Steve Reich: Radio Rewrite

Scan to join our e-list

facebook.com/londonsinfonietta @Ldn_Sinfonietta #radiorewrite

Steve Reich: Radio Rewrite Tour Tuesday 5 March 7.30pm London Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre

Thursday 7 March 7.30pm Brighton Dome

Wednesday 6 March 7.30pm Birmingham Town Hall

Saturday 9 March 9pm Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Steve Reich

Clapping Music*

6’ #

Steve Reich

Electric Counterpoint

15’

Steve Reich

2x5

20’

Interval Steve Reich

Radio Rewrite world premiere (London) 16’

Steve Reich

Double Sextet

Brad Lubman Steve Reich Mats Bergström Sound Intermedia

conductor performer* guest electric guitar # sound projection

There will be a short talk on stage with Steve Reich, immediately following the performance at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, London.

22’

The performance on Tuesday 5 March is being broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, on Live In Concert. It will be available to listen to via the website for a further seven days at bbc.co.uk/radio3

Radio Rewrite is commissioned by the London Sinfonietta with support from London Sinfonietta Entrepreneurs and Pioneers including Sir Richard Arnold, Trevor Cook, Susan Grollet in memory of Mark Grollet, and Richard Thomas; Alarm Will Sound and Stanford Live in honor of the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation with generous support from Van and Eddi Van Auken.

The London Sinfonietta is grateful to the Aaron Copland Fund for Music for their support of this concert.

Performance at Brighton Dome in association with:

The Steinway concert pianos chosen and hired by the University of Sussex are supplied and maintained by Steinway & Sons, London

1

Welcome Welcome to tonight’s concert.

It’s always a special occasion to welcome back Steve Reich to work with the London Sinfonietta, and no more so when we can premiere a new work by him.

Radio Rewrite has such an exciting story behind it since Steve first accepted the invitation to write for us again back in 2008. The way the piece has evolved is a testament to a composer who is always exploring new ideas, with the same energy, curiosity and enthusiasm that first led him to make his music in such a distinctive way.

The ensemble has become a dedicated advocate for Steve’s music, and we are proud to have recorded Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings, the previous commission by the London Sinfonietta. In more recent seasons, we have performed Music for 18 Musicians with Steve as part of the ensemble. So now, it is particularly exciting to have supported Radio Rewrite’s creation and to be giving the world premiere. The London Sinfonietta’s collaboration with Radiohead in 2005, and the performance of one of Jonny Greenwood’s first compositions, makes us feel part of a set of associations that are re-converging at this point. It’s a great night to be part of.

2

I’m particularly grateful to all the people who have contributed towards the cost of this new work.

We’ve benefitted from donations of all sizes, and via a successful online funding campaign. People close to the London Sinfonietta and a wider audience from all over the world who all share a passion for Steve’s music have given money. We hope they will benefit from an on-going satisfaction and connection with the work, knowing they have made possible a new piece that will be played many times, to thousands of people, all over the world in years to come. There may be many of you in the audience tonight who are part of our now much wider commissioning network – so thank you.

I hope you enjoy the evening. Do let us know what you think.

Andrew Burke Chief Executive londonsinfonietta.org.uk @Ldn_Sinfonietta facebook.com/londonsinfonietta

Photo: © Wonge Bergmann

Steve Reich composer

Steve Reich has been called “America’s greatest living composer” (The Village VOICE), “the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker), and “among the great composers of the century” (New York Times).

His music has been influential to composers and mainstream musicians all over the world. He is a leading pioneer of minimalism, having in his youth broken away from the establishment that was serialism. His music is known for its steady pulse, repetition and a fascination with canons; it combines rigorous structures with propulsive rhythms and seductive instrumental colour. It also embraces harmonies of non-Western and American vernacular music, especially jazz. Reich’s studies have included the Gamelan, African drumming at the University of Ghana and traditional forms of chanting the Hebrew scriptures.

Over the years his music has significantly grown both in expanded harmonies and instrumentation, resulting in a Pulitzer Prize for his 2007 composition Double Sextet.

Reich’s music has been performed by major orchestras and ensembles around the world, including the New York and Los Angeles philharmonics; London, San Francisco, Boston and BBC symphony orchestras; London Sinfonietta; Kronos Quartet; Ensemble Modern; Ensemble Intercontemporain; Bang on a Can All-Stars; and eighth blackbird. Several noted choreographers have created dances to his music, such as Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jirí Kylían, Jerome Robbins, Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon.

“ere’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them.”

The Guardian

Different Trains and Music for 18 Musicians have each earned him Grammy awards, and his documentary video opera works The Cave and Three Tales, done in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot, have pushed the boundaries of the operatic medium.

Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.

3

The Steve Reich meme ‘e sounds that surrounded America from 1950 through 1980 – jazz and rock and roll – cannot be ignored. ey can be refined, filtered, rejected, or accepted in part, but they can’t be ignored, or you’re an ostrich; you’re ill-informed.’

So said Steve Reich in an interview with Cole (now Nicole) Gagne in 1980. He repeated the point in 1994 in response to a question from the Musical Times about the future of music. Yet despite this, Radio Rewrite is in fact the first time Reich has explicitly worked with the materials of rock music.

The development of Steve Reich’s music, from his student works, through the early tape and phasing pieces, to masterworks like Music for 18 Musicians and beyond, runs in parallel with the development of popular music from the 1960s to the 2010s.

Many claims are made for his influence on pop, rock, house, techno and even rap, but how much of that is genuine contact, and how much wishful revisionism?

In his student years, before he met Terry Riley in 1964 and discovered the tape phasing process in 1965, Reich claimed three major influences on his music: Bach, Stravinsky and jazz. The last of these was most influential, particularly the playing of John Coltrane, whom Reich saw many times at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop club in the early 1960s. In particular, Reich has mentioned the importance of Coltrane’s 1961 Africa/Brass album, and listening back it’s not hard to hear why.

In its patterns of repetition, flow and rupture, and its emphasis on the beat Africa/Brass is typical of the music of the African (particularly West African) diaspora. To these Coltrane adds modality, an emphasis on massed sound over distinct melody, harmonic stasis, and a way of building form by adding or subtracting layers. In other words, many of the planks of Reich’s minimalist style. Two further elements – phasing and glittering tuned percussion – came soon after, as a result of Reich’s experiments with tape loops and his encounter with Ghanaian drumming.

These two elements are what usually signal the influence of Reich. But the fact that so much of his music is arguably built on a template derived from Coltrane and other Afro-diasporic musicians of the 60s, a template that in various forms underpins music from blues to rap, is what makes the ‘Reich meme’ so persistent.

4

There were signs of this a decade later, as the breakthrough of Reich (as well as Riley and Philip Glass) coincided with the height of disco. The premiere of Music for 18 Musicians in March 1976, for example, came just a month after the release of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s 17-minute masterpiece ‘Love to Love You Baby’.

It is possible to read (and has been done) Music for 18 Musicians in conjunction with disco. Certainly they share common features: a sprawling scale, a formal language of extended and repeating climaxes and releases, techniques of layering and cross-fading, and a relentless adherence to the beat. Indeed in 1978 a live performance of Music for 18 Musicians sold out the Bottom Line club in New York, and the following year a Rolling Stone feature on Glass attempted to argue that minimalism actually prefigured disco. A 1984 article in Harper’s magazine even referred to Reich’s music as a form of ‘higher disco’. The coincidence of white art and black pop was not entirely arbitrary: the racial politics of disco and early techno was already leading black producers like Derrick May to self-identify with ‘sophisticated’ European aesthetics.

Yet how much Reich and disco really knew of each other is beside the point. What is clear is that they were both attuned to similar musical and technological currents at the time – Afro-diasporic beats; the technology of the turntable, tape loop and cross-fader; and the possibilities of accumulative and layered musical forms.

However, there were easily documented points of contact. Perhaps the most important of these was in 1973, when Brian Eno, until then a member of Roxy Music, saw Steve Reich and Musicians at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and introduced himself to the composer. Reich’s influence on Eno was profound, and contributed to a change in direction in his work that can be documented through solo albums like Another Green World, the Ambient and Discrete Music series, and his work as a producer.

In 1976 David Bowie, who was working with Eno on his Low album, attended the European premiere in Berlin of Music for 18 Musicians, and the pulsing marimbas and vibraphones of that album’s ‘Weeping Wall’ are an unmistakable homage. Bowie wasn’t the only rock musician to have felt minimalism’s influence. The Who famously quote Riley’s arpeggiated keyboard style on ‘Baba O’Riley’, and Reich’s technique of building up textures through closely spaced canons can be heard through prog rock (a choice example is ‘I Robot’ by The Alan Parsons Project). To say nothing of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, itself enormously influential.

The contact between Reich and popular music cools in the 1980s, as do both disco and prog. But the most recent and enduring phase of cross-influence was launched by a band who might be said to have helped revive both styles. The Orb’s sampling of Reich’s Electric Counterpoint for their 1990 single ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ simply made explicit the sympathy between late 80s/early 90s rave culture and Reich’s glittering, pulse-driven soundscapes. Rave’s biggest act, Orbital (who themselves drew on Reichian timbres in the keyboard riff of ‘Lush 3’ and the layered pianos of ‘Kein Trink Wasser’), made a technical homage in their arch use of phasing speech loops for the intro and outro to their second (‘Brown’) album of 1993.

While rave and techno have their roots in the same Afro-diasporic elements as disco (and so share some of the same DNA as both Coltrane’s modal jazz and Reich’s minimalism), Reich’s music in the 1990s appealed to a different mood. Instead of the ‘new Africa’ sought by Coltrane or May, techno and minimalism were connected by the general desire for self-sublimation that permeated popular music of the time, from rave to Nirvana. Reich’s appeal was now the ambient glow of massed sound, the total absorption of surface detail into a generalised texture, the effacement of the individual, and it can be heard on albums as diverse as U2’s The Joshua Tree (produced by Eno), My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space and Tortoise’s TNT in different ways even close the circle between loops and Coltrane-esque jazz.

Towards the end of the decade, as techno matured and its producers became more self-reflective, a new genre – minimal techno, or microhouse – was born.

The Reich Remixed album of 1999 may have been devised by Nonesuch records to attract a crossover audience to its Reich discography, but it struck a chord nevertheless. Producers were creating a new form of techno that was more attuned to minute processes of variation and evolution. Several of them, including Carsten Nicolai, Richie Hawtin and Nobukazu Takemura have acknowledged the influence in particular of Reich’s early music.

Takemura (a contributor to Reich Remixed) samples Four Organs on his Assembler/Assembler 2 album.

Hawtin’s Concept series of 12 inches focused with Reichian obsession on single rhythmic ideas; these were later ‘remixed’ by Thomas Brinkmann into new rhythmic configurations by using a custom twin-arm turntable to play the record against itself. Brinkmann has taken Reich’s phasing technique to an extreme on his ‘X100’ record, which consists of just a click, a tone and a bass kick recorded on two slightly out of phase grooves for the duration of one LP side.

In using two Radiohead tracks, Radio Rewrite might be said finally to confirm the importance of rock that Reich spoke of back in 1980. The debt has already been paid the other way, when Jonny Greenwood performed a stunning version of Electric Counterpoint in Kraków in 2011. It was at this concert that Reich and Greenwood met, and the idea of Radio Rewrite was born. The London Sinfonietta’s involvement keeps the circles turning in on each other. As well as commissioning and giving the world premiere of Reich’s Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings in 2006, it was the London Sinfonietta who co-commissioned Reich’s City Life (1995), his first piece to employ digital samplers of the sort used by musicians like Takemura and The Orb. Greenwood’s compositional career, meanwhile, may be said to have been kickstarted by the London Sinfonietta, who performed and recorded his first orchestral work smear in 2005, which led to his score for the film There Will Be Blood and other compositions. And a path via Steve Reich’s Drumming, Eno and Hawtin may well take you to Radiohead tracks like ‘Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box’ or ‘The Gloaming’. To say nothing of Thom Yorke’s ‘Arpeggi’, which the London Sinfonietta have already performed in a very Reich-like reworking. Radio Rewrite may be unprecedented in Reich’s illustrious career, but it also has a satisfying inevitability. © Tim Rutherford-Johnson (2013)

5

Notes on the programme

Clapping Music Late in 1971, I composed Clapping Music out of a desire to create a piece of music that would need no instruments at all beyond the human body. At first I thought it would be a phase piece, but this turned out to be rather inappropriate since it introduces a difficulty in musical process (phasing) that is out of place with such a simple way of producing sound.

The solution was to have one performer remain fixed, repeating the same basic pattern throughout, while the second moves abruptly, after a number of repeats, from unison to one beat ahead, and so on, until he is back in unison with the first performer.

The basic difference between these sudden changes and the gradual changes of phase in other pieces, is that when phasing, one can hear the same pattern moving away from itself with the downbeats of both parts separating further and further apart, while the sudden changes here create the sensation of a series of variations of two different patterns with their downbeats coinciding. In Clapping Music it can be difficult to hear that the second performer is in fact always playing the same original pattern as the first performer, though starting in different places.

Clapping Music marks the end of my use of the gradual phase shifting process.

Steve Reich (Writings about Music)

Electric Counterpoint Electric Counterpoint was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival for guitarist Pat Metheny. It was composed during the summer of 1987. The duration is about 15 minutes. It is the third in a series of pieces (first Vermont Counterpoint in 1982 for flutist Ransom Wilson followed by New York Counterpoint in 1985 for clarinettist Richard Stolzman) all dealing with a soloist playing against a pre-recorded tape of themselves. In Electric Counterpoint the soloist prerecords as many as ten guitars and two electric bass parts and then plays the final eleventh guitar part live against the tape. I would like to thank Pat 6

Metheny for showing me how to improve the piece in terms of making it more idiomatic for the guitar.

Electric Counterpoint is in three movements; fast, slow, fast, played one after the other without pause.

The first movement, after an introductory pulsing section where the harmonies of the movement are stated, uses a theme derived from Central African horn music that I became aware of through the ethnomusicologist Simha Arom. That theme is built up in eight voice canon and while the remaining two guitars and bass play pulsing harmonies, the soloist plays melodic patterns that result from the contrapuntal interlocking of those eight prerecorded guitars.

The second movement cuts the tempo in half, changes key and introduces a new theme, which is then slowly built up in nine guitars in canon. Once again, two other guitars and bass supply harmony, while the soloist brings out melodic patterns that result from the overall contrapuntal web.

The third movement returns to the original tempo and key and introduces a new pattern in triple meter. After building up a four guitar canon, two bass guitars enter suddenly to further stress the triple meter. The soloist then introduces a new series of strummed chords that are built up in three guitar canon. When these are complete, the soloist returns to melodic patterns that result from the overall counterpoint, when suddenly the basses begin to change both key and meter back and forth between E minor and C minor and between 3/2 and 12/8, so that one hears first three groups of four eighth notes and then four groups of three eighth notes. These rhythmic and tonal changes speed up more and more rapidly until at the end the basses slowly fade out and the ambiguities are finally resolved in 12/8 and E minor.

Steve Reich

2x5 My first thought was that with two electric basses I could write interlocking bass lines that would be

clearly heard. This would not be possible on acoustic basses played pizzicato. I then began to think about two pianos and two electric basses being the motor for a piece that would use electric guitars and small drum kit as well. The classic rock combination of two electric guitars, electric bass, drums and piano seemed perfect – so long as it was a doubled quintet resulting in two basses, two pianos, two drums and four electric guitars. This made possible interlocking canons of identical instruments. The piece can be played either with five live musicians and five prerecorded or with ten musicians.

2 x 5 is clearly not rock and roll. Like any other composition, it’s completely notated while rock is generally not. 2 x 5 is chamber music for rock instruments.

We’re living at a time when the worlds of concert music and popular music have resumed their normal dialogue after a brief pause during the twelve tone/serial period. This dialogue has been active, I would assume, since people have been making music. We know from notation that it was active throughout the Renaissance with the folk song L’homme armé used in masses by composers from Dufay to Palestrina. During the Baroque period, dance forms were used by composers from Froberger and Lully to Bach and Handel. Later we have folk songs in Haydn’s 104th symphony, Beethoven’s 6th symphony, Russian folk songs in Stravinsky’s early ballets, Serbo-Croatian folk music throughout Bartok, hymns in Ives, folk songs and jazz in Copland, the entire works of Weill, Gershwin and Sondheim and on into my own generation and beyond. Electric guitars, electric basses and drum kits, along with samplers, synthesizers and other electronic sound processing devices are now part of notated concert music. The dialogue continues.

Steve Reich (2008)

Radio Rewrite world premiere (London)

Over the years, composers have used pre-existing music (folk or classical) as material for new pieces of their own. This was particularly notable from the beginning of the 15th to the end of the 17th century when over 40 settings of the mass using the tune L’homme armé as its point of departure were written by composers Dufay, Ockeghem, Josquin des Pres

and Palestrina among others. L’homme armé was a popular folk song yet writing a mass was similar in scope then to writing a symphony in the Classical or Romantic period. Much later in the 19th century, Brahms wrote Variations on a Theme of Haydn and in the 20th century we find Stravinsky reworking Pergolesi for his own Pulcinella. Radio Rewrite, along with Proverb (Perotin) and Finishing the Hat-Two Pianos (Sondheim) are my modest contribution to this genre.

Now, in the early 21st century, we live in an age of remixes where musicians take audio samples of other music and remix them into audio of their own.

Being a composer who works with musical notation, I chose to reference two songs from the rock group Radiohead for an ensemble of musicians playing non-rock instruments. The two songs chosen were Everything in its Right Place and Jigsaw Falling Into Place. The story is as follows: In September 2011 I was in Krakow for a festival of my music. One of the featured performers was Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead who had prepared all the backing tracks for my piece Electric Counterpoint, and then played electric guitar live against those tracks in concert. It was a great performance and we began talking. I found his background as a violist and his present active role as a composer extremely interesting when added to his major role in such an important and innovative rock group. Even festival director Filip Berkowitz suggested I listen to Radiohead. When I returned home I made a point to go online and listen to their music and the two songs mentioned above stuck in my head.

It was not my intention to make anything like ‘variations’ on these songs, but rather to draw on their harmonies and sometimes melodic fragments and work them into my own piece. This is what I have done. As to actually hearing the original songs, the truth is – sometimes you hear them and sometimes you don’t.

Radio Rewrite is in five movements played without pause. The first, third and fifth are fast and based on Jigsaw and the second and fourth are slow and based on Everything. The piece is scored for flute, clarinet, two vibes, two pianos, string quartet and electric bass.

It was co-commissioned by the London Sinfonietta and Alarm Will Sound and is about 16 minutes in duration. It was completed in August 2012.

Steve Reich (2012) 7

Double Sextet There are two identical sextets in Double Sextet.

Each one is comprised of flute, clarinet, vibraphone, piano, violin and cello. Doubling the instrumentation was done so that, as in so many of my earlier works, two identical instruments could interlock to produce one overall pattern.

For example, in this piece you will hear the pianos and vibes interlocking in a highly rhythmic way to drive the rest of the ensemble.

The piece can be played in two ways; either with twelve musicians, or with six playing against a recording of themselves.

The idea of a single player playing against a recording of themselves goes all the way back to Violin Phase (1967) and extends though Vermont Counterpoint (1982), New York Counterpoint (1985), Electric Counterpoint (1987) and Cello Counterpoint (2003). The expansion of this idea to an entire chamber ensemble playing against pre-recordings of themselves begins with Different Trains (1988) and

continues with Triple Quartet (1999) and now Double Sextet. By doubling an entire chamber ensemble, one creates the possibility for multiple simultaneous contrapuntal webs of identical instruments. In Different Trains and Triple Quartet all instruments are strings to produce one large string fabric. In Double Sextet, there is more timbral variety through the interlocking of six different pairs of percussion, string and wind instruments.

The piece is in three movements – fast, slow, fast – and within each movement there are four harmonic sections built around the keys of D, F, A flat and B or their relative minor keys B, D, F and G sharp.

As in almost all of my music, modulations from one key to the next are sudden, clearly setting off each new section.

Double Sextet is about 22 minutes long and was completed in October 2007. It was commissioned by eighth blackbird and received its world premiere by that group at the University of Richmond in Virginia in March 2008.

Steve Reich

Steve Reich

Steve Reich with Principal Percussionist David Hockings

8

Photo: © Per-Erik Adamsson

Photo: © Eric Camping

Brad Lubman

Mats Bergström

Conductor/composer Brad Lubman is founding co-Artistic Director and Music Director of Ensemble Signal, hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most vital groups of its kind.”

Guitarist Mats Bergström, born in Gävle in 1961, grew up in Stockholm in a family of musicians.

After graduating from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and spending a year in London where he made his debut at the Wigmore Hall, he mainly worked as a session musician on the electric as well as the acoustic guitar during the 1980s. Two years as a post-graduate student at the Juilliard School in New York at the beginning of the 1990s were followed by a conscious effort to concentrate on chamber music. Today, he is often heard accompanying one of our greatest singers or as a boundless soloist and ensemble musician. In August 2011 he made his BBC Proms debut performing Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint at the Royal Albert Hall.

conductor

Brad Lubman’s guest conducting engagements include major orchestras such as the Finnish Radio Symphony, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and the St Paul Chamber Orchestra. In addition, he has worked with some of the most important ensembles for contemporary music, including Klangforum Wien, musikFabrik, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group.

Brad Lubman’s work includes a number of CD recordings. A new CD with first recordings of orchestral works by Morton Feldman was released with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin in October 2011 at Mode Records, receiving great acclaim by the international press.

In the 2012/13 season, Brad Lubman is working once again with the DSO Berlin and the RKF and he will make his debut with the NDR-Sinfonieorchester, Hamburg. To mark the 100th anniversary of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps, he will conduct the New York based Orchestra of St. Luke’s in a guest performance in North Carolina.

electric guitar

By collaborating with composers and rearranging songs and instrumental works for the guitar, he renews and expands the repertoire for the instrument. His discography is extensive. He has been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music since 2006 and in 2011 was awarded the Litteris et Artibus medal.

Mats Bergström lives in the heart of Uppland with his wife and three children as well as a varying number of hens.

Brad Lubman is Associate Professor of Conducting and Ensembles at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York where he has directed the Musica Nova ensemble since joining the faculty in 1997. He is also on the faculty of the Bang-on-a-Can Summer Institute.

His own music has been performed in the United States and Europe and can be heard on his first portrait CD, insomniac, on Tzadik. He has also recorded for Albany, BMG/RCA, New World, Nonesuch and Orange Mountain amongst others.

9

Tonight’s Players Michael Cox*

Adrian Bradbury

flute

cello

supported by Michael and Patricia McLaren-Turner

Enno Senft*

Rebecca Larsen

Sound Intermedia sound projection

flute

supported by Anthony Mackintosh

Timothy Lines

John Constable*

clarinet

piano

Scott Lygate

supported by Michael Conroy

clarinet

Jonathan Morton* violin

Sound Intermedia – alias Ian Dearden and David Sheppard – is dedicated to realising visionary new art works through live performance and cuttingedge technology. Their trail-blazing initiatives and artistic collaborations continually push past the accepted boundaries of composition, sound design, live sound, music technology and interactive multimedia. Internationally respected both as composers and performers, they collaborate with many of the world’s most influential artists and organisations.

bass guitar

Joan Atherton* violin

Paul Silverthorne* viola supported by Nick and Claire Prettejohn

Tim Gill*

Shelagh Sutherland piano

David Hockings* percussion

Oliver Lowe percussion

Huw Davies electric guitar

Steve Smith

cello

electric guitar

supported by Sir Stephen Oliver

*London Sinfonietta Principal Players

London Sinfonietta making new music

10

The London Sinfonietta is one of the world’s leading contemporary music ensembles with a reputation built on the virtuosity of its performances and ambitious programming. It is committed to placing new music at the heart of contemporary culture and continually pushing boundaries, regularly undertaking projects with choreographers, video artists, film-makers, electronica artists, jazz and folk musicians. The ensemble is Resident Orchestra at Southbank Centre with its headquarters at Kings Place.

The London Sinfonietta’s pioneering young artist programmes include Blue Touch Paper, a scheme which promotes the next generation of partnerships across a variety of artistic disciplines; the Writing the Future programme, which enables young composers to work with London Sinfonietta musicians as they make new music; and the London Sinfonietta Academy, which gives the UK’s finest young musicians the opportunity to come together to further their performance experience and training in an intensive week-long course.

Famed for its commitment to the creation of new music, the London Sinfonietta has commissioned over 250 works since its foundation in 1968, and premiered many hundreds more. World and UK premieres in 2012/13 include, among others, Steve Reich’s Radio Rewrite (a London Sinfonietta cocommission), David Fennessy’s 13 Factories (UK premiere), Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s Run (world-premiere) and a new work by Luke Bedford (London Sinfonietta commission).

The London Sinfonietta Label and releases on NMC Recordings and Signum Records present a recordings catalogue of the finest new music performed by the London Sinfonietta. The latest releases include the New Music Show, Thomas Adès: In Seven Days, Jonathan Harvey: Bird Concerto with Pianosong and Louis Andriessen: Anaïs Nin/De Staat.

The ground-breaking Blue Touch Paper programme continues into another round of developing inventive crossartform work. During the forthcoming year, composer Edward Jessen will be working with director Joseph Alford, composer Luke Carver Goss will be working with writer Jacob Polley, and composer Dan Stern will be working with set designer Aurelian Koch. These works will receive their preview performance on Tuesday 14 May at Village Underground, London.

Photo: © Briony Campbell Photo: © Briony Campbell

The Writing the Future scheme continues to pair composers with London Sinfonietta Principal Players to develop new chamber compositions that will be performed throughout the season. Projects for the composers also include creative crossartform collaborations with students at the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design.

Photo: © Briony Campbell

The London Sinfonietta Academy is central to the London Sinfonietta’s commitment to working with young musicians.

A week-long summer course enables 30 students and three conductors from across the UK to learn skills specific to performing new music from the ensemble’s Principal Players.

The London Sinfonietta Academy 2013 will be conducted by world-renowned composer, conductor and performer George Benjamin, and culminate in a public performance on Saturday 13 July. Keep an eye on our website and social media channels to find out how to reserve tickets.

Get closer to the London Sinfonietta and contemporary classical music with activities that give you the opportunity to create, curate and perform with a world-class ensemble. As part of the Steve Reich: Radio Rewrite tour in March 2013, the London Sinfonietta presented a Repeating Patterns Schools Concert, produced by, and for, young people. With nearly 2000 pupils at the Royal Festival Hall, Steve Reich and the KX Collective presented works including Electric Counterpoint, which features in the GCSE curriculum.

minimalism. Principal Percussionist David Hockings led the workshop, where members of the public learnt Steve Reich’s famous piece Clapping Music and discovered first-hand what makes this composition so thrilling; not only to watch, but to perform.

The KX Collective, a dynamic group of young people from Kings Cross and surrounding areas, continue to create and perform new music, collaborate with professional musicians, produce events and find out about music being made today.

In February we led a Clapping Music Workshop inspired by our ongoing exploration of

For further details of future opportunities, please contact together@londonsinfonietta.org.uk

11

The London Sinfonietta is a registered charity and relies on the considerable generosity of many trusts, foundations and individuals to continue to create and perform outstanding new music.

London Sinfonietta Pioneers

included In Broken Images by Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Radio Rewrite by Steve Reich.

A gift of £1,000 and above per year will support one of our world-class Principal Players for a season and give you a close connection with the performing ensemble.

Membership starts from just £35 per year (less than £3 per month) and will support all areas of the London Sinfonietta’s new music-making and help us to remain at the forefront of contemporary classical music.

Help us continue to lead the way, sparking the greatest innovations in music and nurturing the best musical talent as we go.

Become a Pioneer today and help us make new music happen.

You might like to direct your support to a major new commission with an annual gift of £200 and above and gain an insight into the creative commissioning process. Recent Pioneer supported commissions have

Find out more by contacting our Development team on 020 7329 9340, by emailing pioneers@londonsinfonietta.org.uk or visiting londonsinfonietta.org.uk/pioneers

Photo: © Wonge Bergmann

Do you share our passion for new music? Join the London Sinfonietta Pioneers and you will play a crucial role in making new music happen.

Your support, at any level, is enormously valuable to the London Sinfonietta and all Pioneers enjoy an engaging relationship with the ensemble, with regular opportunities to meet our players and attend specific supporters’ events.

12

Steve Reich: Radio Rewrite We are hugely grateful to the London Sinfonietta Entrepreneurs, Pioneers and supporters from around the world who have helped make this work happen:

Andreas Affentranger Carmen Alzner Graham Anderson Richard Arnold Eleanor Ashton Lizzie Atanassova Ian Baker Claire Barton Stephen and Maureen Barton Andrew Brixey-Williams Hannah Bujic Andrew Burke G Buxton Jonathan Cane Peter Carpenter Henrik Celius Trevor Cook Adrian Cosgrave Katriona Coughlin Elizabeth Davies

Dennis Davis Monica Dutta Alexander Fitch Josh Forde Amy Fretwell Sarah Gee Susan Grollet

Hoi-Cheong Lam Marianne Lampon Dominic Leitner Annabel Marsland Mr and Mrs McDade Damian McVeigh Philip Meaden (In memory of Mark Grollet) Ashil Mistry Stephen Morris Robin Haigh Mr and Mrs Morris Will Harriss Esther Mulholland Katherine Hattersley Yasushi Ogasawara John Holland Natalie Olivadoti Deirdre Hollingsworth R O’Neale JK Holman Martin Patefield-Smith Charles Humphries Claudia Payne Jonathan James EJ Picard JV Johnston Kieran Quirke Penny Jonas Emma Rea Claire Jordan Mr and Mrs Karaszkiewicz Karl Richard Mark Rickerby Ann King-Musza

Keith Salway Pedro Segundo Joan Sheppard Roy Stewart Pete Stollery Roz Surtees Alan Teder Barry Tennison Richard Thomas Ageno Toshimitsu Graham Vernon Thorsten Vieth BS Way John Wheatley Ronan Whittern Allan Wilson Barry Witherden AJ Wittenberg

13

London Sinfonietta Patrons and Pioneers Honorary Patrons John Bird Sir Harrison Birtwistle Alfred Brendel KBE Sir George Christie cH

Lead Pioneers Sir Richard Arnold Trevor Cook Susan Grollet in memory of Mark Grollet Leo and Regina Hepner Penny Jonas Anthony Mackintosh Belinda Matthews Robert & Nicola McFarland Michael & Patricia McLaren-Turner

Sir Stephen Oliver QC Nick & Claire Prettejohn Richard Thomas & Caroline Cowie Paul & Sybella Zisman

Creative Pioneers Ian Baker Andrew Burke Robert Clark Jeremy & Yvonne Clarke Rachel Coldicutt Susan Costello Anton Cox Dennis Davis Deborah Golden Patrick Hall Nicolas Hodgson Andrew Hunt Maurice & Jean Jacobs Frank & Linda Jeffs

Alana Lowe-Petraske Jane McAusland Stephen Morris Julie Nicholls Simon Osborne Patricia O’Sullivan Geoff Peace Ruth Rattenbury Dennis Stevenson Iain Stewart Anne Stoddart Sally Taylor Barry Tennison David and Jenni Wake Walker Estela Welldon John Wheatley Jane Williams Stephen Williamson Michelle Wright Plus those generous Pioneers who prefer to remain anonymous

London Sinfonietta is immensely grateful to the following trusts and foundations for their support: Arts Council England The Aaron Copland Fund for Music The Angus Allnatt Charitable Trust The Boltini Trust The British Council The Britten Pears Foundation The Derek Butler Trust The City of London Corporation’s City Bridge Trust Columbia Foundation Fund of the London Community Foundation The D’Oyly Carte Charitable Trust Fidelio Charitable Trust The Goldsmith’s Company Charity The John Ellerman Foundation

14

Esmée Fairbairn Foundation Fenton Arts Trust The Holst Foundation Jerwood Charitable Foundation The Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation The Leche Trust The Leverhulme Trust The Marple Charitable Trust Musicians Benevolent Fund PRS for Music Foundation RVW Trust The Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation Youth Music

London Sinfonietta Board of Directors

Administration

Paul Zisman

Andrew Burke

Chairman

Chief Executive

Andrew Burke Rachel Coldicutt Ian Dearden David Hockings Penny Jonas Alana Lowe-Petraske Belinda Matthews Philip Meaden Sir Stephen Oliver QC Matthew Pike Paul Silverthorne Sally Taylor

Sarah Tennant Head of Concert Production

Natalie Marchant Concerts & Touring Administrator

Tina Speed

Freelance and Consultant Staff Hal Hutchinson Concerts Manager

Lesley Wynne Orchestra Personnel Manager

Julie Nicholls Consultant Accountant

Participation and Learning Manager

Michelle Wright for Cause4

Claire Barton

sounduk

Development Manager

Public Relations

Fundraising Consultant

Amy Forshaw Senior Marketing Officer

Claire Lampon Marketing & Development Assistant

Elizabeth Davies Head of Administration and Finance

London Sinfonietta is grateful to its accountants: Martin Greene Ravden LLP and its auditors MGR Audit Limited for their ongoing support.

Viktoria Mark Finance Assistant

Sarah Tuppen Projects Intern (Surrey University Professional Training Placement)

15

Photo: © Briony Campbell

Photo: © Briony Campbell

Upcoming London Sinfonietta concerts at the Southbank Centre

In Portrait: Luke Bedford

Mauricio Kagel: The Pieces of the Compass Rose

Darkness and Light: Georg Friedrich Haas’ in vain

Wednesday 22 May, 7:45pm Purcell Room at Royal Festival Hall

Saturday 1 June, 7:30pm Queen Elizabeth Hall

Friday 6 December, 8pm Queen Elizabeth Hall

Luke Bedford has fast become one of “e sound references are never the most important composers of his used anecdotally; every one of generation, in part on the evidence of them is integrated by Kagel’s past work for the London Sinfonietta. extraordinary harmonic imagination into a world in This new ensemble composition is a which nothing is what it seems, major 25-minute work, which will be performed for a second time after the and in which every new vista contains a genuine surprise.” interval to give the rare instant second chance for an audience to get The Guardian to know this brand-new composition.

The programme also includes an Discover Mauricio Kagel’s The Pieces ensemble arrangement of the 2011 of the Compass Rose, a musical double-soloist and string ensemble travelogue taking you from the north composition Wonderful No-Headed east of Brazil, to the Gulf of Finland Nightingale, and music by Gérard and the South American Andes using Grisey, whose music holds a instruments from piano and fascination for Bedford. harmonium to a full range of percussion. An Argentinian composer Luke Bedford’s new work is whose cultural and musical outlook commisioned by the London embraced a life lived crossing continents, The Pieces of the Compass Sinfonietta with the generous Rose is Kagel’s response to the diverse support of Michael and soundworlds evoked by geography, Patricia McLaren-Turner. language and ethics.

16

Georg Friedrich Haas’ in vain, written in 2000, is an exploration of a musical sound outside the standard tonal system of composition, and an adventure for the listener. As well as the microtonal harmonic soundworld that pervades the work, the normal concert experience is altered for the audience and the performers, as parts of the performance are given in pitch-black, according to a series of carefully planned lighting changes that alter and heighten the listener’s senses. This extraordinary work has been performed many times in Europe and now has its much awaited premiere in London.

Presented by the London Sinfonietta as part of Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise, inspired by Alex Ross’ book The Rest is Noise.

£15 (£6.50 U26, £4.50 students)

£9, £15, £22 (£6.50 U26, £4.50 students)

£10, £20 (£6.50 U26, £4.50 students)

0844 847 9910 southbankcentre.co.uk

0844 847 9910 southbankcentre.co.uk

0844 847 9910 southbankcentre.co.uk

4