on music and beauty

Author: Lamberto Coccioli (Page 4 of 5)

Mixtur by Stockhausen at the South Bank

Down to London to listen to Mixtur and say hello to Thierry Coduys, responsible for the electronics together with Sound Intermedia (Ian Dearden and David Sheppard).

Mixtur is the daddy of live electronics… a late discovery for me. Some awkward moments (a funny trombone glissando up and down a perfect fourth that comes from nowhere, the long pauses) but beautiful complex timbres especially in the lowest register for cello, double bass and contra-bassoon. Conceptually it was fantastic in 1967, and it still retains some of that aura, although the music has aged. And the performance with the reversed order of the sections, thankfully played in the first half of the concert, just doesn’t work.

Music and Inspiration by Jonathan Harvey

Just finished reading this fascinating book. It has a very ambitious goal: to reveal, or at least to shed some light on, the inner workings of the creative process behind the composition of a musical work. Although at times a bit scholastic, it gives us a hint of a vast, uncharted world, and how creativity can be triggered by unrelated, disparate and often unpredictable sources of inspiration.

Ensemble Network Meeting in Copenhagen

I have been invited by Anders Beyer from Athelas Sinfonietta and Stein Henrichsen from BIT20 Ensemble to present the Integra project to the first meeting of the Ensemble Network, a network of new music ensembles in Europe. The first aim of the meeting was to establish if the setup of such a network was a good idea, and everyone agreed to it.

Among the participants I was delighted to see again Filippo Del Corno after many years. Filippo and I studied both in the same composition class at Milan’s Conservatoire, and share many musical memories… Filippo came as artistic director of Sentieri Selvaggi, an Italian new music ensemble representing an unusual success story in the often dire landscape of contemporary music promotion and performance in Italy.

Highlight: Bent Sørensen talking about the responsibilities of the ensembles: they risk becoming too institutionalized, like symphony orchestras. Innovation and flexibility are the key concepts here: innovation in the presentation of new music, flexibility in the instrumentation, to avoid the “sinfonietta” curse, with hundred of works written for the same instrumental setup and all sounding quite the same.

I met lots of very nice people, and many of them spoke Italian. It is amazing how many musicians from Nordic countries know how to speak Italian! Flattering, really.

Sligo New Music Festival

I spent a different weekend in Sligo, on the North-West coast of Ireland, where I was invited to talk about Nono, Feldman and contemporary music in a public discussion chaired by Ian Wilson, the Irish composer and Artistic Director of the Sligo New Music Festival.

Some very good memories of intelligent interpreters (Callino Quartet, Sarah Nicolls, Nancy Ruffer, Nicole Tibbels), during the three days of the Festival and lively discussion with fellow panelists Andrew Toovey, Ioana Petcu-Colan and Jürgen Simpson.

One image stuck in my mind: the description of the effort in performing Morton Feldman’s work for piano and string quartet lasting 85 minutes, by Ioana, the leader of the Callino Quartet: what the listeners’ experience should be, is something like looking at a beautiful swan, gliding effortlessly on the water, while the performers, unseen, conscientiously paddle under the surface to keep the piece together, counting beats and bars but never showing it in the music…

As for the real thing, I managed to spend one (almost) rainless morning walking along the endless beaches north of Sligo at low tide, the first time I have been near the sea for a very long time.

Integra

This exciting project, with great partners and even greater ambitions, Integra – A European composition and performance environment for sharing live music technologies, is a €1,035,048, 3-year cooperation agreement part financed by the European Commission through the 2005 call of the Culture 2000 programme [ref 2005-849]. Started in September 2005, Integra is led by Birmingham Conservatoire and the project partners are:

New Music Ensembles
Ensemble Ars Nova, Sweden
Athelas Sinfonietta, Denmark (co-organiser)
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, United Kingdom
BIT20 Ensemble, Norway (co-organiser)
Court-circuit, France (co-organiser)

Research Centres
CIRMMT, McGill University, Canada
Krakow Academy of Music, Poland
La Kitchen, France
Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, Lithuania
Malmö Academy of Music, Sweden (co-organiser)
NOTAM, Norway
SARC, Northern Ireland, UK

Association of European Conservatoires, The Netherlands

The composers commissioned so far are:
Malin Bång, Sweden (Athelas Sinfonietta)
Natasha Barrett, Norway (Ensemble Ars Nova)
Andrea Cera, Italy (Court-circuit)
Tansy Davies, United Kingdom (BIT20 Ensemble)
Juste Janulyte, Lithuania (Birmingham Contemporary Music Group)

This is the Integra team at Birmingham Conservatoire:
Lamberto Coccioli, project manager
Richard Shrewsbury, project administrator
Jamie Bullock, technical administrator
Jeanette Davey, finance administrator

Integra project website

David’s Garden

Together with trombonist David Purser and composer-technologist Jonathan Green, we’ve been working since late 2005 on a user-friendly Max/MSP environment to let performers improvise with technology. To capture performance data we have been using a microphone and a flexion sensor, measuring the angle of the arm to track the position of the trombone slide.

Lips Eyes Bang

In June 2005 I invited to Birmingham Conservatoire the Italian composer Luca Francesconi. We performed his multimedia work, Lips Eyes Bang, in a Thallein Ensemble concert conducted by Lionel Friend. The actress-singer role in Lips was given to Abigail Kelly, a very gifted vocal student with superior dramatic skills. Luca gave also some master classes and two talks on his music.

In order to make the performance possible, in collaboration with AGON – the Milan production and research centre – in February 2005 we started to migrate the original live video setup of the piece to a different software environment: from Image/ine to Jitter, a suite of video manipulation objects for the Max/MSP software environment.

Jonathan Green went to Milan in April 2005 to work with Paolo Solcia and the composer at AGON studios. Back in Birmingham he finished the porting of the software in time for the June performance. We were able to rehearse the piece and put together the final performance thanks to the generous support offered by Gregory Sporton, Director of the VRU (Visualisation Research Unit) at BIAD, the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design.

Julian Anderson

In 2004 I collaborated with Julian Anderson and BCMG – the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group – on the realisation and performance of the electronics of a large-scale ensemble work by the composer, Book of Hours, commissioned by BCMG. I worked with Julian in the Conservatoire’s studios and performed the electronics – together with Jonathan Green, at the Birmingham premiere on 28 January 2005 and at the second performance in Manchester the following day. Both concerts were conducted by Oliver Knussen. BEAST, the Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre at the University of Birmingham also took part in the project, with Scott Wilson as sound engineer.

Commissioned through the Sound Investment scheme, Book of Hours takes its name from the elaborately illuminated medieval manuscripts that divided the day into eight segments, or ‘hours’. The work does not literally portray or depict either of the medieval artefacts but it aims to explore – and somehow unite – the relationships between these very old objects and the very latest technology.

Book of Hours, published by Faber Music, won the Royal Philharmonic Society award for large-scale composition in 2006. The Manchester performance was recorded by the BBC and has been released on CD by NMC Recordings.

Modernising live electronics in Harvey’s works

Together with Jamie Bullock we have started this ambitious project in 2004. Collaborating with Jonathan Harvey, we are modernising live electronics in his works that make use of obsolete technologies, to ensure their long-term preservation and allow for future performances. The modernisation usually involves moving from a hardware-dependent electronics set-up to a software based one, using as much as possible standard, open source tools.

The aims of this project are very close to those of the Integra project. Indeed, we are porting to the Integra environment two of Harvey’s works – Madonna of Winter and Spring and Wheel of Emptiness as part of the repertoire migration activities of the project. We intend to carry out the porting of the electronics of other works by Jonathan outside the Integra project, as part of the Conservatoire’s research activities. Although the modernisation is not advancing as fast as we would like to – due to time constraints and the need to harmonise this project with other research efforts at the Conservatoire – we have been able to achieve some very interesting results.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 lamberto coccioli

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑