INTO magazine - October 2009 issue

Issue 2. October 2009

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

MATTHEW ERGEANT

‘Flights of fancy outside the rigorous world I’ve defined’

GAS AND WOLFGANG VOIGT Dark, ambient, nostalgic techno COMPOSITION IN 2009 Complexity and simplicity HOW TO Create a sonic sculpture

The magazine of

Welcome to the October issue of INTO If this is the first time you’ve come across INTO, you might want to have a look back at the first issue from last month, which you can access here. The magazine is all about different kinds of new music and sound that excite us. You’ll probably be into some of them already and we aim to give you the chance to get into new things through interesting and accessible writing.

This month our cover story is Matthew Sergeant, one of the UK’s best twentysomething composers, who talks to us about the crucial career stage he’s at and why he’s been compared to Haruki Murakami.

More generally, where is modern composition going today? John Fallas looks at the programme of Sound and Music’s weekly autumn concert series, The Cutting Edge, and traces interesting trends towards directness and simplicity.

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

Meanwhile something very different is going on at the Barbican on 6 October.

From techno beats to echoes of lost Wagner and Austrian ländler, Geeta Dayal finds dark, ambient landscapes in Wolfgang Voigt’s work.

Our How To section gives you something different each month, ranging from technical skills to industry knowledge.

This month, in a frenzy of creative energy, sonic artist Janek Schaefer presents a photo guide to how he created a series of new sonic sculptures especially for INTO. And in From the Blogs you can read the listening diaries of our regular bloggers, The Earwig and David Cotner, the latter of whom takes a good long look at the major retrospective release, Warp 20.

I hope you enjoy!

Shoël Stadlen Managing Editor

Managing Editor: Shoël Stadlen Designed by Andrew McGarity Original Design: PostParis, www.postparis.com

03

OCTOBER 2009

How to read the magazine: We’re publishing INTO using Issuu software. The way it works is that it retains as far as possible the look and feel of print, so you have the integrity of a magazine issue and you can turn its pages. We’ve tried to design the magazine so that as long as you are looking at it using the fullscreen view, you can read it without zooming in. However, if you find you do want to zoom in, you certainly can. Meanwhile if you prefer to read the magazine in hard copy rather than on screen, you can print out as much or as little of each issue as you want.

Here are some things you may want to do: View fullscreen:

Click the ‘fullscreen’ button at the top left of the screen.

Turn pages:

Hover over the left or right edges of each spread to move forward or backwards.

Zoom in/out:

Click on the page to zoom in, then simply move the mouse without clicking to move around the page. Click again to zoom back out again.

Print:

Click the print icon at the top of the page.

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

Follow a link:

Hover over a link and it will offer you the option to click to follow it.

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

04

OCTOBER 2009

CONTENTS

C ntents NEWS. PAGES 6—8

FLIGHTS OF FANCY: INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW SERGEANT PAGES 10—15

GAS AND WOLFGANG VOIGT: INTERVIEW WITH WOLFGANG VOIGT. PAGES 16—20

05

OCTOBER 2009

HOW TO... MAKE SOUND SCULPTURES. PAGES 22—29

CONTENTS

FROM THE BLOGS: THE EARWIG DAVID COTNER PAGES 36—45

CUTTING EDGE PAGES 30—35

OPPORTUNITIES. PAGES 45—48

06

OCTOBER 2009

NEWS

NEW BIENNIAL £50,000 NEW MUSIC AWARD OPEN FOR ENTRIES

2008 WINNER THE FRAGMENTED ORCHESTRA

The PRS Foundation for New Music has opened its third New Music Award for entries. The award offers a £50,000 prize with which to realise a new and adventurous musical idea. The award is open to anyone based in the UK and individuals, bands, ensembles and organisations are all encouraged to apply. The PRSF describes the award as being open to ‘all musical genres from folk, rap and bhangra to jazz, classical and electronic’ as long as the initiators are ‘interested in pushing the boundaries of the musical genre they work in.’

The New Music Award has been run twice before, with artist Jem Finer’s installation, Score for a Hole in The Ground, winning in 2005 and The Fragmented Orchestra, a collaboration between John Matthias, Jane Grant and Nick Ryan imagining the human brain as a colossal musical instrument, winning in 2008.

The shortlist in 2008 also included Adjustments by Netsayi Chigwendere, Carousel Commission by David Thomas, Eliza Carthy, Adam Bushell & Ed Baxter, Echolocation by Robert Jarvis, Concerto for Beatboxer and Orchestra

by Shlomo and Anna Meredith, and Pedal Tones by Django Bates.

The deadline for applications is 8 January 2010.

www.prsfoundation.co.uk

07

OCTOBER 2009

CAN MUSICIANS AND SOUND ARTISTS LEAD THE WAY?

CHERYL FRANCES-HOAD AND THE PRINCE CONSORT

Artists taking the lead is one of the major projects of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and is being developed by Arts Council England in partnership with London 2012 and the arts councils of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. 12 commissions of up to £500,000 will be awarded to create 12 new works of art across the country; one in each of the nine English regions, and in the nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Out of the 60 shortlisted projects - five for each of the 12 regions many feature music or sound in some way, while several are music or sound led.

In the East, composer Cheryl Frances Hoad and the Prince

NEWS

Consort have been shortlisted for Eastern Invocation, a proposed new song cycle inspired by the area.

In London, producer, performer and composer Nitin Sawnhey’s Global Bedroom Orchestra looks to be inspired by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, proposing to put together an international global orchestra of performers based in their bedrooms, which would perform a specially composed piece by Sawnhey with a live British orchestra.

And in the West Midlands, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group are proposing to commission a work called The Shouting Olympiad from American composer, David Lang. His piece would be written for several thousand people, all shouting, ‘not out or rage or unhappiness but out of joyfulness.’

Meanwhile, several shortlisted projects feature visual and multimedia artists working with sound. Most notably, 2001 Turner Prize winner, Martin Creed, is proposing a mass bell-ringing project, The Big Ring.

The 12 winning projects will be announced later this autumn. www.artiststakingthelead.org.uk

08

OCTOBER 2009

NEWS

NEW AUTUMN FESTIVAL PROGRAMMES ANNOUNCED

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and London Jazz Festival have announced their 2009 programmes.

At London Jazz Festival (13-22 November) some of the more innovative performers featured in the programme include Lukas Ligeti, Carla Bley, Steve Noble & Alex Ward, Centre-Line, Get The Blessing, Polar Bear, Michael Wollny, Finn Peters, Gwilym Simcock, Jason Yarde, Tord Gustavsen Ensemble and Tortoise. www.londonjazzfestival.com Meanwhile HCMF (20-29 November) features Jonathan Harvey, fresh from curating London Sinfonietta’s Sonic Explorations festival, as its composer in residence. Harvey is 70 this year and recently won a Gramophone Award for his Body Mandala (NMC Recordings). The festival is also presenting a rare feature of the music of Portuguese composer Emmanuel Nunes; there are focuses on Dutch minimalist composer Louis Andriessen and avant-garde jazz composer Anthony Braxton, plus

LOUIS ANDRIESSEN, ONE OF HCMF’S FEATURED COMPOSERS

new works by British composers Richard Barrett and James Dillon and Germany’s Wolfgang Rihm. www.hcmf.co.uk

09

OCTOBER 2009

Colour options:

Examples of colours:

Corporate Symbol: Pantone 2995 Name: Pantone 295

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

Single-colour Symbol: any colour Name: same colour

British Council Ukraine corporate

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

Deadline for applications: 30 November 2009

If you’re a British composer, resident in the UK, and you want to travel overseas to attend significant presentations of your work, you can Logo size: Objects to use: apply for funding from the British Council’s Bursaries to Composers Paper Logo Page scheme, administrated by Sound and Music. size size margin A2

200%

25 mm.

A4

100%

15 mm.

A5

90%

10 mm.

A6

80%

8 mm.

DL

90%

10 mm.

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

Hear & Now

The black version should Sinfonietta The reversed version 3 October: London / be used when the logo should be used when John Adams is darker in colour the logo is lighter in colour

Johnthan Cage: Credo in US; Paul Dresher: Concerto for the background. than the background. violin & electroacoustic Band; David Lang: Cheating Lying Stealing; John Adams: Son of Chamber Symphony. Performed by the London Sinfonietta, John Adams (conductor), Clio Gould (violin), Sound Intermedia (sound design). Recorded 27 September 2009 at The Queen Elizabeth Hall, London.

10 October: Sound and Music presents notes inégales

Highlights from Shuffle, the first of three events recorded for Hear and Now at Kings Place. Peter Wiegold: Earth and Stars (UK Premiere); La Belle Epoque; Postcards (excerpt). Six Sound and Music shortlisted composers submit musical ‘postcards’ and films around the theme of ‘shuffle’ or ‘swing’; Christian Marclay: Shuffle (excerpt); notes inégales, Martin Butler (piano); Peter Wiegold (electric piano).

Recorded 6 September at Kings Place, London.

17 October: Twittering Machines and sutartinės

Egidija Medekšaitė: Oscillum; Ričardas Kabelis: Invariations (UKP); Justė Janulytė: Psalms; Arturas Bumšteinas: Heap of Language (after Robert Smithson) (WP); George Mačiunas: In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti; Rytis Mažulis: 14 Canons (WP); Bronius Kutavičius: Anno cum

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

Maximum width is 420 mm.

Saturday nights at 10.30pm on BBC Radio 3 tettigonia (UKP). Anton Lukoszevieze (curator and cello) Chordos string quartet (Lithuania). Recorded 21 September at Kings Place, London

24 October: String Theories

An eclectic and intercontinental group of musicians including a New York jazz flautist, a French punk guitarist, a Chilean political songwriter, a German gondola pianist and a Japanese ultra-modernist - write miniatures for the Edinburgh String Quartet, linked by transformational sound-design installations. Curated by Nigel Osborne; Recorded 19 October at Kings Place, London.

31 October: BCMG 2009 season

Simon Holt: Capriccio Spettrale (revised version - WP); Richard Causton: Chamber Symphony (WP); Bruno Maderna: Oboe Concerto No 1; Vic Hoyland: Hey Presto!... moon – flower – bat (WP). BCMG, Diego Masson (conductor), Nicholas Daniel (oboe).

Recorded 16 October at the CBSO Centre, Birmingham.

010

OCTOBER 2009

FLIGHTS OF FANCY

‘Flights of fanc the rigorous w I’ve defined’ An interview with

Matthew Sergeant

011

OCTOBER 2009

FLIGHTS OF FANCY

cy outside world

Composer Matthew Sergeant emerges from a year in residence with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group to tell us about the results of the collaboration.

You’ve been resident with BCMG for the last year, and the results are now being showcased. What will audiences hear?

I’ve been working with BCMG in various guises for a year now, but from the outset I always had a bit of an agenda.

I’ve always found myself working in what I would describe as a very ‘traditional’ composer role; I write a piece, I give it to the players, and then it’s performed.

Being involved with an ensemble for a long period of time allows for more intimate collaborations and I wanted to exploit this whilst working in Birmingham.

To that end, I have been exploring different ways by which my music could incorporate different degrees of freedom and, to a certain extent, the idea of performer-composer.

As a result, I produced three pieces that try to explore these issues in different

ways. Firstly, there’s my solo cello work [heard weeping under the boughs of hemlock trees] which, although fully notated in a traditional way, was created using slightly aleatoric means.

Then there’s two pieces for oboe and ensemble (the fruits of my collaboration with BCMG oboist Melinda Maxwell): listening to a still small voice is a series of pre-composed ‘backdrops’ designed for Melinda to freely improvise over. She is given some guidance on harmonic context and such-like from a kind of short-score-cum-’part’, but otherwise it’s left for her to create her own line.

Finally there’s the temples at ogden and provo, which I suppose can be seen as a summation of the previous two experiments. Again, scored for solo oboe and ensemble, this is a work without improvisation but is largely quasi-aleatorically constructed. The soloist and ensemble

012

OCTOBER 2009

are rarely rhythmically synchronised and, often, the ensemble itself is divided into sub-groups which deviate rhythmically from the remainder of the players.

However, the goal here was not to exploit performer-freedom for performerfreedom’s sake, but in a sense to use what I had learned about the way improvisation ‘works’ to compose the aleatoricism ‘out-of-a-job’. In effect, the aleatoric components serve as a catalyst for new technical ways of compositional thinking that I had never explored before.

FLIGHTS OF FANCY

world I’ve defined; passages of puzzling structural deviance that make me, as a listener, suddenly blink, sit up and think ‘what was that all about?’

What can composers bring to ensembles and organisations through residencies? What do you think you’ve brought to BCMG?

BCMG have offered me so much that it’s hard to think what I’ve brought to them! Hopefully some interesting music What’s the best description of and, for some players, the opportunity to your music you’ve ever given or work in a slightly different way to usual. heard from someone else?

But I think that the beauty of longer-term residencies is that a real relationship can I was giving a presentation on my music be installed between an ensemble and a to a group of students once and one composer. By the end, the people you’re undergraduate made the observation working with know precisely where that my music reminded him of some of you’re coming from and vice-versa; Murakami’s novels - and I really liked that. advice can be offered that is specifically I’ve long been an admirer of Haruki tailored to your own ends. With BCMG, Murakami’s work; the author has a it’s just been amazing to have some wonderful way of moving seamlessly ‘closed door time’ - to have some time to between the urban and gritty and the experiment away from the public eye. bizarre and phantasmagorical. Although Some of these experiments worked, I could never claim to have his level of some didn’t, but either way such time masterfulness, that’s something that I helps us, as composers, to push our find in my music again and again. I like music in new directions. rigorous, carefully worked-out music that is constructed tightly and defines a world Thinking back over the last 5-10 in which to live. At the same time, I like to years, have your listening tastes, include flights-of-fancy moments that influences and compositional suddenly exist ‘outside’ the rigorous focuses developed along pre-

013

OCTOBER 2009

dictable lines or would your former self be surprised by the music you’re listening to and creating now?

Ten years ago I was in my mid-teens, so I hope my music has changed a little bit since those adolescent days! Having said that, there are a few threads that do run right through. I’ve always liked music that challenges me into questioning what music actually ‘is’. In my adolescent years, I found myself on a journey from pop/rock through to heavy metal, then on to more experimental, although largely mainstream, electronic music, before finding myself on Webern’s doorstep and then trying to go somewhere from there. Even today, I’m drawn to composers who create music in unusual and surprising ways; it might be a structuralcum-technical issue that draws me in, or it may be something to do with the way the work is actually presented.

As well as that, there are also little harmonic ‘quips’ that refuse to die out - certain intervals and harmonic games that I play which, although they have developed substantially over the years, are definitely rooted in the first compositional steps I made as a teenager. As to whether that teenager would recognise himself in my music today - that’s a difficult question. ‘Probably’ seems like a fairly all-encompassing answer.

FLIGHTS OF FANCY

What are you passionate about in life?

I do a lot of teaching, mostly working with school-age composers. I really care a lot about the education of young composers, specifically those in the traditional state-school classroom environment.

Increasingly I’m seeing young creativity stifled by exam-board syllabuses and mark-schemes. Time and time again I see the most interesting and original school-age composers forced into writing the blandest of pastiches in order to receive passable exam grades.

Obviously there are notable exceptions, even amongst the boards themselves, but as a general trend we seem to be systematically brainwashing our young people into believing that compositional quality is somehow defined by external rules and regulations: do not double the fifths; always modulate to the dominant etc. Where’s the twenty-first century creativity here? And how is this going to affect a new generation of listeners?

Whilst I see students in extra-curricular music centres and conservatoire junior departments compositionally thriving, working away from the confinement of our current examination practices, I worry about those who have not been picked up by such institutions. I think our

014

OCTOBER 2009

current 14-18 examination system is damaging young composers, and, perhaps more worryingly, closing the minds of future concert-audiences.

How have you got your commissions and performances? How do you feel about self-promotion?

I really dislike words and phrases such as ‘networking’ and ‘self-promotion’. It all seems a little artistically sterile and somewhat forceful. Nevertheless, it is true that I have had to be proactive at furthering my career over the years. I make a point of stopping short of aggressive networking (the cold-calling style of networking that frequents the bars of new music venues sickens me) but I do frequently pitch creative ideas to people who I think may be interested.

Sometimes this is formal, by way of

FLIGHTS OF FANCY

application, more often I draw on the reliable contacts I already have.

Which people or what contexts would you most like to write for?

I’m at a bit of a crossroads in my work at the moment, which is a very exciting place to be. The BCMG project may prove to be a bit of a turning point in my compositional development; it’s probably a sign of the impact that it has made on my work that I’ve been left many more new paths to explore as I have issues that I feel like I’ve resolved. As a result, lots of new ideas are buzzing around in my head and I’m looking for outlets for as many as possible!

I’m really interested in exploring compositional forms outside of the traditional ‘new-work: concert’ environment. I’m looking to explore more installationbased events and non-traditional concert

015

OCTOBER 2009

formats, although I think that traditional concert-music will always feature in my output. I’m also looking to explore further the ways in which my composed music can be inspired and shaped by improvisational approaches, without using improvisation per se. There’s an energy, freshness and elusiveness that this type of music has which I want to embed in my music more.

What do you think of the contemporary music scene in the UK compared to other contemporary arts scenes around?

I think that there is still a slight anti-experimental streak within the UK music scene, which doesn’t seem to exist quite so much elsewhere. I have felt a tendency towards the conservative in the music of emerging British composers, whilst at the same time spotting our more adventurous voices doing increasingly well abroad. I’m not quite sure what my point is - but I think it’s an observation at least!

Outside of music, I love the written word and visual art. I often find reading books and attending exhibitions much more fulfilling then attending concerts - probably because I’m not involved behind the scenes!

I absolutely love learning things; many of

FLIGHTS OF FANCY

the books I read are non-fiction and I have a bit of a habit of getting completely obsessed/entranced by certain subjects before moving on to another. At the moment, I’m reading a lot about theology - something rather unfashionable at the moment, especially amongst other like-minded atheists (or, at best, pessimistic agnostics). I find the complexity of some systems-of-belief absolutely enthralling. I think it’s something to do with fact that, in most religious thinking, ultra-logical steps are alternated with more fantastical ‘leaps’, like that of faith.

In a way, I suppose it’s back to Murakami’s novels again.

Matthew Sergeant is the 2008-9 BCMG Apprentice Composer in Residence, a project run in partnership with Sound and Music as part of its Shortlist programme of professional development, funded by The Leverhulme Trust. BCMG opens its 2009-10 programme with an all-Sergeant programme on 16 October at CBSO Centre, Birmingham. www.myspace.com/matthewsergeant www.bcmg.org.uk

016

OCTOBER 2009

GAS AND VOIGT

017

OCTOBER 2009

GAS AND VOIGT

GAS W LFGANG V IGT Geeta Dayal investigates the enigmatic world of ambient composer and techno producer, Wolfgang Voigt, aka Gas, who is performing in London this month.

I

“

had an image in my mind of a gaseous and nebulous sound, of an exhilarating, streaming music which literally flows over, which has no beginning or end, no hard edges, only softness. My association was this music drifting through the coppice of a misty wood in vast sound spheres, a very elegiac sound repeated over and over in the far distance, held together by an invisible bass drum that comes marching by somewhere hidden in the woods, coming closer and fading away again. It was an acid experience, basically.”

– Wolfgang Voigt, in Mono:Kultur, Oct/Nov 2006

018

OCTOBER 2009

On the surface, Wolfgang Voigt is all business – one of three owners, with Michael Mayer and Jurgen Paape, of the German techno superlabel Kompakt. But Voigt is also one of the most enigmatic technoproducers of the past twenty years, with countless releases under a bewildering string of aliases: M:I:5, Freiland, Profan, Mike Ink, Love Inc., Studio 1. Perhaps the most beguiling of all of his aliases was Gas; under that particular nom de plume, Voigt released a series of transcendent ambient albums in the 1990s, each more mysterious than the last.

In 2008, Nah und Fern (Near and Far), a box set of Gas’ collected works, was released on Voigt’s Kompakt label; a lavish book, titled Gas:Loops, followed shortly thereafter. Voigt has begun making sporadic live appearances as Gas in select venues around the world, including a show this month at London’s Barbican.

Rather than shedding new light on the music, this newfound spotlight on Gas simply seems to extend the Gas mythos.

In the lush box set of reissues, there are no liner notes or explanatory material – just several glossy squares of abstract images of trees; the book, too, is comprised mostly of tinted photographs in the same vein. The performances are minimal in design – Voigt stands quietly at a laptop, in a sharp velvet suit and cravat, with a kaleidoscopic haze of colorized forests forming the spare but transfixing backdrop.

GAS AND VOIGT

019

OCTOBER 2009

The liner notes of the original Gas albums, released in the 1990s, also offered little in the way of formal explanation: instead, there were tinted, oversaturated images of trees. The album titles, too, played with images of nature, with names like Zauberberg (Magic Mountain – also a nod to Thomas Mann’s novel of the same name) and Konigsforst (King’s Forest – a wood near Voigt’s hometown of Cologne).

“If you look at the artwork on the Gas covers,” Voigt has said, “those are images that I took over many years in the woods where I tried to distil the very essence of the wood and reduce it to a pure beauty. I was not interested in the romantic cliche of the woods; I wanted to see its basic grid, to see the forest behind the forest behind the forest.”

If Gas’s ambient “forest techno” could be compared to anything, it might be in the mid-1970s work of Brian Eno, the modern originator of ambient music.

In 1975, Eno recorded a piece called “In Dark Trees” for his landmark album Another Green World. In an interview with The Wire’s Paul Schutze in 1995, Eno recalled how he came up with the track: “I can remember how that started and I can remember very clearly the image that I had,” Eno said, “which was this image of a dark, inky blue forest with moss hanging off and you could hear horses off in the distance all the time, these horses kind of neighing, whinnying...”

GAS AND VOIGT

Interestingly, “In Dark Trees” had West German DNA: it was, most likely, inspired by a 1974 track called “Sehr Kosmisch,” by the German electronic group Harmonia. Harmonia’s track bears distinct similarities to “In Dark Trees”: a nest of primitive rhythm generators, runs through a chain of analog effects, creates something that sounds profoundly primal. The dense, scratchy underbrush of percussion and faraway echoes generate the powerful sense of being lost in the forest at the dead of night.

“I was not interested in the romantic cliché of the woods; I wanted to see its basic grid, to see the forest behind the forest behind the forest.”

Like Eno, Voigt is a conceptualist as much as he is an ambient musician.

But Voigt’s approach to techno has more in common with his German minimalist contemporaries – such as the artists associated with the shadowy German labels Basic Channel and Chain Reaction, and, more recently, Berlin minimal outfits like Monolake, and Carsten Nicolai and the Raster-Noton label. Voigt’s Gas project was part of an effort to create a uniquely German approach to techno, severing the music from its original Detroit roots. This might seem like a dodgy foray into

020

OCTOBER 2009

German nationalism to some, but for Voigt it was anything but. Voigt’s concept for Gas – and for all of his musical projects – grew out of a desire to innovate, to create something new based on his own personal experience – instead of merely copying, say, Jeff Mills or Carl Craig.

You can’t quite pick out any of the source material, but there’s an odd sense of déjà-vu when listening to Gas

In Gas’ music, the mythos of the German woods – the Wald – looms large.

But leaving the abundant natural imagery aside, the music of Gas was not just an attempt to see the forest behind the forest; it was an attempt to see the music behind the music. It was a grand experiment in minimalism, an effort to reduce music down to its most fundamental unit, before expanding it to dizzying dimensions. The music of Gas is intricate, constructed from microscopic samples of German and Austrian music: everything from cheesy German schlager to grandiose Wagnerian epics to Schoenbergian serialism. But rather than coming across as a patchwork of found sounds, like much heavily samplebased electronica, Gas is a continuous whole, wrapping the listener in a dense, luminous vapour. Snatches of strings, nearly unrecognisable, are looped and shrouded

GAS AND VOIGT

in acres of ambient mist – a shimmering cloud of sonics, seemingly with no beginning or end, underscored by the insistent pulse of a bass drum. You can’t quite pick out any of the source material, but there’s an odd sense of déjà-vu when listening to Gas: Haven’t I heard this before? Gas sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before, and like everything you’ve ever heard.

Gas sounds like Gas. Click to watch a video extract of Gas:

Geeta Dayal is the author of Another Green World, a new book on Brian Eno (Continuum, 2009). Gas is at the Barbican, London, on 6 October

021

OCTOBER 2009

So an

The 10th Cutting Edge Tour brings outstanding concerts of new music, focused on British composers, to venues throughout the UK. For full listings and info visit

soundandmusic.org

Sample a breathtaking range of innovative music and sound Mira Calix Paul Rooney Black Hair Lee Patterson Christina Kubisch Micachu & The Shapes Exaudi Jane Chapman [rout] Anna Best & Paul Whitty Powerplant Chris Wood Ultra-red The Ex and much more...

To find out more, visit

soundandmusic.org

BLACK HAIR Thursday 1st October Manchester University From delicate and secretive to raucous and confrontational, music by Juliana Hodkinson, Damien Harron, Georges Aperghis and Edward Jessen exploring the innate theatre of musical expression.

VAUXHALL PLEASURE Saturday 24th October ICIA, University of Bath Saturday 7th November Oxford Contemporary Music Artist Anna Best and composer Paul Whitty’s multi-part protest piece revealing the conflicting sonic history of Vauxhall Cross.

CHRISTOPHER REDGATE with ENSEMBLE EXPOSE Saturday 21st November Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival Experimental virtuoso oboist and ensemble reveal startling new works by David Gorton, Paul Archbold and Roger Redgate.

CLAIRE BOOTH / ANDREW MATTHEWS-OWEN Tuesday 1st December, Cardiff University

A top-class performance of new works for voice and piano by Philip Cashian, Robert Fokkens, Alun Hoddinott, Oliver Knussen and Arlene Sierra.

022

OCTOBER 2009

HOW TO

023

OCTOBER 2009

HOW TO

H WT

MAKE SOUND SCULPTURE Janek Schaefer creates three ‘Black Magic’ sound sculptures, exploring the magic of vinyl, especially for INTO. The magic of sound trapped in vinyl has never ceased to amaze me. A wobbling groove line cut into a shallow surface sounds just like anything that made it in the first place. I have always thought it’s like black magic, and much more impressive than a 3G phone or something!

When teaching my three-year-old old daughter Scarlett about sound, we were down in the shed studio, and she said to me ‘What’s That?’, pointing at my neighbour’s wind-up phonograph. Moments later her finger nail was embedded directly into the shellac groove, and the sounds of opera were dancing up through her body and into the air around us.

This inspired me to buy a little wind-up gramophone kit to play with recording sound etc. After assembling it (with Japanese instructions!), I then immediately spent the next day taking it apart and creating my series of three sound sculptures for this article.

Earlier in the week I discovered the used pint glasses in a bin out the back of my local arts centre in Walton-on-Thames, and the toy parrot repeats back any sound it hears.

The rest of the story is told in pictures.

Happy days. Janek Schaefer

024

OCTOBER 2009

HOW TO

025

OCTOBER 2009

HOW TO

Pretty Pollygram [2009]

Materials: A toy parrot, sound horns, 78RPM Record

Janek Schaefer [limited edition]

026

OCTOBER 2009

HOW TO

027

OCTOBER 2009

HOW TO

Found Sound Player [2009]

Materials: Used plastic pint glasses, sound resonator, needle.

Janek Schaefer [limited edition]

028

OCTOBER 2009

HOW TO

029

OCTOBER 2009

HOW TO

Unwinding with a pint [2009]

Materials: Wind-up phonograph mechanism, plastic pint glass, drawing pin.

Janek Schaefer [limited edition]

For more information and to buy these art-works, visit www.audiOh.com/releases/blackmagic.html. They will be on display at The Bluecoat, Liverpool in December.

Meanwhile you can take part in a day-long Found Sound Stories workshop led by Janek at South Hill Park’s Digital Media Centre in Berkshire on 24 & 25 October. http://www.digitalmediacentre.org

030

OCTOBER 2009

THE CUTTING EDGE

Complexity Comp

At the end of this month, the annual

Cutting Edge concert series, formerly administrated by the British Music Information Centre, takes place for the first time under the auspices of Sound and Music. Even the most cursory look at the concert listings suggests it’s going to be a great season: one which builds on the programming tendencies of recent years and consolidates the series’ position. Alongside events like Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and new, composer-run series such as London’s Music We’d Like to Hear series, it will be a crucial opportunity to hear what the sort of young (and sometimes older!) composers who slip through the London Sinfonietta/Aldeburgh Festival net - are up to.

What common threads, if any, are you likely to hear at such a series? Is there a mainstream outside the mainstream? If there is such a thing, a central figure in it must surely be Michael Finnissy. A key presence in British contemporary music as far back as the 1970s and 1980s,

John Fallas explores what the programme of The Cutting Edge, Sound and Music’s autumn concert series profiling modern composition, says about new music today.

031

OCTOBER 2009

THE CUTTING EDGE

y and position in 2009 Finnissy’s continued prominence today is in no small part a result of his extraordinary ability to evolve and change while remaining recognisably himself. Or is this apparent change also in part a function of our too-rigid critical categories breaking down in the face of new configurations of the musical scene?

In the 1980s and 1990s the focus of cutting-edge musical endeavour was around what was often dubbed ‘new complexity’. Admittedly, our retrospective view allows us to see more differences than commonalities between many of the composers in question, and perhaps we should by now have abolished the term completely; but if there is any justification for its continued use, I think that justification must be a historical one. Complexity may have been a more multifarious phenomenon than was widely recognised at the time, but one thing’s for sure: sim-

MICHAEL FINNISSY

plicity, in the 1980s, was out. And yet, as it returned in Finnissy’s music of the 1990s and early 2000s (often in connection with his new-found Christian faith), it began to suggest new alignments for a composer critics had firmly placed in one corner of the musical scene. It’s not

032

OCTOBER 2009

AMBER PRIESTLEY

that Finnissy has emerged post facto as the new complexity’s central figure; more that he has revealed himself to be not, or not only, a composer of complexity.

Today, Finnissy’s continuing yet chameleon presence guarantees him a continued place alongside the new centrality of figures like Laurence Crane, long ‘established at the margins’ as it were.

Now that composers are less liable to wear complexity and simplicity as ideological badges, it is perhaps clearer what is the function of Crane’s utter simplicity: it provides him with an access to the enigmatic. His titles – equally inscrutable whether they name a musician (SPAR-

THE CUTTING EDGE

LING, John White in Berlin) or, as often, countries or references to sport (Estonia, Piano Piece No 23 ‘Ethiopian Distance Runners’) – maintain enough distance from the content of the pieces to enable an intense focus on the material.

This focus, in different but perhaps not entirely unconnected ways, recurs in the music of a number of other composers featured in the Cutting Edge. Markus Trunk’s music eschews Crane’s transparent tonal harmonies, but again directs the listener’s attention to material and process – to what we might call abstractions if their effect in performance were not so concrete.

James Weeks’ music also, in his own words, ‘deal[s] in the simplest musical elements and processes (rising scales or oscillations)’, though the complex textures into which these materials can build perhaps suggest an alignment with the spectrum between extreme simplicity and extreme complexity found in Finnissy’s music. Weeks is a noted conductor and performer as well as a composer, of course, and directs the opening concert

033

OCTOBER 2009

LAURENCE CRANE

in this year’s Cutting Edge, given by the choral ensemble EXAUDI. Their concert also features music by Amber Priestley, Ignacio Agrimbau and Claudia Molitor.

What common elements might we perceive between the work of these and other composers, so highly various in its sonic results?

That sonic variety in itself might be one answer. The shift away from a doctrinaire attitude to the relation between techniques of composition and the audible logic of local pitch and rhythmic events in the resulting piece is a broad tendency perceptible in much of the music you will hear in the Cutting Edge this autumn.

THE CUTTING EDGE

You will hear microtones aplenty, but rarely the kind of systematised quartertones and eighth-tones that would have featured strongly in a ‘new complexity’ concert 10 years ago. Extended techniques, likewise, are widespread, but as an expansion of music’s range of gesture – they are expressive possibilities rather than candidates for the ‘parametrisation’ so beloved of post-serial composers.

Most crucially, all of these things take their place within an approach to musicmaking which pays no heed to traditional boundaries between composer, performer and listener. Indeterminacy of various kinds reflects new possibilities of performer input; improvisation – central to the work of Ignacio Agrimbau through his work with the group The Hola – fulfils a similar role. The function of the composer is to enable a democracy of musical pleasure.

The legacy of experimentalism, more than the legacy of modernism, seems to underlie many of these developments.

Take a look through the work-lists of

034

OCTOBER 2009

Amber Priestley or Claudia Molitor, and you will encounter few prescriptions but many possibilities – for 4 instruments playing in at least 2 clefs; duration variable is a typical designation. An intense interest in the potential of open-form scores has led Priestley to use designs based on children’s flipbooks, in which different parts of the page fold differently to reveal different configurations of the material, or Molitor to produce flickerbook scores (downloadable here). In Molitor’s 3D score series, the music is theoretically performable, but the notation begins to take on a life of its own.

All of these works reveal a fascination with the score as artefact – a development which could be seen as a deliberate strategy on the composer’s part to distract him- or herself from intervention in the domain of the performer. The composer gets the conceptual play, and the performer gets the sonic result: a new division of labour?

What is also notable is how connections with visual and graphic art seem more natural than any alignment with the

THE CUTTING EDGE

PHILIP THOMAS

legacy of music history. In this sense, an intense self-consciousness about aesthetic questions – about the ontology of the score versus the performance, about the roles of participants in the process of musical creation – is directed not to complicating the status of music as art but to freeing sound from what ‘music’ has traditionally required it to be.

And there’s an openness here which is immensely attractive. If the audience

035

OCTOBER 2009

JANE CHAPMAN

are invited to keep their mobile phones turned on, as they are during a performance of Amber Priestley’s Warning: Ages 8 & Up (so that the performers can improvise on the ringtones), then any subsequent piece in the concert which is unable to incorporate such contingencies comes to look somehow staid by comparison. In a culture where we all ‘know too much’, where even TV comedy draws continually on ironic selfawareness, an art which pretended not

THE CUTTING EDGE

to be knowing would be the determined choice. Whether in Michael Finnissy’s provocatively political titles, Laurence Crane’s liberation of musical materials previously thought lost to cliché, Ignacio Agrimbau’s noisy joyousness or the gently raised eyebrow of Claudia Molitor’s disruption of conventional aesthetic categories, the music you will hear this autumn refuses a mandarin separateness from life or from everyday consciousness. Perhaps, 70 years after the philosopher Walter Benjamin expressed the hope that film might liberate art from aura, composers have discovered ways in which music can do just that.

The Cutting Edge is at The Warehouse, London each Thursday from 29 October to 3 December, and on Saturday 14 November. The series is also on tour around the UK this autumn. www.soundandmusic.org

036

OCTOBER 2009

16/09/2009 Watchimacallit

FROM THE BLOGS

THE EARWIG

by Bernard Hughes

Titles can be slippery things, but crucial.

Sometimes they come before the music: according to a friend, Satie was delighted to hit on the title Gymnopedies. ‘Truth to tell, he had so far found nothing beyond the title; but the strangeness of the word already gave it a kind of halo.’

The opposite is perhaps more common. Krysztof Penderecki’s modernist classic Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, the most widely-known avant-garde work of the 1960s, might never have found its audience under its working title of 8’37”. Penderecki rightly judged that giving the work an extra-musical programme would provide a route in for ‘lay’ listeners, and also that the Polish music establishment would enthusiastically promote a piece which drew attention to Ameri-

To read more blogs, visit the Sound and Music blog.

can actions at the end of the second world war.

It was listening to the Threnody at the age of seventeen that inspired Poul Ruders to become a composer. He openly admits to finding titles after the

Titles are best when they ring with the character of the music itself, writing a cheque which the music honours.

037

OCTOBER 2009

music is written, blaming the need ‘to get a proper programme note together to feed the concert institutions’.

Ruders’ own titles range from the inscrutable - Four Compositions - to the gothic - The City in the Sea. Sometimes someone else gets in first. Stravinsky maintained that his final masterpiece Requiem Canticles would have been called Sinfonia da Requiem if Britten hadn’t already pinched it.

Titles are best when they ring with the character of the music itself, writing a cheque which the music honours. I think of Judith Weir’s The Consolations of Scholarship, John Adams’ Gnarly Buttons and John’s Book of Alleged Dances, Boulez’s Pli Selon Pli and Param Vir’s Horse Tooth White Rock.

But the best title of all must be Toru Takemitsu’s A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden. I wish I’d thought of it first.

FROM THE BLOGS

23/09/2009 The whole package Being a successful composer can be about more than just writing successful music.

Mark-Anthony Turnage is undoubtedly an outstanding composer and has had public success since his precocious early works Night Dances and Greek.

But he also has two other incidental advantages, and it is no way to belittle his music to credit these with a part in creating the public face of his musical personality.

First off is his striking name, juxtaposing a Shakespearean double-barrelled first name with the down-to-earth English yeoman surname. There is the whiff of culture - even pretension - in the ‘Mark-Anthony’ which is somehow rescued by the no-nonsense ‘Turnage’: a ‘Mark-Anthony Sissinghurst’ or a ‘Mark-Anthony Richardson’ would surely never be taken seriously.

038

OCTOBER 2009

FROM THE BLOGS

And there is in his name an echo of his music: the hard-edged lombardic rhythm of ‘Turnage’ in opposition to the lyrical but lopsided ‘Mark-Anthony’.

is a photo. Like his music, Turnage is unsmiling but not unfriendly, unsentimental, unflinching and unquestionably fascinating.

Turnage is also blessed by an extraordinary and somewhat unlikely face. In the early publicity shots – and especially the cover image of the Blood on the Floor CD – his face is haunted but self-possessed, unblinking but not confrontational, bleak but not unhappy. The shadows round his eyes and the sticking up hair suggest sleepless nights. The bleached colours and blank backdrop suggest the dismissal of artifice. The rounded face, wide nose and small ears might be the work of a caricaturist – but this

The image is as compelling as the name is memorable. And, chiming as they do with his music, both must have helped establish Mark-Anthony Turnage as a central figure in British musical life.

26/09/2009 Le Grand Macabre - opera turned up to 11 Now that’s what I call an opera.

Like his music, Turnage is unsmiling but not unfriendly, unsentimental, unflinching and unquestionably fascinating.

Not for the faint-hearted, ENO’s production of György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre is a crazy carnival of fantasy, whimsy and oddity. It treats its audience (a packed house at the performance I saw) to a bizarre trip through fictional Breughalland, a world of

039

OCTOBER 2009

Hieronymous Bosch, René Magritte and Lewis Carroll filtered through Ligeti’s own finely-tuned sense of the absurd and the absurdly beautiful.

This is opera turned up to 11. The loud bits are louder, the orchestral colour more vivid and the sex scenes more erotic than your usual powder or your money back. And – unusually for an opera - the jokes are actually funny.

Never, surely, in the field of operatic endeavour can so many singers have been persuaded to do so many undignified things. The hilarious scene between the terrifying dominatrix Mescalina (Susan Bickley) and her downtrodden husband Astrodamors (Frode Olsen), in basque and suspenders, brought forth the kind of belly-laugh rarely heard in an opera house.

From the opening aria - the lovesong of a drunken chav to his Big Mac to the final lavatorial punchline, the production shows a staggering level of inventiveness. The wealth of detail

FROM FROM THE THE BLOGS BLOGS

in the staging mirrors the prodigious imagination of the score. The extraordinary set – a massive crouching woman – dominates the production and is used in a hundred different ways: the devilish Nekrotsar (Pavlo Hunka) abseils from her mouth, the lovers climb in through her nipples and the second half begins with a vaudeville double-act emerging from her backside.

In writing Le Grand Macabre Ligeti understood the weight of operatic legacy but wore the burden lightly.

There are nods to Monteverdi’s Orfeo (the opening brass toccata translated into Laurel-and-Hardy car-horns), to Götterdämerrung and, most notably, to The Rake’s Progress and its chilly graveyard. I also detected the example of Mozart in the rapturous passage that accompanies the ascent to heaven of two drunks, mistakenly thinking they are dead, flapping their arms like angels’ wings. Here Ligeti has the deftness, like Mozart in Così fan Tutte, to simultaneously satirise

040

OCTOBER 2009

and sympathise with his characters.

The music often uses grotesque, even crude, sounds and gestures, but the orchestration is endlessly subtle and full of beautiful things. The musical highlight is an infernal instrumental interlude at the climax of the story, building from virtuosic polyphonic strands into a massive fortissimo, the stage spinning faster and faster with the music.

My only caveat was that, brilliantly realised as it was, the central visual metaphor of the massive nude felt tacked on to the opera rather than coming organically from it. The explanation offered in the programme by the co-directors Alex Ollé and Valentina Carrasca is not entirely persuasive but it is probably unfair to throw the charge of illogicality at an opera which is openly and joyously nonsensical throughout.

The ending is another echo of the Rake’s Progress, as the principals

FROM THE BLOGS

step forward and offer a pat moral: Fear not to die, good people all!

No one knows when his hour will fall.

And when it comes then let it be…

Farewell till then, live merrily in cheerfulness!

So that’s alright then.

Well actually there is no reason to suppose Ligeti is being more straightforward or sincere here than anywhere else. Is that really what it all means? Or is the moral message more complicated? Maybe the opera is simply amoral? Or perhaps, as Homer Simpson once put it, ‘it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened’.

Either way, if you want opera to bring together theatre, music and design so as to amaze and amuse, then this is it: this is the real deal.

041

OCTOBER 2009

FROM FROM THE THE BLOGS BLOGS

DAVID COTNER ASS-HOMING THUMBTACKS OF CIVILIZATION WARP RECORDS AT 20

02/10/2009 I don’t want to do this.

I see this beautiful square monolith on the table before me – this violently gorgeous Warp20 box set of records and sleeves and CDS – and I don’t want to open it. It’s not about saving it for another twenty years to rake in the depreciated dollars from an unduly inflated auction; it’s not about the fetishisation of the object that fuels collector culture but stultifies appreciation and understanding of art. Too many times – in these times – neuroses are substituted for wanting to have nice things; for wanting to actively care about those nice things while they’re in one’s life.

But records are meant to be played, as much as they’re meant to be made.

Sean Booth of Autechre: ‘If (Warp Records) had any effect at all, it’s been to make us feel like we can do whatever we want. It was quite an honour when we first met them in 1991-92 – to think they would be interested in our stuff at all, we were quite into LFO’s album Frequencies and the first Nightmares on Wax LP,

042

OCTOBER 2009

FROM THE BLOGS

ASS-HOMING THUMBTACKS OF CIVILISATION

and although those records were pushing it in some ways, we thought what we were doing was maybe a bit too mental for a dance label. It was only after loads of meetings with them that things started to make a bit more sense. Originally, we worked with Rob Mitchell, for just the first LP. He helped us compile it ‘cos there was so much old stuff by that point (that was unreleased or only played on pirate radio) that he wanted to be involved as far as he could. He pushed us quite a bit away from the dancier stuff we had been doing into doing more of the weird electronic stuff (we didn’t know how to class it at the time; we hated ‘ambient’ – it was for students). After doing one LP with him and arguing loads, he kind of donated us to Steve so we could be one of his acts (they usually had acts (designated) as Rob’s or Steve’s for ease of A&R).

Steve was quite different than Rob ‘cos his way of working with us was to leave us to it most of the time and just hang out and get wasted every few months. That worked a lot better, and

it’s pretty much how it’s been since.

There really isn’t a label I would rather be on. I can’t imagine anyone else being able to do what they do.’

Not since the fervid fervour of the Extreme Records 50-CD Merzbow Merzbox in 2000 (or, on the other end of the spectrum, the same year’s Klaus Schulze 50-CD Ultimate Edition on Série Poème), has there been so much loving attention paid to the oeuvre of one artistic entity. And though Warp may be a Holist entity in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, the sense of focus and feeling for the art shines through like a million-candle light made literally of one million candles. Not surprisingly,

043

OCTOBER 2009

FROM THE BLOGS FROM THE BLOGS

Warp brought the fans into the picture with an online poll to choose ten essential Warp tracks. Topping the list was Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker, followed in quick succession by tracks from Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, Battles, LFO, Plaid, Luke Vibert,

music shouldn’t inspire such devotion and warmth, and yet Warp has for over twenty years done precisely that, engendering such an encouraging intensity of affection that thelema and agápē weep in the very face of it.

Were there record labels after which Warp was modelled?

SQUAREPUSHER

Autechre, Jimmy Edgar, and Clark.

Included with this portion of the album is a fold-out poster of comments made on-line from the gathered faithful. Vis-à-vis faith, one voter wrote about one Autechre track in particular: ‘A song of such beauty that it effects (sic) the foundation of who you are.’

‘How cool is coldness?’ asked the man – and, on the face of it, electronic

Steve Beckett, Warp founder: ‘We grew from a record shop in Sheffield – at that time, we were selling records by Factory; we were just totally intrigued by that sort of beauty and mystery that’s on a sleeve where you don’t quite know what surprises are going to be inside the sleeve – they were definitely an influence. Mute, at the time, and Rough Trade as well – all the big indies we looked up to, because they had a lot of the records we were selling in the shop and then also at the same time the whole ‘techno revolution’ which at the time was just starting to take off, so we were getting all these amazing records from Chicago and Detroit. It was

044

OCTOBER 2009

FROM THE BLOGS

WARP RECORDS AT 20

almost a melding of those influences so obviously we were influenced by the whole dance thing because we were right at the start of that revolution in the late ‘80s. We were also influenced by true independence that we saw standing the test of time, and that’s something we applied to our own label.’

Speaking of those Factory records and their Peter Saville sleeves: how important is the enigma; how important is the mystique?

SB: ‘I think that design was part of the lucky accident that Designer’s Republic, who obviously were closely associated with us when we first started, were masters at sort of creating mystique around any design that they do, so we had this whole thing that even though we were just operating out of this tiny bedroom, hand-pressing the records with a rubber stamp, we just always knew that design would make you look like you were this huge corporation with heli-

copters landing on the roof and things like that. It was just that you made, using the design and the packaging, to sort of make the statement that you were way bigger than you actually were.’

Is there a point at which there’s this true enigma that goes beyond the packaging that says nothing on the sleeve – is that something, that sense, something you think you can transmit through a Warp record?

SB: ‘Oh, completely. I’ve been talking about this recently – what’s that quote? ‘Great design is a way of communicating human emotion through an inanimate object’ – people can just tell by the effort that you’ve put into the design that you give a shit about what you’re trying to communicate, that there must be something worth listening to inside the packaging, so I totally believe that you can communicate that through your design. And it’s something like an intuitive, felt sense between the

045

OCTOBER 2009

FROM THE BLOGS FROM THE BLOGS

observer and the experience of the art-form and I just know if it’s just a couple of degrees off, it’s not authentic. It’s like the people who know they’re going to be communicated to through that inanimate object, which I think is fascinating.’

Are mystique and mystery the same thing, then?

SB: (pause) ‘This is such a great interview! I’m so used to being asked the same questions…’ …I have dumb questions, too, if you want those later on.

SB: (laughs) ‘Mystery, to me, is just everything – that’s literally the creative energy that’s just flowing through everything that creators and creative people can never really put a handle on. So to me, mystery is totally authentic, mysterious and you can never name it or control it or identify it – whereas mystique is more of a contrived, sort of ego relation to it and

it’s more thought-out, really.’

So is one more tangible than the other?

SB: ‘Yeah, I think mystique’s a lot more – well, that’s the whole point – you can grasp mystique, to a certain extent, whereas the mystery you can’t grasp it; that’s why it’s called a mystery.’

Now the only mystery remaining, as night melts away into twilight at 5 a.m. in an office assaulted by Santa Ana winds in a coastal southern California town, is why it took me so long to open the box at all. http://warp.net/records/warp20/ warp20-box-set

046

OCTOBER 2009

OPPORTUNITIES

Opportunitie Bloomsbury Woodwind Ensemble Seeking Assistant Director of Music Deadline: 24/10/2009

Location: Central London Start Date: January 2010 Hours: 1.5 hours per week plus admin Salary: ÂŁ50 per session The Bloomsbury Woodwind Ensemble is a thriving adult amateur woodwind ensemble/orchestra and following sixteen successful years is extending to a second group. The candidate will take rehearsals with the new ensemble and deputise in the main ensemble alongside other opportunities. Full details available from the BWE website: http://www. bloomsburywoodwind.org.uk or contact: Andrew Hunt, 36 Marquis Road, London, NW1 9UB Phone: 020 7267 3680 E-mail: jandrewhunt@blueyonder.co.uk

NYCEMF 2010 Call for Works Deadline: 01/11/2009

The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival invites the submission of art works incorporating experimental audio in any capacity, including, but not

limited to: Concert works incorporating digital audio: works including performers, videos, and other elements are encouraged.

Installations: to be exhibited for all or part of the festival.

Experimental Approaches: propose your own involvement with the festival.

All works, installations, and proposals will be submitted through the online submission site: http://submit.nycemf.org/ All file formats are accepted and the deadline for submissions is Nov 1, 2009. http://www.nycemf.org

Music and the Moving Image Conference – Call for Papers Deadline: 11/12/2009

Conference at NYU Steinhardt, USA, May 21-23, 2010. The annual conference, Music and the Moving Image, encourages submissions from scholars and practitioners that explore the relationship between music, sound, and the entire universe of moving images (film, television, video games, iPod, computer, and interactive performances) through paper presentations and plenary sessions. Two keynote addresses will be presented by Karen Collins (From Pac-Man to Pop Music; Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design) and video game composer Tom Salta

047

OCTOBER 2009

(Tom Clancy’s: H.A.W.X, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 & 2, Red Steel).

Streaming video versions of presentations will be available only at NYU from May 21-29, 2010. Accepted papers will be considered for inclusion in the peer-reviewed online journal Music and the Moving Image: http://mmi.press.uiuc. edu/ Conference website: http://steinhardt. nyu.edu/music/scoring/conference/ Abstracts or synopses of papers (250 words) should be submitted to: Dr. Ron Sadoff, chair of the program committee, by no later than Dec. 11, 2009.

E-mail ron.sadoff@nyu.edu for more information.

Arcomis Arts Publishing: Call for Works Deadline: 31/12/2009

Composers are invited to upload scores to Arcomis’ online publishing catalogue where other composers, performers and the public can browse through and purchase scores from the collection.

Submitted scores will be proof-read by an experienced team of editors (criteria for inclusion in the catalogue are not stylistic but rather are concerned with clear presentation) and if accepted will be made available online. The idea is that not only will more people be able to easily access your scores but for every pur-

OPPORTUNITIES

chase made, the composer will receive a share of the profit. Our hope of course is that in time enough people will download the score to cover the upload fee.As the composer, you are free to set the price of your score and you will retain all copyright; you’ll be free to withdraw from the catalogue at any time. Some composers have chosen to include a biography and a link to their own website as well. http://www.arcomis.com/publishing

Looking for musicians to accompany with live visuals Deadline: 15/01/2010

I have over the past few years developed a system using which a group of musicians can perform interacting synthesized computer graphics and live music, using musical instruments as the primary source of control data for the performance. What I am really looking forward to doing now however is trying the system out with real live musicians! My proposal is that I will visually accompany your future rehearsals and/or performances, at least until the end of my stay in London which is roughly on February 2010, provided of course that you wish for it to carry on until then. http://www.soundandmusic.org/network/ opportunities/128895

048

OCTOBER 2009

“Peter and the Wolf 2010” Composition Competition Deadline: 11/03/2010

The Sverdlovsk Philharmonic orchestra invites composers to submit original works of up to 15 minutes duration for symphony orchestra and optional speaker/narrator, for an audience of children.

1st prize: RUB 90,000 (£1,800). http://www.soundandmusic.org/network/ opportunities/128823

London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra – Student Composers’ Piece of the Year Competition Deadline: 24/04/2010 Student composers are invited to enter the third of our Piece of the Year Competitions, for chamber orchestra pieces.

Open to all music students except previous winners of the competition. All entries will be played in a workshop on July 3rd 2010. Composers will receive feedback from the orchestra on their pieces, and from the conductor on questions of notation and score and part presentation. The orchestra members will vote to select the finalists. The finalists will have their pieces performed at a concert in the autumn of 2010, where the audience will vote to select the winner.

Prize - something to put on CVs, and one year’s free membership of Forum London Composers Group. There will be a

OPPORTUNITIES

fee of £25 for taking part. We are a good quality amateur orchestra, of single wind and brass, plus strings, percussion, and piano. Full details of the call for pieces, the orchestra, and its instrumentation can be obtained from the conductor; Alan Taylor - alan.taylor@dpmail.co.uk It is also essential to check these details before submitting a piece. http://www.soundandmusic.org/network/opportunities/128861

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

Outstanding concerts of new music from UK composers alongside modern classics by Xenakis, Cage, Kagel and Feldman.

‘Unmissable’ Time Out

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

www.soundandmusic.org

The magazine of