurous and ambitious festival of new music’, The Guardian; ‘London’s most important festival’, The Wire).
Eleanor Cully Boehringer is an artist and composer from Norwich, based in Newcastle. She makes performances, compositions, installations and music. Eleanor has written for An Assembly, Apartment House, Kantos Chamber
Choir, Drift Ensemble, Tre Voce, Musica Kirklees Youth Orchestra with soloist Craig Ogden, and soloists including Kathryn Williams, and Juliet Fraser and has had work broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Resonance FM. She has performed contemporary vocal works by Jorge Boehringer, Jack Sheen, Cassandra Miller, and Joanna Ward and has collaborated with artists Jorge Boehringer, Jude Lin, Jack Sheen, Stephen Harvey, Phil Maguire, Ryoko Akama, Sarah Boulton and Charlotte Cullen. Eleanor also works with choirs, ensembles, community groups, young people, and galleries.
Eleanor composes music drawing from poetic text, fragments of song, imitation and imagined sound. For instance, a small detail, such as ‘wood for the trees’ is zoomed into and then expanded, reflected outward into a score, a concert, a room. Spaces and environments are considered as part of the composition. Edges of places and contexts are amplified in dialogue with the sound played or playing therein. The work’s moment is an immersive, subtle reflection of the essence that Eleanor finds in the initial detail. Eleanor uses presence and contingency; her work and working process often make provisions for unexpected conceptual or musical additions to enter the composition, both as it develops over time and in a rehearsal or live setting. Compositions and performances are often reworked in various spaces involving new iterations that consciously play upon repetition and memory.
Haunted Network Research Initiative is an organisation dedicated to archiving and preserving the work of the composer Cameron Dodds. Through research, collaboration, and cybernetic strega-hacking the HNRI aims to contextualise both Dodds’ work and the aesthetic realm surrounding it. The HNRI are currently in the process of willing themselves into existence.
Patricia Auchterlonie is a passionate performer of new, experimental and unheard music, equally at home on the opera stage, in the concert hall, and beyond. Her performing has been described as ‘especially impressive’ (The Guardian) and ‘seemingly effortlessly and with amazing directness’ (TEMPO). She is interested in playing with the voice, experimenting with performance practice and cross-arts collaboration as well as more traditional forms of music-making. She is Canadian-born but living and working in the United Kingdom.
Patricia’s 2021/2022 season will include premieres of the role of Superfan in Oliver Leith’s Last Days for ROH Linbury and of new works for voice and piano by Evan Johnson at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with pianist Ben Smith. There’s also a tour in the works for her sax-voice duo, Honkus with David Zucchi. Recent work includes Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are with Shadwell Opera and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, Stockhausen’s Sternklang with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, and covering the title role in Violet by Tom Coult for Music Theatre Wales & Britten Pears Arts. She also recently created the role of Kes’Cha’Au in RUNE by Alastair White for Tête a Tête,
due out on Métier Records in 2022 and Duncan House by Rasmus Zwicki with Plus Minus Ensemble.
Concert work has recently included a recording of Param Vir’s Wheeling Past the Stars for voice & cello, released by NMC in 2019. She has also recently performed with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, London Contemporary Music Festival, An Assembly, Borough New Music, Orpheus Sinfonia, Illuminate Women’s Music, and in the LSO’s 2018 This Is Rattle Festival. Patricia has also been broadcast on BBC Radio Three and Resonance FM’s Sound Out. She has performed in venues all across the UK including Wigmore Hall and The Barbican Centre while regularly working in non-traditional performing spaces including Colourspace, the Courtauld Gallery, The Drawing Room and APT Deptford.
Patricia was the 2017/18 Carne Junior Fellow at Trinity Laban. She holds a master’s degree with distinction from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and a Bachelor
of Music from the University of Toronto with honours.
Patricia is also an avid reader, an amateur seamstress, indomitable knitter, and a shameless lover of the banjo (which she plays with enthusiasm rather than skill).
Standard Issue is a London-based new music collective that goes beyond the archetypal boundaries within music and its culture. As active curators, commissioners, and performers of new music, the group brings fresh perspectives to works by eclectic living composers. standard issue is passionate about the accessibility of new and experimental music and hopes to create unique concert experiences and events that eliminate the barrier between performers and the audience.
‘What makes Musarc an interesting prospect is their humanity, and everything that means: voices and bodies as a social technology, an apt political symbol for new forms of interactivity. … In all pieces, though, Musarc – and the audience they carry with them – are most inspiring as a community engaged in meaningful activity for mutual sensual and social benefit.’
Adam Harper in The Wire (September 2019) on Le Marteau Sans MaÎtre, Musarc’s concert at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, July 2019
The recording of Pond Corpse is supported by Resonance Extra, the UK’s only 24/7 digital broadcasting platform dedicated to sound art, radio art and experimental musics. Based in London, Resonance Extra broadcasts online via its website, TuneIn and Radioplayer and on DAB+ Digital Radio to a footprint of 4 million people in Brighton & Hove, Cambridge, Greater London and Norwich – extra.resonance.fm
Musarc is based at and supported by the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University. The choir rehearses near Aldgate East on Tuesday evenings from September–July. To find out more about the choir and how to join visit musarc.org
