One of our 2016 Call for Scores Commissions, from Lee Westwood.
This is the live, World Premiere performance, from our Micrographia Concert in Brighton, Oct 2016.
Tag Archives: 2016
In My Room by Yukiko Watanabe
One of our 2016 Call for Scores Commissions, from Yukiko Watanabe.
This is the live, World Premiere performance, from our Micrographia Concert in Brighton, Oct 2016.
Micrographia by Laurence Osborn
One of Riot Ensemble’s 2016 Commissions, this is the live, World Premiere performance of Micrographia, by Laurence Osborn (text by Joseph Minden) from our Micrographia Concert in Brighton, Oct 2016.
Reflections on the Text Scores of Pauline Oliveros
Music entails listening. This may be a truism, but it is one that Pauline Oliveros’s music considers from every angle. What is listening? How is it different from hearing? Can we activate it, and then shape it at will? Can we compose music with it?
Listening needs stillness. As does reading. ‘First imagine silence’ begins the score of One Sound Once. Oliveros’s scores are written as texts, rather than musical notation. Some are just a few lines long, some several pages. Klickitat Ride is a list of 108 instructions that are to be read out loud. David Tudor is a two-line epigram. Although often poetic, they are not poems. Oliveros has called them ‘attentional strategies’ – ways of listening and ways of responding. They don’t attempt to express anything as such, but invite the reader/listener to find out for herself what might happen if they pay attention in a particular way. They rarely require specialist musical knowledge: they can be read, and performed, by anyone. But to perform them properly requires discipline, attention and concentration.
Stillness entails breathing. Even at our stillest and most attentive, we are breathing. There is a meditative aspect to Oliveros’s work that applies to both performers and listeners. She calls this aspect ‘Deep Listening’, a form of listening practice cultivated through the sort of concentration and discipline her scores require, and intended to expand consciousness into ‘the whole space/time continuum of sound/silences’.
Breathing means movement. As we inhale and exhale our chest rises and falls. If we are practising Deep Listening, our mind similarly expands and contracts. Inner becomes outer; outer becomes inner. The sounds we are listening to exist in spatial relation to us and to each other. Quintessential and Pebble Music present catalogues of sounds, arranged by the performers like objects in a museum. In Rock Piece movement is even more explicit, with performers moving into, out of and around the space.
Movement means making. As the performers in Rock Piece move, they click pairs of stones together in their hands, ‘sounding out the environment in all directions’, attending to its different resonances and the relationship between their clicks and those of their colleagues. In Word Sound the movements are more abstract – ‘Say a word as a sound. / Say a sound as a word.’ read two lines of the score. Moving from words to sounds, turning one into the other makes a particular type of sound production, and a particular type of listening. When does a sound become a word?
Making entails music. As words and sounds transform into one another, or as clicking rocks echo around the performing space, we start to make music. Like John Cage, Oliveros blurs the boundaries between life and music: Deep Listening is inclusive listening, in which everything one might possibly hear is attended to. The pieces themselves are ways to reach that state. Deep Listening can only be intellectualized so far; in the end you have to do it. You have to listen.
The Viola in my Life
Date: Monday 21st November, 8.00pm
Venue: The Forge, Camden (NW1 7NL)
Mark Simpson: New Work for Solo Viola (World Premiere)
Morton Feldman: “The Viola in My Life 3” for viola and piano
Mark Bowden: “Hoist” for solo percussion
Jack Sheen: “Each One Cancels Out the Last” for viola, piano and tape (World Premiere)
Anna Meredith: “Flex” for solo percussion
Tigran Mansurian: “Duet” for viola and percussion (UK Premiere)
Micrographia
Date: Saturday 29th October, 5.00pm
Venue: St. Nicholas Church, Brighton (BN1 3LJ)
The World Premiere of Laurence Osborn’s Micrographia – a song cycle for two sopranos and chamber ensemble setting seven new poems (written specifically for this piece) by poet Joseph Minden. World Premieres from our 2016 Call for Scores winners Yukiko Watanabe and Lee Westwood, and an array of new miniatures from composers from the New Music Brighton Composers’ Collective.
Hear and Now: Live from South Bank
Date: Saturday 1st October, 10.00pm
Venue: South Bank Centre, London
Listen: Pauline Oliveros @ Sonic Imperfections
Date: Tuesday 13th September, 8pm
Venue: Montague Arms, Peckham (SE15 2PA)
Breathe AHR: Folk Songs
Breathe AHR: Charcoal
Date: Wednesday 9th November 1pm
Venue: Guys Hospital – Atrium 1
A ‘Remembrance’ themed concert, with live artist Marcus Stefanelli. Music by John Garner, A world premiere of Giovanni Cacioppo’s The Immigrant Suite, a selection of Bartok’s 44 Duos For Two Violins and Kate Williams Suite for Two Violins.