The word from the folks at the emc….
Here is the programme and the abstracts from the next conference on Music and Minimalism, October. If you’re in the area, there are some interesting people and papers:
sorry, whoever put it up on Dropbox has removed it. We’ll try to get something about it eventually.
For those of you who can get it, there are five more days of Prom 50: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b038l7nr
The Radio 3 information is here:
Duration:
1 hour, 30 minutes
- First broadcast:
- Monday 19 August 2013
BBC SSO and Ilan Volkov live at the BBC Proms with Gerald Barry, Feldman’s Coptic Light and the World Premiere of Frederic Rzewski’s Piano Concerto with the composer as soloist.
Live from the Royal Albert Hall, London
Presented by Andrew McGregor
John White: Chord-Breaking Machine
Gerald Barry: No other people. (UK premiere)
Frederic Rzewski: Piano Concerto (BBC commission: world premiere)
Feldman: Coptic LightFrederic Rzewski (piano)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Ilan Volkov (conductor)Ilan Volkov brings his spirit of adventure to this late night Prom, featuring music as beautiful as it is ground breaking.
The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performs music by a quartet of visionary and idiosyncratic composers, including two premieres. John White’s Chord-breaking Machine could be seen as belonging to a tradition of experimental English minimalists, deconstructing musical material into its constituent parts and reforming as repetitive machine structures; Irish maverick Gerald Barry’s No Other People, tonight receiving its first UK performance, also draws on repetition and seemingly simple musical figures, but here to create strongly contrasting canvases of bold, wild and stark music.
Frederic Rzewski’s BBC Radio 3-commissioned Piano Concerto, tonally kaleidoscopic and stylistically far reaching, receives its world premiere, with the composer as soloist. And the concert concludes with Morton Feldman’s late masterpiece, Coptic Light, a meditation for orchestra: a beatific and spiritual end to this late-night Prom.
See what you think and let us know. We liked the White of course, and the Feldman — always good. Nice of Ilan Volkov to programme this. He’s been an enthusiastic proponent of this music for some time. And he got the Beeb to programme John White. Cool.
Okay, one gripe. We’re hoping that someday the BBC will not only programme the music, but also someday actually learn something about it; for instance, the description, ‘John White’s Chord-breaking Machine could be seen as belonging to a tradition of experimental English minimalists’. Well, duh. John White is the main man, the big daddy, the big Kahuna, the founder and leading exponent of English minimalism. He invented Machine processes and if we’re talking about any minimalism in Britain before 1980, that minimalism has White to thank in some small part or other — for Machines and other systems processes. If you don’t know John White’s minimalism, try his Promenade Theatre Orchestra music. Or his electric music. Then try some Parsons, or Skempton, or Bryars, or Nyman, or Hobbs, or Dennis, or Shrapnel, or Smith, or Lewis, or Hill, or….
The Journal of Experimental Music Studies, or Jems, has a new upload of a review by Bruce Coates of Tony Harris, The Legacy of Cornelius Cardew (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013). You can find it here: http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk/emc/Jems.html.
Dave sends us sad news about this event: http://experimentalmusic.co.uk/wp/?p=681
Dear all,
Regretfully my concert featuring “The Planets” planned for Friday 13th
September at Schotts recital room has had to be postponed. Apologies for
this. “The Planets” will appear on another occasion!Best wishes
Dave
We hope to see it soon!
Our friend, Ian Mitchell, sends us news of a concert:
Alison Wells, Ian Mitchell, Catriona Scott
Music:
Judith Bingham, Christopher Hobbs, Colin Riley,
William O. Smith
Words:
Judith Bingham, John Ginman
Costume Designer: Carolyn Richardson
Electronics: Colin Riley
Mary Anning: Alison Wells
Mary Shelley: Alison Wells
Clarinet: Ian Mitchell
Clarinet: Catriona Scott
Fossils and Monsters presents the tales of Mary Anning and Mary Shelley – both living in the 19th century but from very different backgrounds; both experts in their field but largely unrecognised in their time. Alison Wells performs Mary Anning by Judith Bingham and Science Fictions by Colin Riley, framed by extraordinary pieces for clarinets played by Ian Mitchell and Catriona Scott.
With up to 3 shows a night for just £7.50 (£5 concessions) each why not make and evening of it? The Festival is programmed so you can see a number of shows on the same visit, have a look at the calender HERE to see what else you can book for. www.tete-a-tete.org.uk/festival-2013/
Well, it isn’t recorded music, and, well, it is. (Ah, the wacky world of experimental intermedia)….
Michael Parsons has given us permission to upload his demonstration of the Dumb Show of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning, Paragraph 5. Paragraph 5 begins with a ‘Dumb Show’, a series of movements describing the text of the paragraph in a gestural sign language developed from Native American sign language. Each performer is meant to ‘teach’ the gestures to another performer who, in turn, ‘teaches’ the gestures to the next, and so on. The video was directed by Christopher Hobbs and filmed by Martin Shiel at De Montfort University, and was only published in Virginia Anderson’s PhD thesis, ‘Aspects of British Experimental Music as a Separate Art-Music Culture’ (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2004).
Virginia Anderson’s 2006 article, ‘”Well, It’s a Vertebrate”: Performer Choice in Cardew’s Treatise‘ is viewable on her page on Academia.edu:
http://academia.edu/3551075/Well_Its_a_Vertebrate_Performer_Choice_in_Cardews_Treatise
It’s in draft form and lacks examples from Cardew’s Treatise and other pieces due to copyright issues. But you can see it (and a number of Virginia’s other articles) on these pages, and decide to read these articles in their original settings (this article, for instance, is in the Journal of Musicological Research).
Note:
Dear all,
Regretfully my concert featuring “The Planets” planned for Friday 13th
September at Schotts recital room has had to be postponed. Apologies for
this. “The Planets” will appear on another occasion!
Best wishes
Dave
Dave Smith sends us early warning of a celestial phenomenon:
Dear all,
It’s some way in the future, but I thought I’d give advance warning of the
1st performance of Dave Smith’s solo piano version of Holst’s “The Planets”
at 6.30 on Friday 13th September at Schotts Recital Room, 48 Great
Marlborough Street, London W1F 7BB.
The concert will include music by Smith and John White.
Best wishes!
Dave
Mike sends word:
Last gig of this concert season tomorrow at Fizzle.
Tuesday 18th June, 8:30pm at The Lamp Tavern, Barford St, B5 6AH.
£5/3
Bagpipes for Pluto
Francesco Bigoni – sax/clarinet
Markus Pesonen – guitar
Adam Pultz Melbye – bass
Håkon Berre – drums
Italy, Denmark, Finland and Norway will be represented at this weeks Fizzle. This will be the Last gig until September.
You never really appreciate a Fizzle until it’s gone….
This is a recent interview by Robert Worby with Gavin Bryars about his piece 1, 2, 1-2-3-4 which was on the BBC Radio 3 show Hear and Now.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01bc203
Bryars is not only informative about the piece, but also gives a good view of the music of that time.