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Cities & Sunsets

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On Sunday, my tape piece from last summer inspired by the lightness and quickness of aural experience in urban spaces, La leggerezza delle città, will be played as part of the 15th biannual Manchester Theatre in Sound (MANTIS) Festival. This edition bears the title ‘Manchester’s Sonic Meta-ontology’ and will explore Manchester’s sounds through a variety of concerts and installation pieces. You can find it here on Facebook.

On Monday, my solo piano work 3 Sunsets receives its second performance by good friend Sebastian Grand. He plays a programme of landscape-inspired works that also includes Ligeti’s Arc-en-ciel, Takemitsu’s Rain Tree II and Cage’s In a Landscape in a short afternoon recital at the Royal Academy of Music. It’s in the David Josefowitz Recital Hall at 2pm.

Sunset on Whitworth Street West, Manchester, UK

Unterwegs

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I’m off to Graz, Austria, for 12 days to attend the Impuls Akademie. While there I’ll be having lessons with Pierluigi Billone, Rebecca Saunders and Beat Furrer. Pascal Dusapin, Brice Pauset and Georg Friedrich Haas are also on the staff. Klangforum Wien are in residence. As are ensemble interface and a whole bunch of starry names as instrumental teachers. Should be fun awesome.

Revolution/Reformation

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Quatuor Danel (Guy Danel, Gilles Millet, Vlad Bogdanas, Marc Danel)

A Talk About Helmut Lachenmann’s Gran Torso

For those of you in Manchester, I am giving a talk with the wonderful Quatuor Danel this Thursday on Lachenmann’s first string quartet, Gran Torso. The talk runs from 14:30 to 16:00 at the University of Manchester (map), but is preceded at 13:10 by a free lunchtime concert featuring Beethoven’s String Quartet in F major, Op. 18 No. 1, and the UK première of Pierre Bartholomée’s quartet Envol et Mort d’un Papillon. I will cover sound, structure and historical context as much as possible in the time available, as well as as briefly touching on the two later quartets, ‘Reigen seliger Geister’ and ‘Grido’.

The Danels are performing all three Lachenmann quartets in the coming months. Gran Torso is Friday night at 19:30 alongside Bartók 3 and Beethoven “Harp”. It is an incredible work, not to be missed.

Listings: Facebook / Venue

Musical squiggles and tumbling sounds

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‘Before Christmas I got to hear my adoptive orchestra from King Edward Musical Society in full flow at their concert of Elgar and Duruflé, so it was with excitement that I prepared to kick off the New Year with my first workshop with the orchestra. The orchestra are busy preparing some tricky Bruckner and Strauss for their next concert at the start of March but we managed to find an hour in the schedule to workshop some of my initial ideas last Tuesday.’

Read more on adoptacomposer.org »

First Workshop with KEMS

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Logos of organisations involved with Adopt a Composer: Sound and Music, PRS for Music Foundation, Making Music and King Edward Musical Society.

My first workshop with the orchestra of King Edward Musical Society is on Tuesday — 11.1.11! — and I’m looking forward to playing around with some semi-improvised experiments mixing traditional notation and graphical elements that will hopefully let us create some interesting coincidences and arrays of interacting lines. I will post something about how it goes over on the Adopt a Composer blog next week, but in the meantime why not read about the experiences so far of the other composers involved.

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