CeReNeM Postgraduate Newsletter [September 2020]

This newsletter is a platform for MA and PhD students at the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM), University of Huddersfield, to share information about their recent activities.

Academic Appointments

A number of CeReNeM alumni have received academic appointments internationally over the past year:

• Dominic Thibault (PhD 2014), Professeur Adjoint en Musiques Numériques [Assistant Professor of Digital Music], Université de Montréal, Canada
• Hakan Ulus (PhD 2020) Lecturer in analysis and aesthetics of contemporary music (postgraduate composition program), Gustav Mahler Privatuniversität für Musik in Klagenfurt, Austria
• Jung In Jung (PhD 2019), Postdoctoral Research Fellow for Interactive Engagement, Innovation for Games and Media Enterprise (InGAME), joint project between Abertay University, University of Dundee, and St Andrews, UK
• Mira Benjamin (PhD 2019), Lecturer in Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
• Pia Palme (PhD 2017), 2019-2021 Senior Artist and Head of Project for ‘On the Fragility of Sounds’, KUG Kunstuniversität Graz, Austria
• Seth Parker Woods (PhD 2016), Lecturer, Dartmouth College, USA (2017–19); Lecturer/Artist-in-Residence, University of Chicago (since 2019); Artist-in-Residence, Seattle Symphony Orchestra (2019–20)
• Timothy McCormack (MPhil 2011), Assistant Professor of Composition, Boston Conservatory at Berklee

PhD Scholarship Recipients

Congratulations to Arash Yazdani (Iran) who has been awarded the Jonathan Harvey  Scholarship in Music Composition, for PhD studies beginning in September 2020. Arash studied previously at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Hochschule für Musik Basel, and Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, with degrees in piano, double bass, orchestral conducting and composition. Arash is Artistic Director of Sound Plasma, a festival for alternative intonation music in Berlin and Tallinn, and Artistic Director and conductor of Ensemble for New Music Tallinn. Arash follows previous Harvey Scholarship holders Hakan Ulus, Cassandra Miller, and Einar Torfi Einarsson.

PGR Activities

James Bradbury

In the earliest stages of lockdown James coordinated the online Huddersfield Hackspace weekly meetups to keep in touch, share work in progress and talk about interesting music and code. Most weeks those who attended took the opportunity to give feedback on each other’s work, but we also heard fantastic and engaging presentations that went into the nitty gritty detail of people’s projects. Francesco Cameli gave a great presentation about his new digital signal processing domain specific language Omni and we also heard from Mortimer Pavlitski on his Max for Live devices that he had been building as part of his academic work. 

James made the first public release of ReaCoMa, a framework that brings the Fluid Corpus Manipulation (FluCoMa) tools to REAPER. This was accompanied by a set of tutorial videos. Alongside ReaCoMa, James published the first alpha version of finding things in stuff (FTIS), a Python framework for surveying, organising and digging through audio corpora. In the near future James is planning to release a new EP, “Reconstruction Error”. This EP contains 5 tracks that represent work done employing FTIS to navigate machine generated sound collections. A paper that describes some of the technical implementations found in this work will be presented as part of the CSMC/MuMe joint conference in October.

Andie Brown

Andie Brown exhibited a sculptural sound installation, Partita II for Unattended Glass Harp, at Electric Spring Festival in February 2019 and in June of that year was one of six winners of the annual PRSF and New BBC Radiophonic Workshop Oram Awards. In late 2019, Andie’s work was featured in the British Music Collection for Sound and Music’s 50 Things Series. In February 2020, Andie gave a presentation of her work with glass and Max at the Creative Coding Lab Symposium at Electric Spring festival. In March 2020, Andie contributed a 40-minute work, Dr Mesmer’s Séance for the Cure of Hysteria, to AMPLIFY2020: Quarantine, an online festival  curated in response to the ongoing pandemic by Jon Abbey (Erstwhile Records) and artists Vanessa Rossetto and Mathew Revert. In September 2020, Andie will have an audio visual work in a group show curated by artist Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us, as part of her residency at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Centre in Buffalo, New York, hosted by radio station WFMU. Andie is currently artist in residence at Huddersfield’s ame space, with work from this to be exhibited in a solo show in November 2020.

Colin Frank

Although Colin Frank has been primarily spending time searching for new recipes and filling in a tapestry during lockdown, he recently performed in the livestream concert Where’s the Flour? with his duo Brutalust (a collaboration with Maria Sappho) along with housemate Henry McPherson, and completed a video exploration of household crevices in the We Belong Here e-residency in collaboration with Sinead Kerr.

Prior to the pandemic, Colin performed with Brutalust at the Leeds Sounds Like THIS festival, and with the Noisebringers alongside guest artist Weston Olenki at Electric Spring. In December 2019, his collaboratively made violin trio Imitate Elegance Expertly was performed by CeReNeM PhD colleagues Linda Jankowska, Irine Røsnes, and Dejana Sekulic in Brussels at the Q02 art space and at the Antwerp Conservatory. The latter performance was part of the conference Collaborations Are More Refreshing Than New Socks, in which he was also a panellist. While in Belgium, he also presented at the conference Who is the ‘I’ that Performs? Enacting Musical Identities, hosted by the Orpheus Institute.

Earlier in the autumn, Colin travelled to Russia where he attended the IX International Young Composers Academy in Tchaikovsky-city. His composition Everything Vanishes Softly was performed in the Perm region by the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble and subsequently at the Moscow Philharmonic Hall. Along with his contemporary music group, the Drift Ensemble, he performed new pieces by Jorge Boehringer, Eleanor Cully, Sam Gillies, and his own composition Concerto for Duck Call and Chamber Ensemble. This latter piece featured Colin as soloist using a tool typical for hunting purposes, and incorporated video for the first time into his live performance practice. He has also performed in various recording projects, including in the album Turmeric about immigrants and cooking by David Velez, and a 360-degree cinematic virtual reality video Sound World for Small Things by Sam Gillies. His audience interactive installation Fill Me was presented at Dai Hall in Huddersfield, with a subsequent publication about the project in The Mass.

Cristina Ghirardini

Cristina Ghirardini, while spending her second year as a PhD student within the IRiMaS project directed by Prof. Michael Clarke, had the pleasure to see published the results of some previous research. The proceedings of the international conference Reflecting on Hornbostel-Sachs’s Versuch a century later, which she edited, were finally published five years after the conference at the Fondazione Levi in Venezia. Moreover, she edited (together with Ilario Meandri) the final publication of the project Sound Archives and Musical Instruments Collections. The project was directed by Prof. Meandri at the University of Torino, in collaboration with the Museo del paesaggio sonoro in Riva presso Chieri.

Sam Gillies

Sam completed his PhD viva voce in July 2020. His PhD, Composing with Frames and Spaces: Cinematic Virtual Reality as an Audiovisual Compositional Practice, explores the creative possibilities of CVR. Sections of the thesis were published in August in the book chapter “Screen Grammar for mobile frame media: the audiovisual language of Cinematic Virtual Reality, case studies and analysis,” in Sound and Image: Aesthetics and Practices, edited by Andrew Knight-Hill and published by Routledge.

In February 2020, Sam hosted and coordinated the Capitalist Realism: 10 Years On symposium. The symposium, a ten year on reflection on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There Any Alternative (zer0 books) and funded by the Post-Graduate Researcher Environment Development Fund (PREDEF), featured a keynote from Matt Calquhoun (aka xenogothic) and welcomed a range of speakers including CeReNeM PhD colleagues Colin Frank, Maria Sappho, and Henry McPherson; CeReNeM graduates Dr Pedro Alvarez and Dr Jorge Boehringer; University of Huddersfield staff Prof. Nic Clear; as well as a range of other national and international academics, and a performance from Huddersfield improv ensemble Noizebringers. 

Sam’s audiovisual work Three Perspectives of a Field in Huddersfield (2019) was premiered at NoizeMaschin!! #106 in April 2020. The performance version of his 360˚ work a sound world for small things (2019) was premiered in its solo version by Colin Frank at Trotsky’s Pink Bowls on August 17, 2019 and in its trio version by Drift Ensemble at St Paul’s Hall on September 21, 2019.  In November 2020 he will join Prof Monty Adkins’ AHRC-funded Gerhard Revealed project as Audio Technician and Research Assistant.

Jacob Hart

Jacob has presented work at several international conferences this year. In October, he presented at the Tracking the Creative Process in Music Conference in Lisbon, in May he presented at the Music and Moving Image Conference in New York, and in September he presented at the RMA Conference at Goldsmiths. He will also present and publish an article with the French conference Journées d’Informatique Musicale in Strasbourg this October. Jacob presented some initial findings from his research at the FluCoMa plenary at Huddersfield in November 2019.

Stephen Harvey

Stephen has been working on various projects with CeReNeM alumna Ryoko Akama as part of the art curatorial project ame (pronounced amay), which include a concert series, UNspellable, and various artist residencies and art installations and exhibitions at the newly established Dai Hall, in Huddersfield. Stephen was involved in the design, and took most of the photographs, in the ame archive book, discrete intervention. The book is a compendium of photographs of artists and performers who have been involved with ame from 2016–19. A multi-speaker extravaganza project curated by Stephen and the ame team utilising the amazing HISS system with Pierre Alexandre Tremblay has had to be postponed due to Covid-19. We had lined up a number of guest performers who are keen to realise this residency sometime in 2021. Stephen and Ryoko currently have an exhibition of photographs and kinetic sculptures placed in the window of Dai Hall and are currently producing three publications for mumei publishing which will be available in August 2020.

In December 2019 Stephen performed as redvirginsoil as support to Toshimaru Nakamura, Sam Andreae, David Birchill and Otto Willberg at Small Seeds in Huddersfield. Stephen and CeReNeM alumnus Dominic Thibault have also been making new music and playing live in difficult times. A new album of previously unheard material has been released by the Montréal label Mikroclimat. The Tout Croche Tapes is a selection of tracks that retain much of the original improvised qualities, raw and largely untouched. Stephen and Dominic also made history with their Transatlantic Loop concert for the Festival #UdeMUSIQUES, being the very first streamed live concert for UdeM! Stephen and Dominic have new music ready for release in the autumn on their label The Silent Howl. Noise Mother is an album of new more traditional songs—Tout Croche style—and we also have slated a new album of work from CeReNeM PhD candidate Andrew Hooker, coming soon.

Steven and CeReNeM alumna Cassandra Miller have been working with Juliet Fraser on a video installation which was unfortunately shut down because of Covid-19. We are hoping this will see the light of day sometime next year. Work with Cassandra, Juliet, and the Quatuor Bozzini have rendered two new stand-alone videos, edited by Stephen, available from the TIME : SPANS festival website.

Andrew Leslie Hooker

In September 2019, Andrew Leslie Hooker, together with musicians Toshimaru Nakamura and Emmanuel Fleitz and choreographer/dancers Melissa Pasut and Sayoko Onishi, rehearsed and performed a long-planned project entitled From The Dust Of This Wretched Earth for butoh dancers, no-input mixing boards (nimb) and double bass. As well as various other venues around the UK, this piece was staged at Huddersfield’s own Phipps Hall and was recorded and filmed (by renowned filmmaker Michael English) for future CD/DVD release.
 
Since then, Andrew has spent most of the last year conceiving a repertoire of pieces for solo no-input mixing board including John Cage’s Fontana Mix, Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, a specially commissioned piece from Richard Barrett and the composer’s own WeAreLegion. As well as this, he has written no-input compositions for violinist Sarah Saviet from The Riot Ensemble and contrabassist Aleksander Gabrys from Ensemble Phoenix.  He has also written work for PhD colleagues Irine Røsnes (violin) and Colin Frank (percussion) utilising a structural approach towards writing for traditional, acoustic instruments with the no-input mixing board termed ‘found complexity’, which he is developing at CeReNeM under the supervision of Prof. Monty Adkins.

In May 2020, Andrew, together with Nick Janczak, released a long-form, electroacoustic piece for nimb and trumpet entitled Black Earth/Red Earth for India’s only avant garde music label Subcontinental Records as well as pieces for vocal quartet and bowed cymbal on his own bandcamp page. Slated for 2020 release is an album of new work for The Silent Howl (curated by PhD candidate Stephen Harvey and CeReNeM alumnus Dominic Thibault), a live at NAWR (curated by Rhodri Davies) solo nimb recording for Recordiau Prin, and the Ambient @40 composition Nõ Music for Abandoned Airports for Listen to the Voice of Fire. Andrew has been invited in the coming month to participate in composer Simon Grab’s podcast Feedback in Music, consisting of talks and interviews with artists working with feedback, self-oscillation and no-input mixing published on the independent arts platform norient.

Henry McPherson

Since migrating from Glasgow (via Newcastle) to Huddersfield in 2019, Henry has formed the Bodies of Meaning research group, drawing together improvising performers in experimental and transdisciplinary sound and movement from across the UK and beyond. With CeReNeM colleagues Maria Sappho and Brice Catherin, he founded the magical-absurdist-improv-theatre trio Noisebringers, which pre- and “post”-lockdown has been running monthly live and digital sharings of transmedia and collaborative performance work, with artists such as Käthi Moser (CH), Laurent Estoppey (FR), Rodolfe and Latifa le Foristier (FR), Tim Tsang (USA) and various individuals from ReCePP and CeReNeM.

Recent sharings of his work include: Parchments (2020) at the Bauhaus Dessau (DE, 2020), Ecosystem I (2019) at the Zuiderstrandtheater in Den Haag (NL), The Abusers of Power United Will Never Be Defeated (2020) with Weston Olencki at Electric Spring 2020, hourlong recording projects featured in the podcast A Matter of Sound (2020), exhibitions with POST ([Online), 2020), The Gathering Zine (Design Museum, London, 2020), NY20+ Gallery (China, 2020), residency with Ngallery (GR, with Noisebringers, 2020), commission at the Glasgow Experimental Music Series (2019), and the sharing of a short video-installation Ear-Eye (2019) as a compliment to Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit during hcmf// 2019.

In January 2020 he co-founded the MASS Collection, a new online publication of discursive art and articles addressing global issues. Now in its seventh volume, the MASS has published work from across all continents except Antarctica, and the editors welcome submissions in all media through a rolling open call.

In 2020 Henry was a panellist at the METRIC Improvisation conference in Tallinn, presented at Capitalist Realism: 10 Years On symposium in Huddersfield, and shouted poetry in Dewsbury Marketplace in David Velez’ project Poetry Shouting in the Market (Kirklees Council). He has contributed to the ongoing What IIIF Improvisation Conference based in Berlin, and is part of a new initiative to develop a pan-European online Inter- and Trans-disciplinary Improvisation Resource Platform. Across the summer, he is preparing video-essay work for the CeReNeM Journal, producing an online transmedia album, and learning to weave carpets on his newly acquired rigid heddle loom.

Mortimer Pavlitski

Mortimer Pavlitski has been creating a suite of ambisonic spatialisation tools for use in the SPIRAL studio and with Headphones as part of his MA study. The suite of Max for Live devices, named MTools for Live (MT4L), enables the encoding and processing of 5th order ambisonic signals in Ableton Live. The research focuses on enabling rapid interaction with spatialisation and an emphasis on creativity, not utility. MT4L can be downloaded here. 

Irine Røsnes

Last September, violinist Irine Røsnes and composer Kaja Bjørntvedt received a prestigious commission grant from Norwegian Art Council for the development of a new piece for violin and electronics, which will be premiered in the fall of 2021. Since October last year, Irine was appointed as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton where she now teaches modules in Research and Performance. After presenting Pablo Galaz’ Grire for violin and electronics at the Music after 1900 conference at the University of Huddersfield – where she also discussed the piece in a public presentation – the piece was performed at Conservatoire of Antwerp and Q-O2 performance space in Brussels. In November, Irine took the position of one of co-directors of Yorkshire Sound Women Network. In April 2020, together with the pianist Jonny Best, Irine co-organised the conference The Improviser’s Experience: Knowledge, Methodology, Communication, funded by University of Huddersfield and Royal Musical Association (the event was postponed to April 2021 due to the pandemic). In August 2020, Irine received a grant from the British Federation of Women Graduates – this support will allow her to complete her PhD at CeReNeM.

Pablo Galaz Salamanca

In November 2019, Pablo’s piece Grire, for violin and live electronics, was performed by Irine Røsnes at Phipps Hall (University of Huddersfield). This was the first of three concerts organised in the framework of the collaborative project Mixed Currents. The other two performances took place in December at DeSingel, Antwerp and Q2, Brussels. Last year, Pablo was selected for the call Adoptions 2019/2020 by Ensemble Adapter. In December, he visited the ensemble in Berlin for a workshop and the recording of material for a new piece. The final concert took place in February at ExRotaprint (Berlin), where Ahtāu, for ensemble and electronics, was premiered. During the 2019-20 academic year, Pablo participated in an Erasmus+ exchange programme at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG), where he continued his research under the supervision of Deniz Peters, Beat Furrer and Gerhard Eckel. This exchange was possible thanks to the ongoing bilateral Erasmus agreement between the University of Huddersfield and the KUG. Pablo is currently working on a new piece for the Ensemble Resilience that will be premiered in Amsterdam in March 2021.

Dejana Sekulic

Dejana has been focusing on performing works related to her research Temporality of the Impossible, through concept performances as ‘multi-voiced poetics‘, ‘Time Traveling Stargazer‘, ‘Front. In. Behind. Here. Now.‘ In August/September 2019, in a new collaboration with artist Jasmina Cibic, she performed and created parts of the music and sound in the video work The Gift: Act I, and later for a performance piece within Cibic’s solo exhibition The Pleasure of Expense. She also took part as a stage designer, and ‘surprise coda performer’, in Johannes Kreidler’s new music theatre essay Selbstauslöser that premiered in Volksbühne Berlin on 28 September.

Together with her fellow researchers, she has been active in developing and performing within several projects: OHHe Supercluster (with Irine Røsnes), Mixed Currents (with Linda Jankowska, Irine Røsnes, Colin Frank, and Pablo Galaz Salamanca), and joining Noisbringers (Brice Catherin, Maria Donohue, and Henry McPherson) on several occasions, most recently with a work memories of things that will never happen for their first intermedia album will you marry us? She was involved with two sound installations – being [all my heart(s)] and Tape Piece II: Room Piece, interpretations of pieces from Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit – as part of edges ensemble’s performance at hcmf// 2019. In February 2020, Dejana premiered two works inspired by and written for her research: Dario Buccino‘s Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16 and Miika Hyytiäinen‘s Impossibilities of the 25022020.

As a side project, Dejana has been developing Sheet Music: the Performance, a work with loop animations and kinetic sculptures that give motion to otherwise static graphics of Johannes Kreidler’s notation based pieces Sheet Music. She continues to develop various sound works and music pieces in duo with Gilles Doneux for violin+electronics+sensors under umbrella performance what hides in grains of sound, as well as performing with their LAPS Ensemble.

Hakan Ulus

In the last several months, Hakan’s music has been performed in Berlin, Dresden, Hanover, Graz and Tolstefanz by Klangforum Wien, AuditivVokal Dresden, Nicholas Isherwood, Ángel Soria Diaz and NEO-Quartet. He was commissioned through the international impuls composition competition to write a piece for large ensemble, titled Tā Hā, which was premiered by Klangforum Wien at the impuls Festival Graz. In August 2019, he was Artist-in-Residence in the Thomas Bernhard House in Ottnang, Austria. As a prize winner of the international composition competition of AuditivVokal Dresden, he was commissioned to write a new piece for ten singers (Auslöschung II referring to Thomas Bernhard’s novel), which premiered on November 9 in Kulturpalast Dresden as part of the 20th anniversary of German reunification. Since January 2020, he is a Lecturer in Analysis and Aesthetics of New Music at the Gustav Mahler Privatuniversität Klagenfurt in Austria. In July 2020, he was chosen as a stipendiary of the Artist in Residence program at Künstlerhaus Wiepersdorf in Germany. Recent projects include the premiere and recording of his Alaq-Cycle for piano by mise-en pianist Yumi Suehiro in New York.

Barbora Vacková

Barbora Vacková is a 1^st year PhD candidate and recipient of the Scholarship in Contemporary Music Studies at the University of Huddersfield. Supervised by Prof. Robert Adlington, her PhD project focuses on Czechoslovak women composers during the communist era (1948-1989). She seeks to discover whether the new political arrangement with its official agenda of gender equality provided women with equal opportunities to pursue a musical career, and how it impacted their social status and lived experience in the male-dominated world of composition. During the academic year 2019-2020, Vacková presented her research on Scottish-Czech composer Geraldine Mucha (1917-2012) at The Second International Conference of Women in Music at Bangor University and at RMA Research Students’ Conference at Open University. Recently, her papers have been selected for the ‘Women Are not Born to Compose’: Female Musical Works from 1750 to 1950 international conference by Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini (November 2020) and 3rd World Congress of Scottish literatures at Charles University in Prague (June 2021). Preparations are under way for the publication of Vacková’s two studies in a Czech-written collective monograph on music and gender edited by Tereza Havelková and Vít Zdrálek.

Manuel Contreras Vázquez

On September 12, Manuel Contreras Vázquez was invited as a guest lecturer at the IX edition of Mixtur Festival in Barcelona, Spain. With the title “Toward an embodied musical experience” the presentation showed some relevant aspects of Contreras’ recent works included in his Doctoral Portfolio. Special attention was given to Lidio, a piece for two guitars commissioned by the Festival and premiered at the Fabra I coats by Estelle Lallement and Filipe Marques. Furthermore, Contreras’s Voice Theatre Aswalaq, Zoos Humanos, commissioned by the Chilean Government and written during his first year at Huddersfield, was awarded the Pulsar Prize, the most important prize for the Chilean classical and concert music. The award is conferred by the Society of Authors and Music Editors of that country. The European premiere of the work is scheduled to take place in Milan, Italy in March 2021. Additionally, Manuel has been received a composition commission thanks to the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation for undertaking his second chamber opera La Furia del Ermitaño (the Hermit’s fury). The work is Manuel’s final composition of his PhD Portfolio and was commissioned by the Taller de Música Contemporánea of the Catholic University of Santiago. The new opera will be premiered during 2021 at the Contemporary Arts Centre of Cerrillos in Chile.

Kathryn Williams

Kathryn’s debut solo album, Coming Up for Air, was released in November 2019 by Huddersfield Contemporary Records in association with NMC. The disc has been called ‘strangely fascinating’ (BBC Music Magazine), ‘extraordinary’ (Daffodil Perspective), and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, PBS Melbourne, and RNCM Radio. Releases on Another Timbre include Dial 45-21-95 (music by Ryoko Akama) with Apartment House and Breaths (music by Federico Pozzer).  Recent solo performances include BIFEM (Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music), Deep Minimalism 2.0 at the Southbank Centre, and Constellation (Chicago). Publications include the article ‘PIXERCISE: Piccolo performance practice, exercise and female body image’, published in Tempo, and a global literature review on COVID-19 and Music Performance for the Incorporated Society of Musicians. During lockdown, Kathryn and her duo partner Andy Ingamells have created a new audio visual work, Private Hire, in which they use their cars to make music.

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CeNeReM Postgraduate newsletter [September 2018]

This newsletter is a platform for MA and PhD students at the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM), University of Huddersfield, to share information about their recent activities.

In 2018 the CeReNeM postgraduate community has been involved in a wide range of activities, both on campus and beyond, with concerts, commissions, performances, lectures, publications, residencies, and presentations in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Colombia, the USA, Belgium, South Korea, Canada, Portugal, Denmark, Thailand, Sweden, Switzerland, and across the UK.

New Appointments

Many congratulations to Cassandra Miller and Mira Benjamin, both in the final stages of the PhD submission and exam process, for their new academic appointments starting this autumn. Cassandra was named Associate Head of Composition (Undergrad) at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Mira was named Lecturer in Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. From 2014–17, Cassandra held the Jonathan Harvey PhD Scholarship and Mira held the Duncan Druce PhD Scholarship at CeReNeM.

The full list of academic appointments, major residencies, and postdoctoral fellowships for CeReNeM alumni can be found here.

PhD Scholarship Recipients

We are excited to announce the recipients of four ERC-funded scholarships starting October 2018. These recipients will be working closely with the IRiMaS and FluCoMa research projects over the next four years. 

Cristina Ghirardini is working on the IRiMaS ethnomusicology case study and will be supervised by both CeReNeM’s Michael Clarke and Jonathan Stock at the University College Cork. Her research deals with Italian musical instruments and traditional music, especially from Northern and Central Italy. Within the IRiMaS project she is working on research entitled “Improvised poetry in ottava rima in Central Italy”. Cristina graduated in 2002 from the University of Bologna, with a thesis on the musical instruments of the Museo Ettore Guatelli in Ozzano Taro (Parma). In 2007 she received her PhD at the University of Torino with a dissertation on the sources of the Gabinetto armonico (Rome, 1722), a treatise on musical instruments by the Jesuit scholar Filippo Bonanni. Since 2008 she has been the sound archivist of the Centro per il dialetto romagnolo founded by the Fondazione Casa di Oriani of Ravenna, where she has digitised and catalogued field recordings done in Romagna by ethnomusicologists, linguists and ethnographers especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Since 2009 she has collaborated with the press office of Ravenna Festival. She was lecturer in history and technology of wind instruments at the Conservatory of Cesena from 2005–13, and in 2014 she held a one-year postdoctoral research fellowship from the University of Firenze for  an ethnographic investigation of the living practices of improvised poetry. In 2018 she received a grant from the University of Torino as a member of the project Sound Archives and Musical Instrument Collections.

Laurens van der Wee is working on the IRiMaS contemporary music case study and will be supervised by CeReNeM’s Michael Clarke and Robert Adlington. Laurens van der Wee earned a Master of Music in Composition and a Bachelor of Arts and Technology with Honours in Audio Design in 2011 and 2009 respectively, both at HKU Utrecht University of the Arts in The Netherlands. Since graduation Laurens has created work ranging from free improvisation to a smartphone app and audio-visual performance to music for dance. A paper about an alternative version of the software for Pierre Boulez’s Anthèmes 2 was presented at the ICMC in 2016, and his creative work has been presented at ICMC ’08 and ’09, SMC ’09 and ’10 and in the Computer Music Journal.

Maria Donohue will be working on the IRiMaS improvisation case study and will be supervised by CeReNeM’s Michael Clarke and Amanda Bailey at Bath Spa University. Maria has performed numerous concerts in the USA at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Brooklyn College Of Music, and has given recitals at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, participated in events with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and composed, directed, and performed in a show designed for people with severe and multiple learning and physical disabilities. She previously studied at Fiorello H. Laguardia High School in Manhattan famous for its representation in the Fame movies.

Jacob Hart will be working as part of the FluCoMa project and will be supervised by Frédéric Dufeu, Owen Green, and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay. Jacob’s research centres around tracking the creative process of techno-fluent composers with the goal of acquiring a better understanding of the contemporary ear. Before this, he studied at Université Rennes 2, France, and completed his Master’s research dissertation in 2017 under the supervision of Antoine Bonnet,  where he was also a Teaching Assistant in Computer Music.

 

Lawrence Dunn

In March, a new piece of Lawrence’s, Set of four, was premiered by Plus Minus ensemble (Mark Knoop, Tom Pauwels, Kasia Ziminska, and Serge Vuille) at City University in London. A studio recording of the piece has also been recently made with CeReNeM students Colin Frank and Irine Røsnes, available here. In April, the violin solo Habitual was performed in its final version in Cologne at a concert given by Sarah Saviet and Carl Rosman. Further performances are slated for Amsterdam and London this autumn, as well as a studio recording next year. In June, Gregor Forbes gave a performance of For piano (singing) in Glasgow, the companion to For piano (dancing) which was premiered by Philip Thomas in January. Lawrence’s review of London Contemporary Music Festival has also recently appeared in the most recent edition of Tempo.

In September, Quatuor Bozzini will perform Carrying at Klangforum Schwaz in Austria, alongside Cassandra Miller’s About Bach. The Bozzinis are also performing at Gaudeaumus Muziekweek, Utrecht, where Lawrence is shortlisted. The full, live version of While we are both will be performed by Ensemble Insomnio, alongside a new piece for Slagwerk Den Haag. A new piece will be performed in October by Ensemble x.y in London, and Jessica Aszodi performs While we are both in Belfast in November.

Oliver Larkin

Oli Larkin was recently awarded the 2018 FAUST award, a prestigious €2000 prize for software developed around the FAUST programming language. The award was for his work updating the iPlug C++ audio plug-in framework (with Creative Coding Lab director Alex Harker) and was adjudicated by experts from institutions such as IRCAM, CCRMA (Stanford) and GRAME. Oli also presented a paper on FAUST support in iPlug2 at the first International FAUST Conference in Mainz, Germany, in June, and in September he presented a paper at the Web Audio Conference in Berlin on iPlug2. iPlug2 offers many enhancements and adds support for building web-audio modules, a new format for web-audio plug-ins that Oli was involved in developing.

Later this year he will present at the Roli Audio Developers Conference (ADC) in London.
Over the summer period, Oli worked in Phipps Recital Hall with the HISS (Huddersfield Immersive Sound System) rigged in a cube shape for high order ambisonics. Seven composers visited Huddersfield to work with Oli’s experimental 3D audio sound synthesis software during a three-day residency. The feedback from the residencies forms part of Oli’s research and will guide future iterations of the software.

Hakan Ulus

In April, Hakan had the premiere of his piece Beton (2018) for female voice with sound objects, four clarinets, and electronics at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. With this commissioned piece he finished his one year Artist residency at the Academy. In March, Hakan’s piece Shrouded for soprano saxophone was premiered by Joshua Hyde at St. Pauls Hall. In May, he published an article titled “Siegeszug der Unterhaltungsmusik – Manieristische Tendenzen in der zeitgenössischen Kunstmusik” (“Triumph of Popular Music – Mannerist Tendencies in Contemporary Art Music”, MusikTexte 157).

In August, he participated at the Kalv Festival Academy in Sweden, where his piece Precious Liquids (2017) was performed by Ensemble Norbotten NEO and where he gave a lecture on his music. In October, his piece Karōshi (2018) for female voice and sound objects will be premiered at the Aussichten concert series of the NEOS-Music Foundation in Tolstefanz, Germany.  For November, he is invited as a keynote speaker to the Basler Forum für Musikästhetik to discuss the topic of mannerism with philosophers, musicologists, and composers.

Kathryn Williams

Kathryn Williams will perform PIXERCISE in the University of Huddersfield Sports Hall as part of hcmf// shorts on 19 November 2018. As the title implies, PIXERCISE is a collision between piccolo performance practise and exercise (in this case, high intensity interval training). The piece is an ongoing creative collaborative response to numerous shared concerns with USA-based Australian-Taiwanese composer Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh. These include perceptions of perfectionism in classical music performance and cultural norms regarding the female body in music and in exercise.

Also this term, Kathryn will perform a substantial set from the Coming Up for Air collection in the Kammer Klang series at Café Oto on 4 December. Coming Up for Air is a commissioning and performance project which limits pieces to a single breath. So far, Kathryn has an ever-growing collection of well over 100 pieces.

Manuel Contreras Vázquez

Manuel has published his first monographic CD and DVD, thanks to the support of the Chilean Government and other institutions in Spain, Italy and Finland. The CD Escorzos (“Foreshortenings”) contains chamber and orchestral works composed between 2008 and 2016 and performed by ensembles and soloists in Chile, France, Germany and Italy. The DVD Moebius is a video of his first chamber Opera, together with a short documentary about the creative process and the subject of the project: immigration.

In June, Manuel was selected by the composition commission program of the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung in Germany. The new work will be written for the Ensemble Contemporáneo in a project that also involved composers Miguel Farías and Francisco Concha.

In early August, Manuel was in his native Chile to participate in the 8th International Composers meeting, organized by the Pontificia Universidad Catóica de Chile and the Taller de Música Contemporanea ensemble, where he presented a lecture about his chamber opera Moebius.

Dejana Sekulic

After closing the spring season of her series Performance+Talk Sessions in June with a performance featuring pieces for prepared violin/bow and violin with performative electronics (with Gilles Doneux), the summer continued with exciting new beginnings.
On 6th July Dejana launched the Call for Scores 2018, commissioning pieces for her research Temporality of the Impossible. NADA: Act 1, a project in collaboration with film, sculpture, performance and installation artist Jasmina Cibic for which Dejana contributed with creation and performance on the instrument/sound installation for the video work of Cibic, featured in the exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980. The exhibition runs from 15 July 2018 to 13 January 2019 at MOMA, New York.

In the second part of July, Dejana took part in the Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2018. She gave two performances related to her research, Temporality of the Impossible, with pieces by Wojtek Blecharz (Phenotype), Aaron Cassidy (“the green is where”), Samuel Cedillo (Monologo I: Laja del Tiempo), Clara Iannotta (Dead wasps in a jam jar I), Dmitri Kourliandski (prePositions), Keeril Makan (Mu) and Robert Wannamaker (violin). Further performances during the Ferienkurse included her participation in the concert “Contemporary Insight”, where she played Zachary Seely’s Personal Gravity, as well as presenting  the project Docu_Presenc by Solomiya Moroz, where she played Moroz’s Artefacts of Presence for violin, live electronics, motion sensor and video. She also presented a Yuta Bandoh’s Untitled [fantastic] in the concert of Graeme Jennings’s violin studio concert. Besides solo violin works, Dejana played in the chamber session—together with Carlos Cordeiro (clarinet), Churen Li (piano) and Chris Pidcock (cello), she performed Niklas Lindberg’s Cross Section approx. 1:250. She was also part of the ViolinObo studio led by Cathy Milliken and Graeme Jennings. For the studio’s final concert Dejana played the world premiere of Alberto Carretero’s Ondeggiando for oboe and violin, with Mei Kamikawa. On the last day of Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Colin Frank (percussion) and Dejana gave a performance, “REFLECTIONS AND RUMBLINGS”, featuring pieces by CeReNeM MA student Thomas Weidemann (Beneath and Cut Out, for bass drum and violin) and Sarah Hennies (Psalm 2, for snare drum). Dejana was also one of the selected participants to give an intervention in the conference “Finding Democracy in Music”, organised by Robert Adlington and Liza Lim.

August took Dejana to Switzerland, where she was one of the mentors of a summer camp led by Julien Annoni (WeSpoke) and organised by Coordination Jeune Public. During this week of experimenting and exploratory music making with the children participating in the camp, Dejana created one of the five cubes, mets ta likette, featured in the final spectacle (available here). Starting September, Dejana will continue with the Performance+Talk Session Series. The Autumn season will include further performances of Temporality of the Impossible repertoire in Brussels, Antwerp and Huddersfield, as well as performances with the LAPS ensemble.

Solomiya Moroz

On June 11, Solomiya Moroz presented a lecture/performance at AV Body Symposium hosted by Ben Spatz and the University of Huddersfield Drama Department. She presented her research in composition with audiovisual embodiment where Colin Frank, Ilona Krawczyk, and Cristina Fuentes, fellow researchers from the University of Huddersfield, also participated. In July, Solomiya participated in Darmstadt Ferienkurse, taking part in the Composing with the Archive workshop led by Kirsten Reese. There she presented DNA problems, a 7-min piece based on materials from the IMD archives, critically questioning gender and the notion of the ‘female aesthetic’ in contemporary music as discussed in the past forums (1980s) of Darmstadt Ferienkurse. On September 7, the final version of Arrows That Remain for string quartet and electronics will be premiered at the Gaudeamus Muziekweek in Utrecht, Holland. The piece was written for the Bozzini String Quartet and developed as part of the Composer’s Kitchen 2018 programme, taking place in Montreal, Canada and Utrecht, Holland. Recently, Solomiya has been selected as part of PIVOT professional mentorship programme hosted by the Canadian League of Composers and the Canadian Music Centre. As a result, Solomiya will be writing a piece for Continuum Contemporary Music Ensemble, which will be presented in March 2019.

David Velez Rodriguez

David’s new album, The things that objects can tell us about ourselves, is a recordings-based composition released on CD by London label Flaming Pines. This piece is a musical exploration of the filmmaking Foley technique recorded in a sculpture studio in France, where David aimed to create a series of fictional catastrophic situations by improvising with a number of discarded objects. In July at Iklectik (London), he premiered Raw matter, a four-piece concert based on two very dissimilar actions: cooking and the destruction of found objects, along with a laptop performance using field recordings, sine waves and voice samples taken from interviews  realised as part of his research. He also exhibited the installation Patacones & San Bei Ji chicken on “Auditium” in Medellín. The installation is based on the sounds produced in the home preparation of these two recipes from Colombia and Taiwan.

The FRAC des Pays de la Loire Museum in France acquired for their collection the 6-channel installation Une Affaire De Friction Et De Gravite that David produced during the residency program curated by Alejandro Martín Maldonado.

“Through the participation of the sound artist David Vélez, the question of gravity takes an acoustic turn that accounts for the sound potential of the pieces presented in the exhibition. Thus David meticulously captured the sounds of living together with the other resident artists, from their workshop open to the public, to their intimacy in the main room, the kitchen, where they shared meals and discussions for two and a half months”. (Museum catalogue)

On October 11th he will perform at Cafe OTO together with Huddersfield alumna Ching-Fang Wu, in which she will cook a series of traditional Taiwanese recipes while David will be live mixing the sounds using a number of microphones, hydrophones and piezos, and performing with sine waves and sounds made with field recordings captured in Thai, Colombian and Jamaican kitchens in the UK.

Marco Bidin

Marco is currently working on the composition of a work for piano and electronics, based on motives from Montenegro and dedicated to the pianist Maria Skender, who will premiere it in November at the Fruchtkasten Museum in Stuttgart, Germany. He is also completing Magnificat for choir, schola, two organs, percussion and electronics, commissioned by the Cathedral of St. Eberhardt (Stuttgart). At the same time, he is a tutor for the Studio for Electronic Music at the University of Music of Stuttgart, assisting Prof. Marco Stroppa leading group exercises on computer-assisted composition and sound synthesis.

In May 2018 Marco performed together with the Japanese Soprano Chisa Tangaki on a concert tour in Northeast Italy on period pipe organs, presenting Early Music works and modern Lieder for organ and voice. On 12 October he will premiere in Savorgnano, Italy, work by Di Zhao, a young composer from Xinghai, China. For November, he has been invited to hold a workshop on classic and contemporary techniques on the organ at the Silpakorn University of Bangkok, where he will also perform two organ concerts, the first with traditional repertoire and the second featuring his interpretation of John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP. ALEA Associazione Laboratorio Espressioni Artistiche released the CD Incontri 2017 with Marco’s electroacoustic works in a joint project with the Brazilian composer Daniel Quaranta.

Eva Sjuve

In August, Eva was invited to premiere her piece Metopia Data Dust at International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2018) in Daegu, South Korea. The theme of this year’s ICMC was Preserve–Engage–Advance, and for this theme Eva recorded samples of Buchla and Serge analog synthesizers during a winter break residency at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm, using Music Information Retrieval algorithms written in Python to slice samples to generate sonic dust for the composition, a way to find new approaches to work with old musical instruments.

Eva has been invited to participate in the Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence workshop, which takes place at Victoria & Albert Museum in London, 22–23 September, and is part of the exhibition The Future Starts Here in the London Design Festival.

Linda Jankowska

In April 2018 together with Distractfold Ensemble, Linda worked again with the composers of the Harvard Group for New Music. The group then travelled to Montréal to give a presentation with Hanna Hartman at CCRMIT, as well as performing at the No Hay Banda concert series. Other activities have included a presentation at Bath Spa University (with Mauricio Pauly), performances at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, and collaborative work with Mauricio Pauly at the Civitella Ranieri in Italy.

Linda keeps working on a few long-term collaborations, among others with Katherine Young and Sam Salem, for which there aren’t any official logs, yet they are as important to her practice as any visible public events.

Andrew Leslie Hooker

In March, Andrew Leslie Hooker recorded and performed a new piece written for no-input mixing board (NIMB) entitled LikeDustBlownAcrossTheSkin at the Exemption from Meaning composers’ residency in Aberystwyth along with Toshimaru Nakamura (JPN), Rhodri Davies (UK) and others. This led to the ongoing development of a much larger project based upon the philosophical relationship between NIMB and Butoh dance methodologies involving choreographers Melissa Pasut (USA), Sayoko Onishi (JPN) and contrabassist Emmanuel Fleitz (FRA), as well as Nakamura and Davies.

Over the last few months, as well as performing a set of solo NIMB improvisations at NAWR in Swansea, recording no-input duets with flautist Manuel Zurria (ITA) and contrabassist Aleksander Gabrys (POL) as part of his PhD research, performing new works on a regular basis with Anoikis Contemporary Dance and preparing a CD release of electroacoustic/no-input compositions for Entr’acte, Andrew has written an essay entitled “Where Lost Bodies Roam”, an aesthetic and performative interpretation of sacred place as an inter-dimensional zone of communion via the practice of ecstatic meditation and no-input composition, for an anthology curated by Sacred Places (Cartographies of Belonging), a Liverpool Hope University Research Cluster, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.

Jung In Jung

Jung In presented her short paper “Bridging Abstract Sound and Dance Ideas with Technology: Interactive Dance Composition as Practice-Based Research” at the International Conference on Live Interfaces 2018  held at Casa da Música in Porto, Portugal, in June. The paper summarises her PhD research and gives examples of her practical works such as Locus, which was performed with two collaborating dancers at Electric Spring in 2016.

From 10–17 August she had a short artist residency at ARoS museum in Aarhus, Denmark, with her art collective Flux Factory from New York City. The collective was  invited to use the atelier space at the museum during August and September so that the audience can be engaged closely by walking into the artists’ work environment. During this residency, Jung In decided to try out something different outside of her usual practice. As a result, she created a fun social application using Max for the museum’s Wednesday evening event. Inspired by dating apps, her app asked some questions to the user and found the best match from the collective members as a way of introducing the artists.

CeNeReM Postgraduate newsletter [February 2018]

The 2017–18 academic year has featured workshops and concerts by leading soloists and ensembles, including loadbang [USA], Richard Haynes [AUS/SUI], Teodoro Anzellotti [GER], Francesco Dillon [ITA], and Joshua Hyde [AUS/FRA], as well as lectures and masterclasses by Clara Iannotta, Hilda Paredes, Chaya Czernowin, Amnon Wolman, Jamie Currie, Hans Tutschku, Lyn Goeringer, and Christopher Trapani, plus a diverse range of artists as part of the annual Electric Spring festival.

Our MA and PhD postgraduate community has been as vibrant and active as ever, with concerts, commissions, performances, lectures, publications, residencies, and presentations both here in Huddersfield and internationally, including work in Canada, the USA, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Turkey, Finland, Latvia, and across the UK.

Cassandra Miller

At Spectrum in New York this past August, violinist Conrad Harris performed a solo concert featuring Cassandra’s work, including for mira, Serenata, and  Just So. The concert was curated by composer Michael Vincent Waller. In September, EXAUDI performed Cassandra’s work Guide as part of the BBC Proms concert ‘Proms at the Tanks at Tate Modern’, curated and hosted by Sara Mohr-Pietsch. This piece was also given its North American premiere in October in New York by the vocal ensemble Ekmeles.

Standing head-and-shoulders above everything was Cassandra Miller’s Guide […]  creating a beautiful and moving sense  of multitudes of voices raised in rapt, quiet praise. – The Telegraph

Soprano Juliet Fraser performed two modules of Cassandra and Juliet’s ever-evolving collaboration Tracery at the Klangspuren Schwatz festival in Austria this September.
Cassandra’s new orchestral work Round (commissioned and premiered by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra last spring) was given its UK premiere by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra this November under the baton of Maestro Ilan Volkov, who performed it in both Glasgow and Birmingham. On February 2nd, the piece was performed twice in Canada, by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and by the UVic Symphony.

Round demonstrated a sure feeling for orchestral sonority—drawing on a lesser known Tchaikovsky  melody (rendered by cellist  Gaspar Cassadó) as a ‘cantus firmus’ around which the texture gradually  opens-out; taking in antiphonal trumpets and off-stage tubular bells, while maintaining its hushed aura  through to the rapturous culmination. Ilan Volkov secured a committed response in this absorbing piece. – Arcana.fm

Hakan Ulus

From September to November 2017, Hakan Ulus was Artist-in-Residence at the Academy of Arts Berlin (Berlin Stipend). In October he had a radio interview with Dr. Ellen Freyberg in SWR (Germany), where he talked about the Freedom of Art. Also in October, Hakan published an article titled ‘Die Krise als Chance?! Strategien zur Überwindung des Manierismus in der zeitgenössischen Kunstmusik’ (‘The Crisis As a Chance?! Strategies To Overcome The Mannerism of Contemporary Art Music’) as well as an article about Peter Eötvös in the February (2018) edition of ÖMZ (Austria). A larger article titled “Erfahrungen, Realitäten, Visionen—Meine Probenerfahrungen und Vorschläge zur Verbesseung der Probenbedingungen komplexer Musik (‘Experiences, Realities, Visions—My rehearsal experiences and suggestions for improving the rehearsal conditions of complex music’) is set to be published in the next few weeks in the edition Klangreden of the Rombach Verlag (Germany).

In January, Hakan participated at the 2018 BFE/RMA Research Students’ Conference here at Huddersfield University. He gave a talk titled ‘The identity of contemporary art music: current mannerist tendencies in the second decade of the 21st century, with a focus on the scene in Germany’.

Performances of Hakan’s pieces took place in Dresden, Tolstefanz and Istanbul by Trio Sostenuto and Hezarfen Ensemble. On January 31st, Hakan had his first portrait concert supported by the Kunststiftung NRW, Goethe Institut, and BAUART in Istanbul. Six pieces of his were performed: Iqra (2015) for ensemble, Talaq II (2016) for piccolo clarinet, A.Q. (2014) for piano trio, Alaq I and Alaq II (2015; 2017) for amplified piano and Precious Liquids (2017) for clarinet and string trio.

Solomiya Moroz

Solomiya Moroz has been selected as one of four participants in the Composer’s Kitchen programme with the Bozzini Quartet, including sessions in April 2018 in Montreal and a performance as part of the 2018 Gaudeamus Festival in Utrecht.

In October 2017, Solomiya presented a project in collaboration with Canadian/Ukrainian composers and artists titled Docu_Presence at the Contrasts Festival for Contemporary Music in Lviv, Ukraine, where fellow CeReNeM PhD student Dejana Sekulic also took part.

Docu_Presence examined archival materials and their contrasting existence with live performers.

In this project, we deconstructed and recomposed sound and video materials as well as embodied traditions such as folklore. By working with the documents, we were also addressing folklore as an idea for cultural transmission and its fascinating, multifaceted layers of interaction both in urban and traditional contexts.

The project took the form of an installation-performance with installations by Ostap Manulyak and Oksana Kazmina and a concert performance of pieces by Taylor Brook [CA], Ostap Manulyak [UA], Julian Kytasty [USA] and Solomiya Moroz [CA/UA], with performances by Dejana Sekulic [SR], violin, Julian Kytasty, bandura, and Solomiya Moroz, flute and electronics.

 

Brice Catherin

In September 2017 Brice visited Amsterdam with Sophie Fetokaki to premiere Svioloncello for voice, cello and luthier at the Fringe Festival. It was then performed later in France in the Jura mountains in November. After that Brice and Sophie worked on O, or what you will for cello and electronics, premiered by Bethany Nicholson in Hull on her Master’s recital, and they are now working on a new work with Yorkshire-based poet Alicia Fernandez, to be premiered at the Leeds Lieder Festival in April 2018.

Brice performed work by Galina Ustvolskaya in the Jura mountains early December; in January he recorded Kasper T. Toeplitz’s Cello Titan for cello and electronics in Paris for a portrait album of Toeplitz’s work to be released later this year. He also performed his own cello Sequences in Hull and Huddersfield.

Marco Bidin

Marco’s work TotenTanzToccata for percussion, organ and electronics was premiered on October 7, 2017 in Stuttgart during the percussion festival Schlagzeugnacht by Paolo Bertoldo, with Marco at the organ assisted by the young organist and composer Wanying Lin. One week later, the same trio celebrated the 10th anniversary of Marco’s project Incontri (“intersections”) — Eastern and Western culture in Contemporary Music, with a concert that took place in Savorgnano, Italy, featuring compositions and improvisations by the performers themselves and Young Jo Lee among others. On December 8, 2017 Marco’s work Metamorfosi I for alto saxophone (Zhe Wang) and harpsichord (Wanying Lin) was premiered at the Music University of Stuttgart.

From October to February he worked as a research assistant at the University of Music of Karlsruhe together with Prof Marlon Schumacher, developing patches in OpenMusic for the OMPrisma library, dedicated to the compositional control of sound spatialisation. At the same time, he has continued teaching as a tutor for the StEM (Studio for Electronic Music) at the University of Music of Stuttgart, assisting Prof Marco Stroppa leading group exercises on computer-assisted composition and sound synthesis.

On February 15, his work Metamorphosis II for accordion was premiered at Huddersfield by Teodoro Anzellotti. PiPaPa, an electroacoustic work dedicated to the Italian poet Pier Paolo Pasolini, will be played at the Cité Universitaire in Paris on April 9. A small concert tour on period pipe organs, with performance of early music for organ and voice, is scheduled for May in northeast Italy together with the Japanese Soprano Chisa Tanigaki.

He is currently working on a CD release with electroacoustic works in a joint project with the Brazilian composer Daniel Quaranta, produced by ALEA (Associazione Laboratorio Espressioni Artistiche).

Lawrence Dunn

Lawrence has recently had music performed by Quatuor Bozzini in Aberdeen, as part of Sound festival, and the quartet’s Composers’ Kitchen scheme. A new piano piece for Philip Thomas was recently premiered in Huddersfield. In March, a new piece for London ensemble Plus-Minus will be performed. In April, Sarah Saviet will perform a new piece for solo violin in Cologne. Lawrence has also been shortlisted for the 2018 Gaudeamus prize. The recent piece While we are both (developed with Juliet Fraser) will be performed at the Gaudeamus Muziekweek, alongside a new piece for Slagwerk Den Haag.

Dejana Sekulic

The Temporality of the Impossible: Performance+Talk series continues to form a key component of Dejana’s research project Temporality of the Impossible: contemporary violin music, technique, notation and performance. Performance+Talk continues for the 2017-18 season which will primarily explore the aesthetics of violin sound, from the barely audible to extreme presence and everything in between. The programme features pieces with various degrees of extreme and complex performance, including some exploring movement, physical gesture and decoupling as the basis for musical material.

How impossible is the “impossible”? The lasting curiosity of composers in exploring expression through music continues the legacy of creating pieces that are fresh, “new” and challenging not only for listening, but also to artistry of playing. Subsequently, performers continue to be challenged by these pieces demanding unconventional approaches. Temporality of the Impossible focuses on these challenges, and addresses two important and inseparable parts of music and performance: the tangible and the abstract. While the former investigates challenges of the extended violin techniques and the notation, the latter investigates the shaping of sensibility for understanding the music. Questioning what is this “impossible” and how do we overcome it by finding remedies for technical “unplayability”, the aim of this research is to simultaneously seek out ways for reshaping the understanding for the “new” aesthetics and expressivity, and whether and how we grow into appreciating this “unconventional”.

Different Performance+Talk sessions will include works by Wojtek Blecharz, John Cage, Aaron Cassidy, Samuel Cedillo, James Dillon, Clara Iannotta, Brian Ferneyhough, John King, Helmut Lachenmann, Keeril Makan, Salvatore Sciarrino, Zach Seely, Robert Wannamaker, amongst others.

Moss Freed

January was a busy month for Moss, with the inaugural rehearsal of a new large ensemble established to perform his compositions. It features some of Moss’s favourite musicians in the UK, coming from a breadth of jazz, experimental, folk and improv backgrounds: Kit Downes, Ruth Goller, James Maddren, George Crowley, Laura Jurd, Francesca Ter-Berg and Tullis Rennie, alongside himself.

January involved a gig at Ronnie Scott’s with Moss’s band Let Spin, a presentation on musical power dynamics in context of his recent compositions at the BFE/RMA conference in Huddersfield, and a performance of a new piece in Hull by Bethany Nicholson (cello) and Berlin-based academic/improviser/composer Christopher Williams (double bass), as part of a lecture/workshop he presented. Moss is currently working on a version of this piece for visiting CeReNeM saxophonist Joshua Hyde, which will be performed at St Paul’s on March 19.

Between November and January, Moss was touring around the UK on and off with ‘indo-jazz’ clarinettist Arun Ghosh and joined a new sextet led by trombonist/improviser Sarah Gail Brand and composer Sam Eastmond. Over the past six months he has been working with various ensembles on his Grid Pieces, including Ensemble Fractus (Hull), City University Experimental Ensemble (who will perform Relay at Iklectik in London on 5th April), and Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra.

July 2017 saw three recordings sessions. The first was of John Zorn’s music by the Spike Orchestra, for whom Moss plays guitar. The record will be released as part of the Masada Book 3 series in April on Zorn’s Tzadik label. The second recording is gradually becoming the third Let Spin album and will contain two of Moss’s pieces. The third was of his violin & piano piece how not to dance by Flora Curzon and Henry Tozer at the Vortex in London.

 

Eva Sjuve

Eva Sjuve was invited to deliver the keynote at the Arts in the Environment Symposium in Helsinki, August 31 – September 2, 2017 in the strand on (Environmental) Art & Aesthetics. This trans-disciplinary symposium included scientists, philosophers, artists, and composers from all over Europe to promote exchange and discussion. Eva’s presentation addressed sonic art, aesthetics, and art practice working with the environment and computing as a tool. Papers will be published in a special edition together with Helsinki University of the Arts at the end of 2018.

From 19–21 October 2017, Eva was invited to present her research at the Open Fields Conference in Riga, Latvia, on the theme of Virtualities and Realities. The conference was a collaboration with the Art Academy of Latvia and the Latvian National Museum of Art. Eva’s presentation was on aesthetics, computing and mapping the virtuality/reality experiences of sonic works in urban spaces. More information available here and here.

David Velez

David’s recent activities include a concert for two actors and one director, Une affaire de friction et de gravité, performed at FRAC Des Pays DeLa Loire Residency Program, Carquefou, France, on November 4–5. This work is a 45-minute installation for six-channel electronics. At the same location, The way things fall was performed under David’s direction on November 17—David captured the sounds of living together with the other resident artists, from their workshop open to the public, to their interactions in the main room, the kitchen, where they shared meals and discussions for two and a half months.

 

Colin Frank

On February 21, Colin Frank and Prof Philip Thomas presented the opening concert of the Electric Spring Festival in works for piano, percussion and electronics by Thomas Meadowcroft [AUS], Rozalie Hirs [NL], and CeReNeM visiting researcher Luc Döbereiner [GER].

Colin is joined by fellow postgraduates Cristian Morales Ossio, Irine Røsnes, Paola Muñoz Manuguián, and Pablo Galaz Salamanca along with CeReNeM friend Peyee Chen on February 27 to present recent works by Kate Soper, Gabriele Manca, Cristian Morales Ossio, and Colin Frank at St. Paul’s Hall. Their second concert takes place on March 20th, where Colin, Irine Røsnes, and Peyee Chen will perform work by James Saunders, Stuart Saunders Smith, Kate Soper, Thomas Weideman, and Colin Frank.

Pam Hulme

In November Pam Hulme performed a new work for organ and live-looping, Es ist gewisslich an der Zeit, commissioned by the Theologisches Konvikt, Berlin. Based on the melody and text of the 16th-century Lutheran hymn, the piece uses looping, shifting meter and electronic manipulation to explore anxieties around time and belonging. The performance took place at Golgothakirche in Berlin-Mitte and was in collaboration with Pf. Volker Jastrembski and the Theology Faculty of Humboldt University, Berlin.

 

 

CeReNeM Postgraduate Newsletter [August 2017]

This newsletter is a platform for PhD music students at the Centre of Research in New Music (CeReNeM), University of Huddersfield, to share their recent music activities and upcoming work.

2017 has been a busy year for CeReNeM’s graduate composer cohort, with the research centre hosting a wide range of performers and ensembles, including Garth Knox (viola) [GBR/FR], the duo of Aisha Orazbayeva (violin) [GBR/KAZ] & Joseph Houston (piano) [GBR/GER], Juliet Fraser (soprano) [GBN], Line Upon Line Percussion [USA], and the Quasar Saxophone Quartet [CAN], and guest lecturers including Michael Winter, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Judy Dunaway, Sam Pluta, Jennifer Walshe, Ann Cleare, and Miller Puckette.

Contributors to this month’s newsletter are Lawrence Dunn, Solomiya Moroz, Jorge Boehringer, Linda Jankowska, Pia Palme, Tadej Droljc, Oli Larkin, and Abel Paúl. Their activities have spanned an exciting range of international festivals, commissions, and performances with major venues, ensembles, and presenters, including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini (Quebec), Wien Modern (Austria), BBC Radio 3, Darmstadt (Germany), hcmf//, Mixtur Festival (Spain), Café OTO, MADATAC (Spain), and Ars Electronica (Austria) as well as significant academic conferences in the USA, Finland, Germany, and the UK.

PhD Scholarship Recipients

We are excited to announce the recipients of our 2017 PhD Scholarship call:

The Jonathan Harvey Scholarship in Composition will be held by Hakan Ulus, a German-Turkish composer. Hakan has studied composition with Ernst Helmuth Flammer, Adriana Hölszky, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf and Tristan Murail at the Mozarteum University Salzburg (B.A. 2013, M.A. 2015), at the HMT Leipzig (Erasmus), and Contemporary Music at the HfMDK Frankfurt (International Ensemble Modern Academy, M.M. 2016). He has also completed studies in musicology at the University Mozarteum Salzburg.

Hakan has won several stipends (e.g. Berlin-stipend 2017 of the Academy of Arts Berlin, Artist-in-Residence Istanbul 2017 of the Art-Foundation NRW Germany, International Ensemble Modern Academy 2015/16, DRK International Composers Residency Singapore 2015, Harvard Composition Institute Residency 2014, I-Park Foundation Residency 2015, Turkish Cultural Foundation 2014, Arbeitsstipendium Salzburg 2014, EMAS 2014) and prizes (impuls Competition 2017, Recherche Competition) and has received commissions from impuls Festival 2019, Ensemble Francaix of the ANAM 2017, IEMA 2016, City of Munich 2014, and Ensemblia Festival 2013.

His works are performed by many renowned ensembles, including Ensemble Recherche, Ensemble SurPlus, Ensemble intercontemporain, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Aventure, Talea Ensemble, IEMA-Ensemble and Ensemble mise-en at international festivals of contemporary music (e.g. Salzburg Biennale, Klangspuren Schwaz, KlangNetz Dresden,  ZKM Karlsruhe, ManiFeste Academy Paris). His writings have been published by Musik & Ästhetik, MusikTexte and Wolke Verlag. Currently he is Artist-in-Residence in the Istanbul-Studio of the Art-Foundation NRW, Germany.

The Denis Smalley Scholarship in Electronic Music will be held by James Bradbury. James has recently completed his Master of Music qualification with supervision from Dr. Chris Tonkin at the University of Western Australia. He  follows a practice-based research approach and performs electronic music involving highly autonomous or interactive elements. James has won awards from the University of Western Australia, including the Callaway Medal and the Edith Cowan Prize in Music for the most outstanding undergraduate and highest ranked undergraduate student in music, respectively. James was also the 2016 Schenberg Fellow, an position that allowed him to travel to Europe to study at IRCAM, Paris, as part of the ‘Manifeste’ festival and with Dr. Kerry Hagan at the University of Limerick, Ireland. In 2017 he released recordings and Max/MSP patches from one of his systems, Biomimicry, as a digital product, which culminated in its first live performance with experimental West Australian vocalist, Sage Pbbbt.

The Duncan Druce Scholarship in Performance will be held by Sophie Fetokaki. Sophie has studied a variety of creative disciplines, including singing, acting, dance, literature, composition, and the music of oral traditions. She has studied at the Conservatoire of Amsterdam, City University London, University of Amsterdam, City Literary Institute, and Trinity Laban Conservatoire.

As a singer she has worked with Reinbert de Leeuw, Etienne Siebens, Arnold Marinissen, Alfredo Bernadini; with Asko/Schönberg and the L.A. Philharmonic in Louis Andriessen’s Theatre of the World with the Dutch National Opera; at Radio Kootwijk, Theater Carré, Bimhuis, Melkweg (Netherlands) and the Walt Disney Concert Hall (USA).

As a director and dramaturge she has worked with Ensemble Himeros at the Utrecht Early Music Festival, and at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival with her own performance art quartet Knot Applicable. 

As a curator she works regularly on her interdisciplinary performing arts series DoorKruising (AFK funded), in which she explores performativity, embodiment, the boundaries between art forms, and the translation of concept into performance. 

Lawrence Dunn

Lawrence recently finished making a piece for Juliet Fraser, entitled While we are both, a collaboration with poet Caitlin Doherty premiered in Huddersfield in February. Further performances were given in Chicago in April and again in London in late June.

He has also recently been working with Quatuor Bozzini in Montreal as part of their Composers’ Kitchen programme, with a new string quartet to be premiered in Aberdeen in October as part of the Sound festival. (Additionally, an arrangement of the Star-spangled Banner for string quartet was recently performed at the London concert series 840.)

In May, Lawrence’s orchestra piece Ambling, waking was premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov at the Tectonics festival, Glasgow. It will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3, June 3. Lawrence also presented a paper at the Performing Indeterminacy conference in Leeds at the end of June. 

In early July, Lawrence will be working with American violinist Sarah Saviet on a new solo violin piece as part of an Aldeburgh residency. Later in the year, Sarah will be performing Claribel, a piece for violin and piano written for Aisha Orazbayeva and Joseph Houston. New composition projects are also planned with the flautist Carla Rees, and the New York-based ensemble Loadbang. 

Solomiya Moroz

Solomiya has had a number of creative projects over the past few months. In early May her piece On Fragments had its Canadian premiere, performed by the Quasar Sax Quartet in Montreal. Later this same month, Solomiya participated as flutist and composer in Keys, Wind and Strings Festival in Toronto and Montreal (May 24-26) with Thin Edge New Music Collective and Olivia Steimel, accordion premiering works of Canadian composers.

In June Solomiya attended the Klingt Gut! symposium in Hamburg, Germany, where she presented her paper Simulacra Studies and Composition with Gesture:

 

In this paper I discuss my process in composition with gesture while demonstrating examples from Simulacra Studies and from my recent work. In Simulacra Studies, I explored the drama of a missing piano interface while embodying physically the act of playing without the instrument itself. The piece is concerned with gestuality as a result of the instrumental behaviour where personal qualities are juxtaposed with the embodied capabilities of the performer. There is a video component to the piece which initially establishes real-time correlation with the performer, only to become amplified, disjoined and broken into other narratives as the piece progresses. Thus the physical gestural behaviour becomes magnified with mediatized video experiences of the pianist as a person playing with images of himself on himself as one does with gender, sexuality, power, fragility, superficiality, banality, etc.

Jorge Boehringer

Composer/performer Jorge Boehringer joined University of Huddersfield students Stef Connor, Xueyang Fang, Leah Stuttard, and Professor Rupert Till for a journey to New York City to present papers at the Sounds of Prehistory and Antiquity conference at City University of New York’s Center for Music Iconography.  Jorge gave a talk -slated to be published later this year – about how some of Yorkshire’s local stone age artworks might be viewed as antecedents for contemporary sculptural and sound art practices. He also performed Son of a Waterbull, a piece for wood blocks and electronic tones, at both the conference and later in the week at a concert held in Brooklyn at the Sunview Luncheonette.  The program for this concert also included his solo works Unnatural Isle and Spectral Lama.

Jorge has also recently returned from Prague where he and CeReNuM alumna Eleanor Cully were the invited artists for a workshop and exhibition hosted by Prague College.  The exhibition, CyberSpace#2017, presented the results of a weeklong workshop researching new conceptual and technical bridges within experimental media art practice, network installations, kinetic sculpture, ambisonic and binaural sound, and music.

While in Prague, Cully and Boehringer also premiered their new musical duo Kneeling Coats at the Prague Headphone Festival.  They also presented several solo and ensemble works alongside composer Ian Mikyska and the ensemble Margaretova Citrony, at a concert in the theatre of the Scout Institute on the Old Town Square in Prague.

Jorge performed pieces for viola and electronics on Sunday July 2 at Wharf Chambers in Leeds under his solo-pseudonym Core of the Coalman, alongside American percussion and guitar duo 75 Dollar Bill, and Leeds-based New Wave of Hysterical Mania, Guttersnipe.

Photo courtesy of Anna Baštýřová.

Linda Jankowska

In 2016/17 Linda was primarily busy co-curating and co-producing the Cut and Splice Festival in Manchester. Cut & Splice is as an acclaimed international festival of sound art and experimental music presented by Sound and Music and BBC Radio 3. Performances and artist interviews are broadcast on Radio 3’s flagship contemporary music show, Hear and Now.

The Festival happened in the North for the first time since its inception and welcomed an array of international artists such as Hanna Hartman, Steven Kazuo Takasugi, and Christina Kubisch. It focused on the idea of digital  presence, omnipresence and ambiguity. Distractfold Ensemble presented a carefully selected range of mixed media, electroacoustic, sound art and music theatre works making for a two-day feast of focused listening.

Earlier in August 2016 together with Distractfold Ensemble she returned to Darmstadt to present two programmes of music at the Central station and co- curated a CD featuring remixes and reworking based on the festival’s 70-year archives. Interested in extended performance practice she challenged herself to learn the percussion part for Michael Pisaro’s Concentric Rings in Magnetic Levitation.

In April 2017 together with Distractfold Ensemble she was in residence at Stanford University. Linda also performed at hcmf//, Rainy Days in Luxembourg and Kammer Klang at Café OTO. 

Photo courtesy of Dimitri Djuric.

Pia Palme

Last November, Pia Palme’s VOM RAUSCH IM SCHWARM III, a work for ensemble and wind-machine, was premiered by ensemble Kontrapunkte at the Wiener Musikverein during Wien Modern, Vienna’s biggest and oldest festival of contemporary music. In the same month, Pia Palme received the Ernst-Krenek-Preis for contemporary composition, a biennially awarded prize from the City of Vienna. Recently, Pia Palme held a series of performance-lectures, a format she uses to merge vocality, instrumental performance (with her Kueng contrabass recorder), electronics, video, and more theoretical explorations. Performances were held in academic contexts at the Vienna University of Applied Arts, at the 16th annual congress of the GMTH in Hanover, Germany, and at the Vocality/Instrumentality symposium at the University of Huddersfield, but also at Vienna’s renowned jazz club Porgy&Bess.

In spring 2017, Pia Palme finished her thesis The Noise of Mind: A Feminist Practice in Composition under Prof. Liza Lim and Prof. Monty Adkins; she is currently working on a number of commissions (for the Manchester-based trio ATEM, festivals Klangspuren Tirol, BTzM Austria, and Wien Modern) to be premiered in fall 2017. A number or experimental performances complete Pia Palme’s activities, including a performance with German vocal artist Ute Wassermann and double bass player Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka at the V:NM festival for experimental music in Graz. 

Tadej Droljc

After almost two years of developing various tools, techniques and compositional strategies Tadej Droljc finally finished his 23 minutes long audiovisual piece entitled Capillaries Capillaries that represents the core of his PhD portfolio. The piece was performed at Electric Spring Festival in Huddersfield (UK),MADATAC 08 festival in Madrid (ES), Radeon Amsterdam (NL) and Sajeta Festival in Tolmin (SI), and received some very positive critiques in Tempo, 5 against 4, and Radio Student. The first movement, which also exists as a self standing work entitled Capillaries, won a Most Promising Video Artist Award at the MADATAC 08 festival in Madrid. The full version (Capillaries Capillaries) is currently in the final selection (top 5 in its category) for a Lumen’s Meural Student Prize. 

Tadej will be performing at several upcoming festivals, including Kamfest (15.8., Kamnik, SI) and Ars Electronica (7.9., Linz, AT). 

Oli Larkin

Creative coding lab PhD student Oli Larkin is researching abstract sound synthesis techniques for spatial audio platforms. In June he presented some of the experimental software he has been developing at the annual Sounds in Space symposium at The University of Derby on a 3D with-height ambisonic sound system comprising 28 speakers. The event was live streamed on YouTube in a binaural format so remote listeners could hear the 3D sound via headphones.

In July he was selected to take part in the Sound and Music Computing (SMC) summer school and conference at Aalto University in Helsinki, which featured four days of lectures from world experts on acoustics and signal processing. Later in the year, Oli is scheduled to present a poster at the Roli Audio Developers conference in London.

Abel Paúl

Abel’s work Room & Elbow was awarded the SGAE Young Composer’s Prize (one of Spain’s most important composition prizes) in November last year, while his work Nombre y Vacío, commissioned by Vertixe Sonora Ensemble, was premiered in Santiago de Compostela (Spain) last December. More recently, Abel’s work Mano y Mente, a commission of the Mixtur Festival, was premiered last March in Barcelona. 

 

CeReNeM Postgraduate Newsletter [May 2016]

This newsletter is a platform for PhD music students at the Centre of Research in New Music (CeReNeM), University of Huddersfield, to share their recent music activities and upcoming work.

A special mention this month goes to Hali Santamas who recently passed his PhD. Hali primarily works with digital sound and still image, evoking memory through affective atmospheres. The maximal aesthetics of Idris Khan, Swans, Mark Rothko and Tim Hecker are key influences on his creative output which is characterised by its layered, processed and abstracted use of recorded time. His most recent creative and theoretical works explore the conceptual space and queer possibilities that arise from the temporal friction between digital sound and still image. See more at Hali’s website: http://hali.io

Elías Merino

http://www.eliasmerino.com

Recent:

Elías has recently released an album entitled ‘initial suppressions’ (limited signed edition 1 copy) on renowned record label Leerraum. The album will be presented on the 22th of May in multichannel, in a [ ] leerraum showcase with Zimoun, Richard Garet, D’incise, Janiv Oron, Yuzo Kako and Colliding Fields. Organised by CT::SWaM. New York City. https://www.facebook.com/events/241302709578278/

Elías also performed alongside Tomoko Sauvage at FUSE artspace (Bradford, UK) http://www.wearefuse.co/project/106/tomoko-sauvage-elas-merino/ – And performed at Medialab-Prado (Madrid, Spain) http://medialab-prado.es/article/encuentros-avlab-abril-mayo-y-junio

Upcoming performances include:

May: ‘Study #04 for Indivisible Streams’ a one speaker sound installation at Sound and Sculpture Conference (Huddersfield, UK).  More info: https://soundandsculpture.wordpress.com/schedule/

May-June: ‘Hypergradients’ (in collaboration with the visual artist Esstro9) is a 2 channel audio + 2 channel video installation as a part of the exhibition ‘Estado_Abstracto’ (Guadalajara, Mexico).

June: A 10 day funded artistic residency as guest composer at EMS Elektronmusikstudion. (Stockholm, Sweden) http://www.elektronmusikstudion.se/news/2016/637-elias-merino-ems-15-25-june-2016

July: ‘The Nothing, Seeking answers: Indivisible Streams.’ A one speaker sound installation at Cafe OTO. (London, UK.), see website: https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/the-nothing-seeking-answers-indivisible-streams/

September: A 10 days funded artistic residency at Game of Life in the Wavefield Synthesis system (The Hague, The Netherlands).

Eva Sjuve

http://www.moolab.net/

Eva has been invited to present a research paper, “Noise in the Clouds”, at International Computer Music Conference, ICMC16 in Utrecht, 12th – 16th September 2016

Eva will also be presenting the paper, “Noise in the System: Noise in the Clouds” at International Symposium of Electronic Arts, ISEA16 in Hong Kong, 16th – 22th May 2016. http://isea2016.isea-international.org/

A recent article in the University of Huddersfield news talks about Eva Sjuve’s work at ISEA as well as another of our PhD researchers, Jung In Jung.

https://www.hud.ac.uk/news/2016/april/fourrepresentuniatmajorhongkongelectronicartsconference.php

Rodrigo Constanzo

http://www.rodrigoconstanzo.com

Rodrigo recently performed at the Borealis festival in Norway. See info: http://www.borealisfestival.no/2016/en/

 

 

Here is a blurb about the performance from the website:

Rodrigo Constanzo is all about playing some pieces for you.
He wants to play you some loud pieces, with flashing lights. As well as some quieter pieces, that are charged with a simple stillness.
Constanzo plans on using the following: a drum (maybe even a drumset), some tuning forks, an old computer hard drive, a variety of metal objects and sticks and some digitally controlled lights.
At some point in the middle you may find him singing quietly to himself. He is alone on stage, so no one will hear him.
It is unlikely that he will travel through time tomorrow (/yesterday?), but do not worry. It is (/was) all worth it.

http://www.borealisfestival.no/2016/rodrigo-constanzo-2/

 

Photos from the performance/space.

 

Pablo Vergara

https://soundcloud.com/pablo-vergara-composer

Pablo will be participating in the summer festival “Composit 2016” ( http://composit.org/ ), in Rieti, Italy, where his piece “Ohne” will be workshopped and performed by the MDI Ensemble ( http://www.mdiensemble.com/en ), among other activities such as colloquiums, concerts and lessons.

Clara Maïda

http://www.claramaida.com

Past Events:

1)  April 8-10, 2016: TRINITY COLLEGE Dublin, Ireland

International Conference “DELEUZE + ART – Multiplicities / Thresholds / Potentialities

Clara MAÏDA – Lecture – April 9, 2016: “From a Formless Ground to a Restless Sound – Virtual/Actual/Musical: Degrees of Power and Diagrams of Matter”

https://deleuzeart.wordpress.com/about-2/location-2/

2) February 2016: Clara MAÏDA – Coming out of the article:

“Chocs et entrechocs, analyse et catalyse” (“Shocks and Knocks, Analysis and Catalysis ») in SUPERFLUX n° 8/9 (Review of Psychoanalysis, Editions L’Unebévue, Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, Paris).

Acts of the colloquium MUSIC AND PSYCHOANALYSIS at IRCAM in January 2015: “Correspondances musiciennes et création musicale” (“Musicians’ Correspondences and Musical Creation”)

http://www.unebevue.org/l-unebevue-editeur/superflux

3) January 2016: Clara MAÏDA – Coming out of an interview with Christine FISCHER (artistic director of Eclat festival and Neue Vocalsolisten vocal ensemble) in the book published by the Kulturamt Stuttgart: “60. Kompositionspreis 2015 Stuttgart – Jubiläum 1955-2015”

http://www.delightdesign-komm.de/gestaltung/stuttgart-kulturamt-design-hardcover-buch-verpackung-kompositionspreis/#iLightbox[gallery733]/4

Next Events:

1) June 2016: RADIO FRANCE – Alla breve

Premiere and broadcasting of Web-wave for violin, viola, prepared harp and piano, and electronics (2nd part of the series Web-studies)

Commissioned by RADIO FRANCE-Alla breve.

Residency at ART ZOYD (Valenciennes-France) and CESARE (Reims-France). Laureate of the HORS LES MURS Programme of the Paris French Institute 2012.

2)  July 11-13, 2016: UNIVERSITY ROMA TRE, Italy

DELEUZE STUDIES CONFERENCE

Clara MAÏDA – Lecture: “Sound rhizomes – Virtuality and actualizations: music and its multiplicity of sound becomings”

http://www.deleuzeconference2016.org/

3) PROXIMA CENTAURI ENSEMBLE – Marie-Bernadette Charrier (saxophonist), Bordeaux-France

Commission of Later bluffer for solo saxophone and electronics

http://www.proximacentauri.fr/

David Pocknee & Michael Baldwin’s WEISSLICH concert series

Huddersfield PhD composers, Michael Baldwin and David Pocknee, and Bath Spa PhD composer Louis d’Heudieres have been busy running their nights of experimental music and performance art, WEISSLICH. 23 April saw them put on their 6th concert at Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, London, which featured performances by themselves, Ben Jameson, Neil Luck, Solomiya Moroz and Mark Knoop, playing pieces by G Douglas Barrett, Carolyn Chen, Cathy van Eck, Ben Jameson, Neil Luck, and Solomiya Moroz.

[Image: WEISSLICH’s Louis d’Heudieres, David Pocknee, and Michael Baldwin performing Carolyn Chen’s /Adagio/ at Hundred Years Gallery]

This was followed the next week on 30 April with their first concert in Manchester at Nexus Art Café, which featured works by G Douglas Barrett, Carolyn Chen, Eleanor Cully, Cathy van Eck, Louis d’Heudieres, Andy Ingamells, Solomiya Moroz, Maya Verlaak and Jennifer Walshe, and performances by Baldwin, Pocknee, d’Heudieres and Andy Ingamells, Solomiya Moroz, and Maya Verlaak.

The next WEISSLICH will be on 23 July back at Hundred Years Gallery. More information on the events and featured artists can be found at http://www.weisslich.com

CeReNeM Postgraduate Newsletter [November 2015]

This newsletter features the recent achievements from our PhD composition students at the Centre of Research in New Music (CeReNeM) at the University of Huddersfield.

Last week, Professor Peter Ablinger (University of Huddersfield) and Professor Winfried Ritsch (Institut für Elektronishe Musik und Akustik, Graz) brought their computer-controlled/robotic piano ‘RHEA’, famed for Ablinger’s ‘Speaking Piano’ project, to the UK to work with CeReNeM postgraduates.

A brief online documentary was made by filmmaker Angela Guyton, which allows you to see inside both the processes and products of these workshops and RHEA’s week-long residency at CeReNeM.

See the video here:

Contributors to this month’s newsletter are from: Pia Palme, Lawrence Dunn, Ben Potts, Clara Maïda, Sebastien Lavoie, Tadej Droljc and Diego Castro Magas.

News From Our Composers:

Pia Palme

Pia Palme’s new work for four voices, MORDACIOUS LIPS, TO DUST was premiered by the ensemble EXAUDI at The Warehouse, London, on 17th October 2015. The work was part of an initiative by ‘Sound and Music’ called ‘Profile’ – An artist development programme: http://www.soundandmusic.org/resources/opportunities/2014/call-portfolio-exaudi

Link to the event: https://www.facebook.com/events/960684940660147/

An interview with project mentor Laurence Crane about her piece can be found here:

In October, Pia was awarded the prestigious Outstanding Artist Award in Music 2015 of the Austrian republic, in recognition of her overall compositional work and with special mentioning of her experimental requiem BARE BRANCHES from 2012 (from festivals Wienmodern and e_may).

Recent performances include a commission for ensemble including a wind-machine and text VOM RAUSCH IM SCHWARM which was premiered by ensemble Reconsil, and the collaborative performance Punctuated sound, patterned on silence, which was shown at Echoraum Vienna and Festival VLNA Bratislava (plus Austrian Cultural Forum).

More details can be found here: http://www.vlna.sk/vlna-nazivo-2015/

Pia developed the piece with vocalist Claudia Cervenca, Margarethe Mayerhofer-Lischka (double bass) and the German accordion-player Anja Kreysing. The artists work around the theme of punctuation, following a concept which Pia developed in spring of 2015. She uses punchcard rolls, as knitting machines, to look closely at compositional structures of patterning and singularities, in the context of her investigations into internal and external noise. Pia first implemented this theme for a commission for Ute Wassermann in March 2015.

In Pia’s lecture-performance at Goldsmith’s in June, she also talked about punctuation and explained her phenomenology of composing. Close-ups of punched patterns and projections of punchcard rolls are featured in a video:

Further details of the work:

http://piapalme.at/works/patterns-to-punctuate_lecture/

Pia’s work is now also featured in the British Library Collection, see under NEW VOICES 2015:

http://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/composer/pia-palme

Lawrence Dunn

Lawrence Dunn presented a paper at the 15th International Conference “Principles of Music Composing Phenomenon of Melody” at the Lithuanian Composers’ Union, on 14-16 October 2015. His talk was entitled “Melody in Experimental Music: An Excursion” and was a discussion on Harry Partch, Christian Wolff, Martin Arnold, Cassandra Miller, Laurence Crane and Rytis Mazulis.

Further details of the conference:

Click to access MKP%202015_programos%20lankstinukas.pdf

Ben Potts

Ben Potts created an installation and presented a paper for the INTIME 2015 conference at Coventry University on 24-25 October 2015. The conference was titled: ‘Landscapes and Environments: Experimentation and Transformation in Sound and Music’

Further details:

http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-directories/research-events/2015/intime-2015/

Clara Maïda

Clara Maïda will be giving a lecture and a concert at the International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research called “The Dark precursor” November 9-11, 2015, at the ORPHEUS INSTITUUT, Ghent-Belgium.

The lecture will be on November 10, 2015, at 16:30 and is entitled: “For A Nanomusic – ’Sound Desiring Machines’ and Multiple Time”

The concert will be on November 10, 2015, at 18:45 and the piece is entitled DOPPELKLÄNGER – for solo prepared and amplified piano  (commissioned by the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD, 2008) with pianist Jan Michiels.

DE BIJLOKE MUSIC CENTRE – KRAAKUIS: http://www.debijloke.be/concerts/outlandish

Sebastien Lavoie

Sebastien has been invited to present his work in Portugal at the festival Dias de Música Electroacústica. He also was selected to perform during the last Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR) symposium in Plymouth. Recently, he attended “LOOP”; a summit for music maker organized by Ableton in Berlin, Germany. He is now looking forward for his next presentation for one of his piece at the Festival MANCA in Nice, France.

Tadej Droljc

Tadej Droljc presented his work at the Earzoom/#MTF Central festival on 18th-21st September 2015 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He  presented his tool called Stringvencer which is a physically based graphical sequencer that alters temporal relations in pre-made musical sequences. The grid on which musical events are attached is a soft body that can topologically morph or disintegrate. It allows user to morph between free and metric paradigms. The development is still in progress.

See the video demonstration here:

Tadej is also exhibiting a neuro-bio feedback loop based interactive installation called ‘Synergy’ at the gallery Kapelica in Ljubljana and at the festival Kunigunda in Velenje.

“Synergy is a neural machine prototype for intra-brain communication. Users are able to reprogram their brain via brain-computer interface. Synergy’s audiovisual object reflects the user’s brainwave activity as well as their interaction with their partner in the machine. Synergy as neural machine invites the users to become present in the ‘here and now’, as this is the only way they are able to control it via neuroheadsets that measure their brain electrical activity – EEG. In the neurochamber the users connect to the machine as a neural impulse generator and ignite an infinite neuro-bio-feedback loop that can reprogram our neuroplastic brains by experiencing and controlling two responsive audiovisual objects in a virtual 3D space. Audiovisual convergence or divergence reflect synchrony or asynchrony of brain waves generated by two users, through which they learn and develop their synergetic potential, their ability for cooperation and harmonization, which is essential in the evolutionary pressure of current geopolitical situation.”

Concept, programming, visualisation and sound design by Tadej Droljc.

See further details here: http://kersnikova.org/synergy/

Diego Castro Magas

October 20, 2015 – Guest seminar in the Contemporary Music Research Centre at the University of York. Rymer Auditorium, 4pm.

http://www.cmrcyork.org/events/event/from-image-to-gesture-towards-a-gesture-based-model-of-performance-practice-in-recent-guitar-music/

November 9-11, 2015 – Paper/performance in DARE 2015 (Dark Precursor: International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research) on Aaron Cassidy’s The Pleats of Matter, alongside the composer.

http://darkprecursor.org/programme/

November 17-23, 2015 – World premiere of Pedro Alvarez: New Forms of Asymmetry (2015), for guitar and ensemble, as part of Ensemble Interface UK-tour: Manchester, Leeds, London and Huddersfield.

http://www.ensembleinterface.com/en/agenda/

http://hcmf.co.uk/event/show/509

November 20/23, 2015 – Performances with Ensemble Anomaly (alongside Alex Ward, guitar) in hcmf//2015: Derek Bailey’s realization of Stockhausen’s Plus-Minus for two guitarists and four electric guitars and world premieres of Bailey’s solo guitar pieces.

http://hcmf.co.uk/event/show/496

http://hcmf.co.uk/event/show/502

New CD for Huddersfield Contemporary Records (HCR) and launch concert at hcmf//2015

Thanks to the support of HCR and the Researcher Development Fund from the University of Huddersfield, Diego recorded last summer a solo guitar CD including pieces by Matthew Sergeant, Bryn Harrison, Michael Finnissy, James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough and Wieland Hoban.

There will be a launch concert at hcmf//2015: http://hcmf.co.uk/event/show/520

 

CeReNeM Postgraduate Newsletter [August 2015]

This newsletter features the recent achievements from some of our PhD composition students at the Centre of Research in New Music (CeReNeM) at the University of Huddersfield. Contributors to this month’s newsletter are from: Rodrigo Contanzo, Eva Sjuve, Pablo Vergara, Michael Baldwin and Clara Maïda.

Rodrigo Constanzo

Composer and drummer Rodrigo Constanzo recently performed a concert at the Manchester Jazz Festival using his dfscore (dynamic networked score) system. The dfscore system is a creative tool for communicating commands to musicians through digital devices. Using graphic, visual or written cues, new music is created instantaneously by improvisers, simply following the instructions appearing on screen in front of them as they play.  Rodrigo performed with this system along with leading improvisers: Richard Craig flute, electronics, Sam Andreae tenor saxophone/electronics, Alex Harker and Anton Hunter guitars/ electronics, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay bass/electronics and Richard Knight electronics. There was also a world première of a work commissioned especially for mjf 2015 in collaboration with Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

http://www.manchesterjazz.com/artist/rodrigo-constanzo-dfscore/

Rodrigo has also develop a new piece of software based on a gaming controller which has gained some attention. It’s called the Cut Glove and it’s a live-sampling and processing patch that contains mappings based on video game mechanisms and metaphors. See more about the research that went into the project here: http://www.rodrigoconstanzo.com/2015/06/cut-glove/

And here is a performance video of the software in action:

 

Eva Sjuve

Eva will present her project Metopia at International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA) 2015, the theme is Disruption and will be held on August 13-18 in Vancouver, Canada – see more detail here: http://isea2015.org/

She has also been invited to participate in Mobile Audio Fest 2015 on November 19-22, in Aix-en-Provence, France. Mobile Audio Fest is a symposium run by the research group Locus Sonus, audio in art: http://locusonus.org/

 

Pablo Vergara

Pablo had a premiere of a piece in the city of La Serena, Chile on August 6. It was a commission for the woodwinds of the Symphonic Orchestra of La Serena, specifically for 2 flutes, bassoon and trombone. The work was performed as part of the orchestra’s concert season, alongside pieces by Villalobos and Stravinsky. The title of the piece is escritos diferidos.

http://www.sinfonicalaserena.cl/

 

Michael Baldwin 

Michael has recently undertaken a project of learning and devising performances of Charlie Sdraulig’s solo voice piece, few. He has written about his engagement with the piece, produced a video of few and conducted an interview with the composer, all of which can be found on the following page dedicated to the project’s documentation.

In July, Michael gave his second performance of Luke Nickel’s [factory] as part of WEISSLICH III at the Hundred Years Gallery in London. A video of his performance, along with a short description of the work and an interview with Hundred Years Gallery’s venue director Graham MacKeachan can be found here.

[Photo by Dimitri Djuric]

Upcoming activities include travel to Miami, Florida in September to participate in a series of concerts entitled Rock, Paper, Scissors, held at Audiotheque at Art Center South Florida in Miami Beach. The series is curated by composers Robert Blatt and Jorge Gomez Abrante and consists of three concerts highlighting the experimental music tradition’s predilection for utilizing unconventional instruments. Each concert (Rock Concert, Paper Concert and Scissors Concert ) will use the material in its title as a musical instrument. Michael has been commissioned to write a piece for Scissors Concert and will be participating as a performer in all three concerts.

In October, Michael returns to England to prepare for two performances of Beavan Flanagan’s solo voice piece no sweeter sound than my own name, written specifically for, and in collaboration with, Michael. Performances will take place as part of the INTIME 2015 symposium in Coventry (23rd October), and WEISSLICH IV at the Hundred Years Gallery in London (31st October). Ongoing developments can be found on the following page dedicated to the project’s documentation.

 

Clara Maïda

Below is Clara’s recent creative work in English and French:

Barbicania is film by / un film d’ila bêka & louise lemoîne
and will be presented at / est présenté à doku.arts, berlin
Clara Maïda’s piece holes and bones / ma pièce holes and bones
is included / est incluse
in the night section of this movie about the barbican (london).
Dans la section nocturne de ce film sur the barbican (londres).
http://doku-arts.de/2015/en/programme/2015/barbicania

Barbicania is a video diary of a month-long immersion in the life of the Barbican, From the top floors of the towers to the underground levels of the arts centre. An intimate and lively map of this brutalist masterpiece. First presented at the barbican, London, on October 23, 2014 Bêka partners:

http://www.bekapartners.com/html/films.html

Recording / enregistrement :
Accroche note ensemble, musica festival, Strasburg, 2002.
Ensemble accroche note, festival musica, strasbourg, 2002.
Commission / commande 
by the French ministry of culture / ministere de la culture & accroche note)

CeReNeM Postgraduate Newsletter [April 2015]

As always there has been plenty of activity within the CeReNeM post-graduate community. While this newsletter only represents a part of what goes on at our University, it does show the depth and scope of the work produced here. Below you will find the details of the recent achievements as well as upcoming talks, performances, successful grants, installations, details of new compositions and collaborations in a range of diverse areas. Contributors to this month’s newsletter include: Pia Palme, Linda Jankowska, Clara Maïda, Diego Castro Magas, Jung In Jung, Jorge Boehringer, Eleanor Cully and Daniel Portelli (me!).

We also welcome the release of the fifth issue of the CeReNeM Journal edited by David Pocknee. Editors of submissions were done by David Pocknee, Beavan Flanagan & Braxton Sherouse, graphic & web design by Ana Lemnaru, with contributions from Michael Baldwin, Eleanor Cully, Beavan Flanagan, Alex Grimes, Phil Maguire, Pia Palme, David Pocknee and Daniel Portelli.

Link to Journal: cerenem.ricercata.org

News from Composers:

Pia Palme

In March, Ute Wassermann premiered her piece ‘Patterns to punctuate song, with darkness’ for voice, electronics and a scenic element, commissioned by the renowned festival Salzburg Biennale. The festival had a focus on vocality this year. The scenic element is a punchcard score, which she made during the compositional process. It defines action with a throat microphone which Ute is handling during the piece.

Pia has been working on a another work with EXAUDI and Laurence Crane as part of the Portfolio opportunity. Pia says she has enjoyed working with them and that the piece is evolving. The second rehearsal and workshop phase is in April, in London. Pia wrote: “I find it interesting to have so much time to work on something, to be able to put a sketch aside and then resume the compositional process, to be able to try out things before finalising the piece.”

Linda Jankowska

“Its fleece electrostatic” video has been selected as a finalist of The Engine Room International Sound Art Competition and will be presented in the exhibition. The prize winners will be announced at the private view on the 11th of May. The public exhibition takes place at Morley Gallery, London, from 12 May – 12 June 2015.  For links to the video visit her website: http://lindajankowska.com/news/ – and for more information about The Engine Room see: http://www.morleycollege.ac.uk/morley_gallery/whats_on/2473_morley_gallery_the_engine_room

In May Linda will be going to Chicago to work on a project with Katherine Young. This trip was enabled by the Santander Student Mobility Scholarships available to support short study visits to other institutions, particularly those in the QS Top 500 or those in the Santander Global Universities Network – http://katherineyoung.info

Linda will also be giving a talk for the Composition Colloquium at Northwestern University, on the 26 May, along with Professor Aaron Cassidy who will give talk on 19 May.

Clara Maïda

Clara received a Berlin Senat Composition Grant, for her project Lostery, with Theo Nabicht, for contrabass clarinet, electronics and a visual installation. The composition and realization of the installation is by Clara Maïda.

A new performance of Clara’s work Doppelklänger will be performed on April 25th, 2015, for solo prepared and amplified piano Fabra&Coats – 22:00 – Piano: Lluïsa Espigolé at the Mistur Festival in Barcelona – http://mixturbcn.com/en/programacio-2015/ – Individual courses are available for young composers, with master classes for composition.

Clara will also be the guest professor of composition at Escola Superior De Musica De Catalunya, in Barcelona, 2nd semester of 2015 – http://www.esmuc.cat/

Diego Castro Magas

On the 20th February, 2015 Diego premiered Professor Aaron Cassidy’s The Pleats of Matter, for solo electric guitar at Electric Spring Festival in Huddersfield. 

Diego also gave a paper about Walter Benjamin’s concept of historical time in Brian Ferneyhough’s guitar music at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent, on February 25-26 2015.  The context of the seminar was: ‘The Making of Musical Time: Temporality in Musical Composition and Performance’. He also played Ferneyhough’s Kurze Schatten II for solo guitar. More info: http://www.orpheusinstituut.be/en/events/the-making-of-musical-time-temporality-in-musical-composition-and-performance

And on April 23rd, 2015 he gave a Lecture-recital in University of Leeds: On Brian Ferneyhough’s Kurze Schatten II and its ‘auratic’ quality in interpretation and performance – http://music.leeds.ac.uk/events/music-research-seminar-diego-castro/

Jung In Jung

Jung’s dance and sound collaboration ‘Thermospheric Station’ was selected to be part of xCoAx 2015 conference, titled: ‘Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X’ and will be held on the 25-26 June in Glasgow. Professor Monty Adkins will also be presenting an installation work. Below is some information about the conference:

“xCoAx is meant as a hub for the exchange of ideas and the discovery of interdisciplinary and international synergies, with the participation of a diverse confluence of computer scientists, media practitioners and theoreticians working on the frontiers of digital arts and culture. Our focus has always been on critical and stimulating intersections: between the computable and the uncomputable, the communicable and the incommunicable, the chaos of creativity and the rules of algorithms, the human and the machine, in a constant search for new directions in aesthetics” – http://xcoax.org/

Jorge Boehringer

Jorge’s solo project (Core of the Coalman) continues to evolve and unfold with recent performances at Wharf Chambers in Leeds, and very special performance at Fuse Gallery in Bradford celebrating the opening of the exhibition Canvas, in which he performed a set of entirely new compositions for solo performance on a variety of electronic and acoustic instruments.

A small selection of recent drawings, sculptures and sound art works will be exhibited beginning May 4th in Huddersfield’s Unit 9 Gallery in the Market Walk Arcade.  This is part of a group show including other artists from the area, some of whom also attend CeReNem: Beaven Flanagan, David Pocknee, Eleanor Cully, Charlotte Cullen, Kashika Ashley Cooper, and Dex Hannon also will showcase recent work in this show. The exhibition, Discrete Positions, lasts until May 14.

This summer promises several concert appearances and the presentation of new works as a solo performer and in collaboration with others.  May 1st is the first concert of a new duo project with Eleanor Cully.  Festival Romance presents a songs about whales, warewolves and milkmen in a fictive folk tradition, and will open up a concert for Cathy Heyden, Roger Smal, and local electronic musician Daniel Thomas at the cavernous Todmorden Unitarian Church.  May 14th and 15h see Jorge performing solo in Manchester and Bristol, and then in June the following dates are confirmed for a concert tour featuring the Irish Band Woven Skull with whom Jorge is a frequent collaborator.  Jorge will perform on these dates both as a soloist and with Woven Skull.  Local musician Sofie Cooper will also perform on these concerts:
5th June – MANCHESTER, Fuel Cafe with Jon Collin
6th June – GLASGOW, The Old Hairdressers
7th June – EDINBURGH, Henry’s Cellar Bar
8th June – GATESHEAD, The Old Police House
10th June – NOTTINGHAM, Rammel Club, The Chameleon Arts Cafe
11th June – TODMORDEN, Golden Lion. Woven Skull “big band” supporting Eternal Tapestry
12th June – BRADFORD, Fuse Art Space

    

Daniel Portelli

Daniel has been commissioned to write a new piece for an Edgar Varese honorary concert, where he will write for the same  instrumentation as Ionisation, to be performed in Barcelona in February 2016.

His recently completed choir and ensemble work Animal (2015) had its world premiere at the Samstag Museum in Adelaide, Australia on the 16th April, 2015.

Art and Performances in Huddersfield

Discrete Positions presents an assemblage of Huddersfield-based artists working across different media including sculpture, site-specific installation, painting, drawing, sound art and performance who have come together through the shared space of NYA’s Huddersfield studio to present their individual works within the context of a collective exhibition. In doing so they will generate reflective exchanges, beginning a conversation between different concepts and practices and initiating critical dialogue across Huddersfield’s rich spectrum of artistic activities.

Featuring: Kashika Ashley Cooper, Jorge Boehringer, Charlotte Cullen, Eleanor Cully, Beavan Flanagan, Dex Hannon and David Pocknee.

The opening day will feature a free lunch time concert from the London Contemporary Orchestra Soloists beginning at 1.30pm, on the 4th May. The LCO Soloists draws together principal players from the London Contemporary Orchestra for intimate performances of contemporary chamber music. This performance will feature string players Galya Bisengalieva, Mira Benjamin, Robert Ames and Gregor Riddell as soloists and together in a string quartet. The performance will explore an eclectic mix of sounds and styles to complement the Discrete Positions art exhibition – https://www.facebook.com/events/1402917240025077/1432547660395368/ – www.lcorchestra.co.uk

Exhibition Continues: Monday 4th May – Friday 15th May

 

 

That’s all from this month’s newsletter.

CeReNeM Postgraduate Newsletter [January 2015]

Here are the recent updates from the University of Huddersfield’s CeReNeM postgraduate community:

Kee Yong Chong

On 20 January Kee Yong had a mini portrait concert with Belgium excellent Hermes Ensemble at their new home “deSTudio” Het Kanaal (Wijnegem). (See images above and below)

Score extracts by Kee Yong:

Latest events from Clara Maïda

BRUNEL UNIVERSITY – London, January 15, 2015, Centre for Contemporary Music Practice. My seminar / Presentation of the series  / SHEL(L)TER. IRCAM – Paris,  January 17, 2015, SUPERFLUX and / et ENTRETEMPS journals / Psychoanalysis and music / Colloquium “Musicians’ correspondences and musical creation”, My intervention: “Shocks and knocks, analysis and catalysis”.

Motion Capture Research at Zurich University of the Arts – Seth Woods

Seth Woods will be presenting Motion Capture Research on Lachenmann’s Pression at a symposium on Gesture, HCI, Machine Learning at Zurich University of The Arts, Jan 26-28th, 2015.

TEDx Conference in Costa Rica – Linda Jankowska

Linda Jankowska will be going to Costa Rica at the end of Feb to play at the TEDx conference, as a part of Mauricio Pauly’s talk. See link for details: http://tedxpuravida.org/?participante=linda-jankowska

 

Royal Northern College of Music Festival of Brass – Andrew Baker

Andrew Baker premiered his recent brass band work ‘atrium phase’ at the Royal Northern College of Music Festival of Brass on Saturday 24 January performed by the Foden’s Band, conducted by Michael Fowles, alongside works by Edward Gregson, Andy Scott and Bramwell Tovey. The opportunity arose as a result of the work winning the Foden’s Band inaugural composition competition in September 2014.

Further information can be found on the RNCM website: http://www.rncm.ac.uk/festivals/rncm-festival-of-brass/

CeReNeM Postgraduate Newsletter [September-October 2014]

PhD Student Basar Under Awarded ‘Best Music’ at the 51st Antalya Film Festival

Basar Under has been awarded the Best Music Award at the 51st Antalya Film Festival for his music in the film ‘Song of My Mother’.

Basar speech on the night: ” I dedicate this award to the memory of my dear father whom I lost ten days ago, many thanks to jury and friends.”

The movie “song of my mother” was awarded for four categories:

best first movie (director: erol mintas)
best actor: feyyaz duman
best supporting actor: aziz capkurt
best music: basar under

 

 

 

 

 

The trailer to the award winning film:

The awards ceremony video can be found here: http://www.tvyo.com/altin-portakal/video/en-iyi-muzik-odulu

The movie was also awarded at the 20th International Sarajevo Film Festival for the best movie and best actor. Here you can find the info about the movie: http://ticketing.sff.ba/en/film.aspx?ID=3653&title=Song+of+My+Mother

Distractfold Ensemble awarded the Kranichstein Music Prize

Distractfold Ensemble has been awarded the Kranichstein Music Prize. They convinced the jury with their outstanding performance/work in terms of quality and impact.

Ashley Fure (Composition / USA) and the Ensemble Distractfold (Interpretation / UK) were awarded the 2014 Kranichstein Music Prize. The prize, founded in 1952, is awarded to one current composition and one interpretation presented at the International Summer Course for New Music, selected by an independent jury, comprising the music journalist Carolin Naujocks, the composer Hannes Seidl and the accordionist Eva Zöllner, as outstanding in quality and significance. In 2014 the prize sum is 6000 Euros, divided equally between the winners in the two categories Interpretation (ensemble or soloist) and Composition.

Upcoming performances by PhD student Diego Castro Magas

Diego Castro is a performer from Chile. He is a classically trained guitarist, currently championing new repertoire in both classical and electric guitar.

Diego is a third year PhD student in Contemporary Performance under the supervision of Philip Thomas at CeReNeM (University of Huddersfield). Also, he is studying electric guitar under the guidance of Daryl Buckley.

Upcoming performances:

• Nov 10, Blackheath Halls in London, alongside tracensemble (Peyee Chen, voice and Alba Bru, flute): https://www.trinitylaban.ac.uk/whats-on/blackheath-halls-events/event?event_id=72264
• Nov 24, hcmf// shorts: http://www.hcmf.co.uk/event/show/444
• Dec 1, conference presentation in Malmö: Tacit or Loud, Symposium and Festival for Artistic Research http://www.teatrweimar.se/tacitorloud/
• Dec 6, clapTON ensemble, Hundred Years Gallery, London.

Website: www.diegocastromagas.com

Further performances next term:

• January 26, talk and concert in Brunel
• Jan/Feb TBC, talk, concert and workshop in Durham
• February 20, Electric Spring Festival (premiere of Cassidy’s The Pleats of Matter for solo electric guitar)
• March 19, lunchtime concert in Huddersfield alongside tracensemble

PhD composition student Daniel Portelli winner of the Winston Music ECF commission

Daniel Portelli’s performance at Soundstreams Emerging Composers Forum in Adelaide on 4 November 2014 won him the Winston Music ECF commission of $1500 for his piano multimedia work, Mapping Australia (2014). Performed by Gabriella Smart, the concert was recorded to be broadcast on ABC Classic FM’s New Music Up Late program on 29 November at 10:30pm. He was also asked to write a new work for the Soundstream Collective.

Daniel recently represented Australia as the Young Composer Representative at the Asian Music Festival 2014 in Tokyo and Yokohama from 1-7 November 2014.

 

 

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