 |
BlogAngela from Push! at Tete a Tete FestivalPosted on 05 August 2008
 Louise Mott will be reprising her role as Angela from Push! as part of Tete a Tete's Opera Festival over the coming days. Louise and other performers will be performing 'Lite Bites' - operatic excerpts of various kinds at assorted venues in the Hammersmith area throughout the festival. The festival itself is the usual fantastic mix of shows from the 'operatic fringe' (and some not so fringe) and is a must for anyone serious about their new opera. Lagerphones and lamentsPosted on 22 July 2008
It's nice when life and art interact and feel like they are all part of one larger picture. I first met Michael Ward-Bergeman at the Carnegie Hall workshops for Piosenki back in 2006. He introduced me to the lagerphone and later I introduced him to the famous laments or 'Treny' of Polish poet Kochanowski (I even made a post about it here) I built and used the lagerphone for Piosenki, and Michael has decided to set the laments for a new commission from the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation. The circle is completed in November this year, when Dawn Upshaw will sing both my Piosenki and Michael's new piece, in Carnegie's Zankel Hall (further details of the concert here). Michael's now embarked on a series of podcasts about his commission, and in this opening one below, he talks about our friendship, lagerphones, and the laments. Check our Michael's blog for further podcasts. Two summer festivals, two new commissionsPosted on 30 June 2008
August brings two new premieres, both from Summer festivals in some of the most beautiful areas of the UK. August 25th is the premiere of my Gigue for flute and harp at the Presteigne Festival, and earlier on August 6th it's the turn of the Lake District Summer Music Festival and the Heath Quartet's performance of my string quartet Dances for Oskar. Beginners Lessons in Tabla playingPosted on 29 June 2008
 How to play tabla [PDF - 17Mb] Many years ago, I took a course in tabla playing. The tutor was of Caucasian origin, but had studied with some great tabla players and clearly knew his Tin Taal from his Keherva Taal. For years since I've had the often hand-written sheets he gave me to learn from and felt they were a fantastic resourse that anyone at my stage of interest in tabla playing (ie just starting out) would find invaluable.  After a question from someone on the Composition Today site, I finally got round to scanning the sheets in, and have uploaded them here in PDF format. Unfortunately I no longer have the tutor's name, as it appears nowhere on the lessons, but if he happens to stumble across this, I hope he doesn't mind, and I'd love to hear from him! How to play tabla [PDF - 17Mb] The implications of Antony GormleyPosted on 26 June 2008
 Yesterday I attended a fascinating evening at Antony Gormley's London studio, where the kreutzer quartet played passionately some rich and evocative music by my old friend Jim Aitchison. Looking around Gormley's studio was fascinating - there were plenty of his body casts lying around, and a number of his more recent works that build shapes (often body-related) out of thousands of repeated patterns, like this:  Birtwistle used to sometimes look at a work of art and ask 'What is the musical equivalent of that?' I think Jim went beyond that, using the ideas and structures of the works to inspire his music, and a fascinating response it was. But I couldn't help also returning to Birtwistle's question. What would a piece of music sound like that was so clear and simple in form, yet so new and original, and so thought-provoking. Perhaps Ligeti came somewhere close. I browsed Gormley's website and came across an article mentioning Gormley's 1993 work Field:  What Gormley says about this work is fascinating, especially if you reflect it back on the music world: "It came out of a personal crisis. I went back to first principals and started over. I felt the romantic view of the artist as someone standing apart from and remaking the world, was no longer tenable. It was a betrayal of what art could do. Art is nothing without being experienced and shared. And I wanted to start again on that basis". "In the heroic story of Modernism, artists thought they were emancipating the tools of art from the strictures of representation, making something that could be everyone's. Instead, they ended up being implicated in the institutionalisation of modernity. I think the greatest thing we can try to do now is to take the freedom that art gained in the 20th century and offer it back to the viewer, to make work that really can be everyone's." Stephanie Berger PhotographsPosted on 06 June 2008
I got hold of these two wonderful pictures of the Bard College performances of A Bird in Your Ear from photographer Stephanie Berger - both will make lovely covers to my promotional CDs!
Heath QuartetPosted on 28 May 2008
 Some mediums are clearly harder to write for than others; for me, the String Quartet is probably the hardest of them all. I know many composers feel the same, for a mixture of reasons - As far as this last point goes, I love intellectual music - Berg is one of my favourite composers - but I think it was something of a coming of age for me when I realised I'm not really an intellectual composer. I think as soon as I started writing operas I realised I was much more interested in, well, whatever the opposite of intellectual music is - music that's just music, music that moves you in some way, makes you dance, sing, cry, whatever. At least for now I think that's much more what I need to focus on. So, earlier in the year Lake District Summer Music Festival commissioned a quartet from me for this year's festival, to be played by the exciting young Heath Quartet (pitcured above). After quaking in my boots for some months, when I finally got down to work on the piece it went really surprisingly smoothly. The key decision for me was that these would be a series of 'dances' in the Baroque sense. They would start in one place, explore the possibilities therein and stop. No Beethovenian developments, no 'musical philosophising' if you like. And that did the trick. I wrote five dances, each about 3-4 minutes long, and I'm really excited to hear them at the festival in August. They're called Dances for Oskar. Musical ClownsPosted on 09 May 2008
Some great violin playing from Wilbur Hall in this video. Hall's version of Pop Goes the Weasal seen in this clip was apparently the inspiration for the 3rd movement of Oliver Knussen's Violin Concerto (not that you can particularly hear the influence, mind). I love the way he keeps hitting an out of tune note, and then doing a quick open-string re-tuning, very funny. Also check out this arrangement of 12th Street rag for 'collapsable trombone' and 'stereophonic bicycle pump' (it gets going after the first 40 secs or so) Meet the Composer GalaPosted on 07 May 2008
 This May 28th Meet the Composer Foundation is holding a gala dinner in honour of world-renowned soprano and great muse of composers, Dawn Upshaw. I'm thrilled that Dawn requested a piece of mine to be played at the event, and delighted that my friends at Metropolis Ensemble have agreed to help out - all very last minute - and perform a specially arranged version of Three Pieces from Piosenki with the adorable Melissa Wegner and the charming Kyle Ferrill (; This annual event organized by Meet the Composer honors a prominent American artist. The benefit committee includes Esa-Pekka Salonen, James Levine, Robert Spano, Osvaldo Golijov, John Adams, among others. Dawn was involved in the original Carnegie Hall commission of Piosenki, and has recently been incredibly supportive of my music, commissioning Bird for her students on the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at Bard College, NY and scheduling performances of Piosenki herself in the fall (of which more soon). More details about the gala... Listen and learn about Piosenki... Bird picturesPosted on 01 May 2008
I've finally managed to get some stills from the DVD recording of A Bird in Your Ear, a selection below:       Archive 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | |
