Cassandra Miller – Notation, detail and richness

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Music Research Forum

Cassandra Miller

Notation, detail and richness

Thursday 17 May, 1 – 2pm, MT.G18

In the presentation of her recent chamber works, Canadian composer Cassandra Miller will discuss the relationship of notation to sound-image, interpretive musicality, (non)coordination of elements, recursiveness, and detail. Through a flexible view of notation, Cassandra explores the pull of two opposite desires: the draw of complex nature-inspired sound-worlds, and an impulse towards simplicity and elegance.

Composer Cassandra Miller (1976) is the artistic director of Innovations en concert, a non-profit organization which presents experimental music concerts in Montreal. In 2011, she received the Jules-Léger Prize for New Chamber Music for her composition Bel Canto. Composition teachers included Christopher Butterfield (University of Victoria), Richard Ayres and Yannis Kyriakides (Royal Conservatory of the Hague), and Michael Finnissy (private study 2012). Her music is performed widely in Canada, and recently with increasing frequency in Europe. She is currently composing a new work for pianist Philip Thomas to be premiered at hcmf// 2012. Cassandra Miller’s work combines a love of warmth with a love for the absurd. Her music often involves notation systems that stimulate personal interpretation and connection between performers. Common themes include circular repetition; inspiration from folk music, romantic music, or natural sounds; a re-thinking of the concepts of simplicity and complexity; and a general tendency towards sighing.

To hear this talk, please visit the CMR archive [BSU users only]

Verbal notation book published

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The result of the recent AHRC-funded project on verbal notation has now been published by Continuum. Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation by James Saunders and John Lely examines the way composers, artists and performers work with verbal scores, bringing together a wide-ranging analysis of the resources available to scorers, contextualised by detailed commentaries, statements and interviews, and over 170 complete examples of pieces, including work by George Brecht, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Michael Pisaro, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jennifer Walshe and La Monte Young. Writing about the book, Nicolas Collins (Professor, Department of Sound, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Editor-in-Chief, Leonardo Music Journal) comments that Word Events is an ‘extraordinary collection of important scores, ranging from the exalted to the ephemeral. The inclusion of commentary by the artists themselves, as well as the first systematic analysis of the various forms of prose score, makes Word Events an invaluable resource for scholars and practicing artists alike.’ Liz Kotz (Associate Professor of Art History, UC Riverside and author of, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art) adds that ‘this is a collection we have needed for a long time.’

For more information, please see the Continuum website.

Jim Dickinson – Klee’s Composers

Posted by James Saunders on

Music Research Forum
Jim Dickinson (BSU)

Klee’s Composers

Thursday 3 May, 1 – 2pm, MT.G18

Much of Paul Klee’s experimental oeuvre is concerned with his ideal of creating dynamic movement in the fixed medium of painting. Klee turned to his beloved music to find structural solutions to the temporal problems he would encounter and these experiments led to his ‘Polyphonic Painting’ style, of which he declared ‘Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that, here, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly’ (Diaries, 1081). Since Gunther Schuller’s 7 Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (1962), there have been hundreds of musical compositions, which are either direct ‘readings’ of Klee paintings, or they acknowledge an influence derived from his theories and practice. The Paul Klee Centre in Bern, Switzerland, has a musical archive that brings together many of the works. Using examples from this archive this talk will explore the reciprocal nature of the relationship between Paul Klee and Music.

To hear this talk, please visit the CMR archive [BSU users only]

Roger Heaton – Boulez Domaines: composition, performance and tradition.

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Music Research Forum
Roger Heaton (BSU)

Boulez Domaines: composition, performance and tradition.

Thursday 26th April, 1 – 2pm, MT.G18

Boulez’s Domaines for solo clarinet/clarinet and ensemble (1960-68) is a core work in the clarinet’s contemporary repertory despite its radical nature. This paper will discuss the genesis of the work and Boulez’s compositional strategies with reference to the sketches housed in the Sacher Stiftung in Basel. The interpretation of complex modernist music demands technical accuracy but also often displays a significant lack of expression: a tradition adhering closely to the text. However, performers find it difficult to suppress an impulse to ‘phrase’ often imposing familiar expressive gestures from an earlier repertory where none are intended. Performance traditions become attached to works and originate from the techniques and idiosyncrasies of specific performers. Does a player observe the effect of a work’s first performer or is the detail of notation sufficient for an ‘authentic’ rendition?

To hear this talk, please visit the CMR archive [BSU users only]

Roger Heaton in New York

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Roger Heaton is currently touring with the Richard Alston Dance Company, playing Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint for Alston’s ballet Roughcut. Performances round the UK include Sadler’s Wells in March, as well as New York and Aachen. He is also playing many performances this year of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic as this is the centenary of the sinking, at venues including Birmingham Town Hall in April and the Barbican, London. Roger also gave the first performance of Mihailo Trandafilovski’s Clarinet Quintet with the Kreutzer String Quartet at Wilton’s Music Hall London in December.

 

Trevor Wishart – Music from Speech: Voices and Technology

Posted by James Saunders on

Music Research Forum
Trevor Wishart

Music from Speech: Voices and Technology

Thursday 29th March, 1 – 2pm, MT.G18

Pioneering composer Trevor Wishart will talk about extracting musical characteristics from the speech stream, with special reference to his new 8-channel work Encounters in the Republic of Heaven (2011).

Composer and performer Trevor Wishart specialises in sound metamorphosis, and constructing the software tools to make it possible (Sound Loom/CDP). He has lived and worked as composer-in-residence in Australia, Canada, Germany, Holland, Sweden, and the USA but spends most of his time in the North of England, where he was born. He creates music with his own voice, for professional groups, or in imaginary worlds conjured up in the studio. His aesthetic and technical ideas are described in the books On Sonic Art, Audible Design and Sound Composition (2012).  His most well-known works include Red Bird, Tongues Of Fire, Two Women, Imago and Globalalia. His work has been commissioned by the Paris Biennale, the Massachussets Council for the Arts and Humanities, the DAAD in Berlin, the French Ministry of Culture and the BBC Proms. In 2008 he was awarded the Giga-Herz Grand prize for his life’s work. Also involved in community, environmental and educational projects, his Sounds Fun books of musical games have been republished in Japanese. Between 2006 and 2010 he was composer-in-residence in the North East of England (based at Durham University), and during 2011, Artist in Residence at the University of Oxford.

For further information consult  www.trevorwishart.co.uk.

To hear this talk, please visit the CMR archive [BSU users only]

Roger Heaton on performance practice

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Professor Roger Heaton has two new pieces of research published this month, drawing on his extensive experience as a clarinettist specialising in new music. Roger has a chapter in final section of Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell’s The Cambridge History of Music Performance entitled ‘Instrumental performance in the twentieth century and beyond’, focusing on contemporary performance practice. Alongside this is his article ‘Contemporary performance practice and tradition’ in the CMPCP/Performance Studies Network Special Issue of Musical Performance Research.

Ralf Dorrell (BSU): Whose piece is it anyway? – Big Band Jazz Composition

Posted by James Saunders on

Music Research Forum
Ralf Dorrell (BSU)

Whose piece is it anyway? – Big Band Jazz Composition

Thursday 22nd March, 1 – 2pm, MT.G18

After a brief introduction to big band jazz composition, Ralf Dorrell will discuss his recent works for improvising soloist and jazz big band. These explore various ways of guiding the soloist with the aim of integrating the improvised solo into the musical argument of the composition.
Ralf Dorrell has been active in the South-West as a jazz composer, performer (trombone and bass), bandleader, workshop tutor and jazz educator since the mid-1980′s. Performances include BBC Radio 3 jazz broadcasts and jazz festivals in Britain and Europe. His works have been commissioned by Radio 3 and SWJazz and performed at the Purcell Room. He has recorded several CDs.

Kathy Hinde – Visual Scores

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Music Research Forum
Kathy Hinde

Visual Scores

Thursday 15th March, 1 – 2pm, MT.G18

Interdisciplinary artist Kathy Hinde will present a talk using her own work as a starting point focussing on how she combines sound and image, and collaborates across different artforms. She has a passion to involve other people in the process of making work, whether this be through collaborating with other artists, dancers, musicians or perhaps scientists, she is keen to explore how the audience can meaningfully contribute to the realisation of an artwork. She has recently collaborated with digital artist Ed Holroyd to make online participatory soundmaps that can be interacted with on a number of levels from the virtual, global sphere of the internet to a local, physical level through going for a listening walk. Her interest in the natural world has informed her recent work, much of which is inspired by birds and their migration patterns or quite simply by the patterns of their flight. Her current touring work, PIano Migrations uses the movements of birds to physically play a dismantled, prepared piano.

Kathy Hinde’s interdisciplinary approach combines different art forms frequently through collaborations with other practitioners, partnerships with scientists, and input from the audience. She has created video and sound for theatre and live art performances alongside creating installations and site specific work. She has shown work across Europe, Scandinavia, China, Pakistan, USA, Colombia and Brazil. Kathy has created interactive visual environments that are responsive to live situations and her video work frequently moves away from the screen. Her musical interests embrace various strategies of improvisation, generative systems, and unconventional notation and using adapted, ‘prepared’ or self-made instruments. She has created a number of works combining kinetic sculpture with musical automata, plus online participatory art works. Previous and current collaborators are many and include:  musicians Joanna MacGregor, Joby Burgess, and Maja Ratkje;  audio-visual artist i am the mighty jungulator; dancer/choreographers Lotta Melin,  Subathra Subramaniam and Jin Xing;  composers Stephen Montague, Gabriel Prokofiev, Graham Fitkin, Max De Wardener and most recently composer Will Gregory of the duo Goldfrapp by creating visuals for Gregory’s new Opera Piccard in Space.

To hear this talk, please visit the CMR archive [BSU users only]

Professor Gadget

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Roger Heaton’s research into music pedagogy continues with his new project exploring the use of iPads in lectures. Roger comments:

“I’m currently exploring the iPad in the lecture theatre/seminar room as a kind of white board or smart board. Quite simply what I’m doing is using a stylus to write on pdf files using an app from the Apple store called neu.Annotate which was free but their latest version is 69p! I plug the iPad into a data projector and can talk and demonstrate and also play the music at the same time as scrolling through the score.”

Roger has pitched this to a new JISC funding scheme called Elevator and you can watch a short demo film and find more information HERE. You can also vote for the project to be considered for future funding. In his guise as Professor Gadget, Roger has recently completed BSU-funded research into the use of audio feedback in the assessment of student work.