Programme, August 2009 concerts:


• Michael Norris

Vitus 2001

According to legend, St. Vitus was the Christian son of a pagan senator of Lucania, Italy. He was known for his miracle-working, although his father tried to make him abandon his faith, through sometimes violent means. He fled with his tutor Modestus to Rome, where he was taken to exorcize the evil spirits from Emperor Diocletian’s possessed son. This he did, and yet, because he remained steadfast in the Christian Faith, he was once more tortured along with Modestus and his nurse Crescentia. By a miracle an angel brought back the martyrs to Lucania, where they died from the tortures they had endured. Vitus reflects this legend by setting out a slowly modulating tetrachord articulated by the strings and brass, which the woodwinds ‘torture’ by means of completing the full chromatic gamut of pitches in sweeping moments of violent dissonance. The central section suggests an episode of St Vitus Dance, also known as Sydenham’s Chorea and Rheumatic Chorea, a temporary disorder of the brain that manifests itself in continuous, involuntary jerking movements.

MN

• Richard Barrett

knospend-gespaltener 1992-93

This work was completed in early September 1993. It was commissioned by Andrew Sparling, to whom it is dedicated. Like many other of my soloistic compositions, it begins with a view of the instrument as a view or "theatre" within which the player may "move" in order to articulate an in-time structure - as opposed to elaborating "abstract" structures of pitch, rhythm and so on. The title is derived from a poem by Paul Celan; the form centres on the expansion of four registral layers (heard at the outset compressed into a rapid and regular four note iteration) and, eventually, the eruption into this process of increasingly alien material: the vigorous propulsion of the opening is torn apart to lay bare its visceral inner structure—and that of the clarinet.

RB

• Rachael Morgan

from a fixed point 2009

For a while now, I have had an interest in the nature of sound and timbral nuances. In this piece I also explored the concept of vibration and movement around a fixed point.

Fixed points appear in many guises through-out the work, at times they are explicit, other times more implicitly implied, particularly later in the piece. In all cases the focus is on timbre and movement within a sound.

The piece begins in a strong and solid soundworld. Here, pitch is a clear fixed point with the intention of drawing the listener’s attention to subtle timbral variations.

Pitch is certainly not the only reference point. Distortion and interference of both soundwaves and textures are also important elements of the work. These become stronger features as the material begins to destruct in a gradual shift towards instability. This move from stasis and stability, to instability and fragility is also highlighted by an evolution of instrumental techniques.

from a fixed point was commissioned by 175 East with funding from Creative New Zealand.

RM

• Richard Barrett

codex I 2001

for 6-12 improvising musicians

The model for codex I was the situation where a fragmentary or skeletal or barely decipherable musical text, from the distant past, is realised by (contemporary) musicians so as to reconstruct, or imagine, something of the “living tradition” from which these few obscure fragments are perhaps the only musical remains. codex I (which has now been followed by many others) is a
structural foundation upon which the performers create their own music: events are timed, but not precisely; the number of instruments for a sound-event are specified, but not which instruments; a (broken) thread of sustained pitches runs through the piece but is typically encrusted with improvised divergences; some parts of the score have completely “gone missing” and inferences are to be made as to what kind of improvisation might appropriately replace them; and so on.

codex I was written in early 2001 for Chris Burn’s Ensemble, and was commissioned by the Bangor New Music Festival with funds from the Arts Council of Wales.

RB

• Christian Wolff

Two Players 1996

About Two Players, what can I say?

I wrote the piece for a longtime friend, once a student, Krystyna Bobrowski, a composer and horn player, who asked me to write something for her and a cellist friend.

I suppose it's main feature is the structure, which is made up of chunks of material, one after the other, which is pretty much the way I've worked now for a long time. Resisting "one idea" or procedure structures; heterogeneity instead, which I think of as like the variety in something like a quilt, made by sewing together of various scraps of material.

A recent piece (for 3 small orchestras) is called Rhapsody, because that work in old Greek means "song-stitching". The other main feature (again, common to much of my work) would be the writing for the interplay and interdependence of the performers, including in ways not determined by usual scoring (i.e. with fixed measures in a fixed tempo and metre).

CW
(from a recent e-mail)

• James Gardner

a study for voicing doubts 2001

Many painters—most notably Francis Bacon—have produced series of satellite “studies” around one subject. While these works are complete and interesting in their own right, they also function as commentaries and footnotes on each other, and on the cluster of preoccupations they share, as
much as on the “main” paintings for which they are nominally studies. Composers do this sort of thing less often, but it was with this idea of a study in mind that I set out to write a miniature “clarinet concerto” for Gretchen Dunsmore and 175 East some eight years ago.

The piece makes use of the contrasts between the generally light and lithe clarinet writing and the weightier interjections of the ensemble, and the repeated attempts of the soloist to escape the “gravitational pull” of the ensemble could be seen as one narrative strand in the work.

While a study for voicing doubts is a complete composition it was also a testing ground for ideas which have been incorporated into Rank and File Movements, a much larger clarinet concerto for Gretchen, which will be finished in early 2010.

JG