Westgarth Nikolai - Chat Slab

Biography

Nikolai Westgarth

Nikolai Westgarth, b.1987 studied Piano with Julian Roltan and later attended Birmingham Conservatoire where he studied composition with Joe Cutler, Howard Skempton and Michael Wolters, counterpoint with Edwin Roxburgh and orchestration with Richard Causton. 

Works have been written for a wide rage of instruments, unorthodox non-standard sound making devises and abstract forces in art galleries and pubic settings. Solo works; trios, quartets; quintets; string orchestras; wind orchestras; and a variation of mixt ensemble works have been performed by world leading ensembles and soloists as well as student and amateur music groups as well as abstract work for the general public. Notable performers include: The Goldberg ensemble; the Schubert ensemble; the Fidelio Trio; BCMG; The CHROMA ensemble; Robin Michael; Darragh Morgan; Mary Dullea; Christopher Redgate; Rowland Sutherland; Thalian ensemble; the Thumb ensemble, the Swift ensemble, Birmingham Conservatoire Composers ensemble, CoMA ensemble (East Midlands). Projects have also involved directly working on dance, photography, film, text and other site-specific, interventional, visual and performance based art. These pieces have been exhibited internationally.

ChatSlab

(by the composer himself)

The minimal music of Glass, Reich, Riley and Young influenced a whole generation of different composers and also linked more popular music to art music. Steve Reich's iconic and groundbreaking tape piece, Come Out (1966) influenced and is largely responsible for establishing the types of cut and paste techniques that New York DJs Africa Bombaataa and Grandmaster Flash used to create some of the earliest hip-hop, electro and techno records. Combined with early Dancehall influences, MCing gained popularity and is today compatible and frequently found in all manors of music.

Being a 90s kid, Hip Hop was everywhere growing up. Like most teenagers wrestling with adolescence in a reserved British society, I was very taken with Eminem. Not only did I get a kick out of his provocative profanities but also his incredibly complex craftsmanship, especially his approach to phrasing. When his phrasing (over emphasised by the repetitiveness of the beat behind his MCing) dissects the bar structure when least expected, with a rhyme that is sandwiching two internal rhymes and some alliteration, and then he continues with the inside rhyme, all of which coincides with a flowing rhythmic system, intonation of voice and stressed syllables, its hard not to be balled over. For myself this coined my appreciation for MCing but also opened doors to other MCing genres such as Ragga, Jungle, Dancehall, Drum 'n' Base, Garage, Grime, Reggaeton etc. 

ChatSlab is quite literally a slab of chat but for Piano and is strongly influenced by Mcing culture. I have taken two extracts from Dizzee Rascal's MCing and transformed the incredible rhythmic phrasing into notation. The components of piano music such as the flowing phrasing, intonation, and in particularly the repetitive endings of the phrases (often ending on the same note) are not unlike the structures of syllables in MCing. Although more manic and rave like than the music of Philip Glass, these on-going phrases with repetitive endings hark back to the early minimal cut and paste techniques of rap. It's also possible to hear traces of Jungle and Garage rhythms in ChatSlab. 

Marc Yeats - Amy's Toye

Biography 

Marc Yeats

Marc Yeats’ music is performed, commissioned and broadcast worldwide. Transduction, complex surface relationships, asynchronous alignments, contextual, harmonic and temporal ambiguities, polarised intensities and a visceral joy of sound are all primary concerns.

. . . . . ‘how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!’ . . . . 


(William Shakespeare: Richard II, 5.5.42-9) 

Marc Yeats is a composer and visual artist. His intense music has received performances and broadcast around the world including The Edinburgh String Quartet (UK), the Chamber Group of Scotland (UK), Psappha (UK), Richard Casey, Stephen Combes, the London Sinfonietta (UK), the Endymion Ensemble (UK), Lonba (Argentina), Paragon Ensemble (UK), the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (UK), illegal harmony (UK), 175 East (N.Z.), Sarah Watts, SCAW (UK), Sarah Nicolls, Federico Mondelci, the Commonwealth Sinfonietta (UK), Contempo Ensemble (Italy), Rarescale (UK), The Scottish Clarinet Quartet (UK), Symposia (UK), the New York Miniaturists Ensemble (USA), Trio IAMA (Greece), The International Concert Brass Soloists (Switzerland), Dirk Amrein (Germany) Expatrio (UK), Chroma (UK), Kokoro (UK), Consortium5 (UK), Ensemble Amorpha (UK) Chamber Cartel (US), Auditiv Vokal (Germany), the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra (UK), the Hallé Orchestra and Chorus (UK) conducted by Sir Mark Elder, Tokyo City Philharmonic (Japan) and Gewandhaus Radio Orchestra (Germany), with broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio Scotland as well as US, German, EU, Hawaiian, Japanese and New Zealand radio.

Marc is Composer-in-Association with: 

Thumb Ensemble      [Birmingham UK]

Manchester Pride     [Manchester UK] 

Chamber Cartel       [Atlanta, Georgia US]

SATSYMPH        [Bristol/Crewkerne UK]

Composer Curator with Sound and Music for 2014/15

A glimpse into 2014 – and beyond . . .

The year started magnificently with Auditiv Vokal [Dresden, Germany] giving the premiere of their commission oros for 8 voices. The premiere was recorded by Deutschlandfunk Radio for European broadcast this autumn.

This year Marc has become a ‘composer curator’ with Sound and Music. Along with funds from SaM and English Arts Council Lottery he is curating Sonic Coast Live Concert Series in partnership with DIVAcontemporary. The five Dorset-based concerts will include four world premieres of Marc’s work including on the 26th July, beyond this [all had been chaos] for viola and percussion with Stephen Upshaw [viola] and Callie Hough [percussion] and later in the season, the moon, upright for wind trio [with Rarescale], his 18 minute second string quartet from manuscripts of moving song with the Zero Theorem and through woods in riot for 2 trumpets, tenor and bass trombones with Meridian Brass.

2014 also sees a number of commission premieres in the US. These will include:

sculptures in bright blue for soprano and alto saxophone with KOEK duo;                                                     

vulgar gorgon for Clibber Jones Rock Ensemble and                                                                                     

invoco for alto saxophone and bassoon with Post-Haste Reed Duo

Virtuoso US flautist, Carlton Vickers recently commissioned an epic, 20+ minute solo work from Marc. streaming will be premiered and recorded by Carlton in the 2014/15 season. Carlton said of the new work: “Today, received “Streaming” for Kingma System quartertone alto flute by Marc Yeats. A massive 20< minute energy field. What a terrifying talent this man has. Effortless. Unreal.”

Again in the US, the spring of 2014 will see the release of the shape distance CD, recorded by the Atlanta based Chamber Cartel where Marc is currently Composer-in-Association. And in November 2014 Chamber Cartel will give the premiere of a substantial new Yeats’ commission, ‘and exploration of bright’  for piano, harp and 2 percussionists at an all Yeats’ concert.

In Europe:


To date, Marc has completed two duo commissions, the first for pianist Geert Callaert and double bassist, Martin Rossi and cherries all black will be premiered in Brussels in the 2014/15 season and subsequently taken on tour around Belgium.

The second for Geert Callaert and Pieter Nuytten – a pathology of line for bassoon and piano will be premiered in the 2014/15 season in Belgium.

Additionally, over the next 18 months a huge collection of Marc’s piano music is being recorded with Geert including the ferociously difficult Viciousness of Circles, lenten fires, Oroborous and ‘ENÛMA ELIŠ’. Comprising over an hour of music, this initial collection of pieces will be the first recording of Marc’s piano music from the 1990s to the present day. Geert will be recording the work in Academiezaal Sint Truiden; a beautiful concert hall in Belgium. Geert and Marc are also making a documentary video of their work together in August this year. Live performance of the pieces will follow at venues around Europe.

There will be much more piano music recorded in 2014 as Marc will be working with Pierre-Arnaud Dablemont, a wonderfully talented pianist based in Brussels. Pierre-Arnaud will be recording Marc’s epic series of pieces the magical control of rain [c.48 minutes] for commercial release in the autumn / winter of 2014. ‘the magical control of rain’ is Marc’s most recent solo piano composition. A live London premiere is also planned for March 2015.

2014 will also see premieres of corpuscular theory of light for clarinet, soprano saxophone and xylophone, Lines and Distances for solo B flat clarinet [July 2014] and black root for E flat clarinet [also July 2014] in Austria and Germany with Clarinet specialist Markus Wenninger.

We Are Wolfpack will premiere the dog and the wolf for ensemble at a London venue in their 2014/15 season. 

And a little further into the future . . .

Marc has been exploring a relationship with the fabulous Australian Syzygy Ensemble. More to follow on this in 2014/15!

In 2015, cellist Patric Tapio Johnson [who premiered ‘pathos’ for solo cello], along with zero theorem [ensemble] comprising a host of the most talented young contemporary music exponents will give the world premier of logos [concerto for cello and seven instrumentalists] in London [date and venue tbc].

Also in 2015, the Galachter Wind Trio will premiere and be recording Marc’s newly commissioned ‘dark gravity’ for bassoon, oboe, clarinet and percussion [1] for inclusion on their new CD of British woodwind trio music.

Under the auspices of their new initiative, Creative Music Composer Continuum (CMCC), the CHICAGO MODERN ORCHESTRA PROJECT has asked composer Marc Yeats for a new composition for their 2014-15 season. The new commission will see Marc continuing his compositional research around unsynchronised performance and compositional techniques, culminating in a substantial work for brass ensemble, percussion and strings [with optional piano] that will push Marc’s unsynchronised compositions into the orchestral sphere for the first time. The work will be directed but only to initiate sounds and instrumental groupings. All performers will play ‘as soloists’, following their own fully notated parts which shall contain different tempi, bar structures and material, simultaneously performed [asynchornous] across the orchestra without a unifying beat from the director. Each performer will play ‘live and [to a certain extent] free’. Due to the compositional nature of the music, each performance will yield slightly different results, interplays, gestural and harmonic references and unique outcomes creating music of great fluidity, unpredictability, beauty, complexity, wild energy and connectivity. This music cannot be read from a conventional score; it renews itself with each performance and can only be ‘revealed’ when played live.

Amy's Toye

(by the composer himself)

I was recently approached by pianist Nicolas Horvath to write a piece for his epic homage to Philip Glass  piano recitals 'the GlassWorlds'.  I am not a fan of Glass' music so thought the request strange. However, Nicolas made it clear that he was not looking for copies and imitations of Glass' work but pieces that were also reactionary so as to broaden the scope and musical language of his project. Thinking about the matter further I realised that there are sometimes elements in my music that concern repetition and the use of limited material. I would not describe this as minimalist in approach, not least because the rate of transformation that occurs in my works from bar to bar, even based on limited material renders the term repetition somewhat redundant. So here in 'homage' I have written a piece that is the opposite of Glass' compositional approach but is never-the-less related to aspects of it in some very distant way.  The music is dedicated to the American pianist Amy O'Dell who plays in Chamber Cartel. I have  recently finished a commission for Chamber Cartel 'an exploration of bright' that includes an extensive piano part.  I realised there were a few bars of this material that could develop a life of their own and they appear here, in amy's toye [see meaning for toye below]. 

toy noun \ˈtȯin\: 

something a child plays with : 

something that an adult buys or uses for enjoyment or entertainment : 

something that is very small  

Full Definition of TOY 

1 obsolete 

a :  flirtatious or seductive behavior 

b :  pastime; also :  a sportive or amusing act :  antic 

2 

a :  something (as a preoccupation) that is paltry or trifling 

b :  a literary or musical trifle or diversion 

c :  trinket, bauble 

3 :  something for a child to play with 

4 :  something diminutive; especially :  a diminutive animal (as of a small breed or variety) 

5 :  something that can be toyed with  

Origin of TOY: Middle English toye. First Known Use: 15th century 

Hillary Springfield - Atom Unit

Biography

Hillary Springfield

I was born in 1971 in Mönchengladbach and grew up in Niederkrüchten, a small German village on the Dutch border. After working as a care worker in a children's home and a runner at several theatres in Germany and England I studied Applied Theatre Studies at Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany and Composition with Patric Standford and Christopher Fox in Huddersfield (BA, MA) and with Vic Hoyland in Birmingham (PhD).

My works have been performed at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the ISCM World Music Days in Manchester (with Isobel Bowler), Spitalfields Festival (with Isobel Bowler), the Barbican Centre, Birmingham Symphony Hall, the Royal Festival Hall, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Tate Liverpool and various other concert halls, festivals, supermarkets, art galleries, shoe shops, theatres, banks, opera houses, in cafes, on beaches, in cinemas, on the radio, on TV; in the UK, Germany, lots of other European places, in Russia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada.

Atom Unit

 

Joe Cutler - Here Comes Mr Glass!

Biography

Joe Cutler

Joe Cutler (born 1968) is a British composer who studied music at the Universities of Huddersfield and Durham, before a scholarship at the Chopin Academy in Warsaw, Poland. He has taught composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire since 2000, and since 2005 he has been the Head of Composition there. He is also the co-founder of the instrumental ensemble Noszferatu.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cutler, like many of his generation, including Americans composers Michael Gordon and David Lang, and British composer Steve Martland, was influenced by the minimalist music of Louis Andriessen. Like Andriessen, Cutler rejected the atonal inheritance of Arnold Schoenberg in favour of the more rhythmically driving music of Igor Stravinsky. In these early works, Cutler showed influences ranging from Minimalism and Andriessen to 1980s avant-garde modernism and even the rhythmic aspects of the New Complexity movement. This is seen in such works as Epitaph for Nebula (1989) and Blast! (1992), where atonality and complicated driving rhythms preside.
During the 1990s, as Cutler's mature style developed, the complicated rhythms were gradually replaced with simpler, but still motoric[clarification needed], jazz inspired rhythms whilst the atonal element lost ground to allusions to Eastern-European modality and jazz. This is seen in one of his most popular works, Sal's Sax (1996), written for the De Ereprijs Ensemble. In more recent years, Cutler has developed a more lyrical side along with his influences from postminimalism, which led to works such as Awakenings (1998) and Sikorski (2005). In 2008, Cutler won the Chamber Music Category in the BBC Composer Awards with his piece, 'Folk Music'.
In 2010, Cutler was one of twenty composers commissioned to write a piece for the London 2012 Olympics.

Here Comes Mr. Glass!

Lawrence Ball - Glass Ball

Biography

Lawrence Ball

Lawrence Ball is a versatile and innovative composer who has a multiple focus as a composer,improviser and audio-visual creator. He has collaborated with healers, therapists and counsellors as well as writing for dance, film, orchestra,and choir and is as much at home writing a score as creating electronic or computer music. In summer 2008 he completed his 2nd Symphony. He collaborated with Pete Townshend and software engineer Dave Snowdon on the Method Music project, designing music software for a web server which generated over 10000 musical pieces - 'portraits' - over the internet. Pete Townshend also helped Lawrence record a double album "Method Music" now available through iTunes as a download.
His work is largely tonal (in the sense of an identifiable set of notes that are emphasised - rarely changing the key, central note). It is contemporary, in that it has much in it which is formed anew - not directly influenced or inspired from the classical music tradition. It is often associated with meditational or New Age aspects, because of the strong emphasis on its relationship with silence and presence, it makes more use of the space between notes than occurs in classical music. It is in the minimalist genre, in the sense that it borrows the idea of looping and repetition (since over 30 years) from the musical innovations of Terry Riley and LaMonte Young, and seeks deeper experiences through working with constancy, with sustained sounds and small or zero contrasts.
Since 2001 Lawrence has worked with sarod player Lisa Sangita Moskow and vocalist Manickam Yogeswaran on improvised music based on North and South Indian raga scales. He has created 2 multi-media audio-visual installations with the artist Genie Poretsky-Lee: Anonymous Words (2007) and Image Of Sound (2008).
He has developed techniques to deeply integrate audio and visual images with quantum physicist Michael Tusch, collaborating on this since 1993 with Dave Snowdon who created the software "Visual Harmony" to explore this arena; worked with healer/counsellor Isobel McGilvray in shaping harmonic tonescapes to aid relaxation, and has worked with choreographers/dancers (ex-Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet) Sheila Styles and (ex-Ballet Rambert) Rebecca Ham on several dance projects. Lawrence Ball has written for the pianists Yonty Solomon, Mark Swartzentruber, Tim Ravenscroft (2 suites), and Alessandra Celletti (Fractal Studies and Mist Sculptures), for The Smith (string) Quartet, the Electric Symphony Orchestra, , the female vocal quartet led by Rosemary Forbes-Butler, Rosy Voices, and he wrote 6 pieces for the violist Robin Ireland (of the Lindsay Quartet) and many more for violist Neil Davis.
He composed music for the film "The Eye Of The Heart", a portrait of the life and work of the artist Cecil Collins, and features in the book on Collins and his circle by Nomi Rowe. He has recorded almost 3000 piano improvisations as well as performing many live. Ball's creating in acoustic and electronic media, in composed and improvised methods is one of the broadest of any composer. He has performed in Canada, the US, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy, Switzerland, France and Germany as well as in the UK. He has accompanied the international painting group Collective Phenomena who work 'more than one to a canvas' with marathon keyboard improvisations, at John Calder's La Fonderie in Paris and The Blackie in Liverpool, as well as a Planet Tree Festival London appearance. Ball is a pioneer in music, having addressed meditative and healing presence and state-of-mind, primarily, for over 30 years. In 1996 he founded the Planet Tree Music Festival, which he also directs. He is also a highly sought after private tutor in mathematics. He lives in London.

Glass Ball

(by the composer himself)

Glass Ball is a homage to the composer Philip Glass, one of 4 composers who inspired me to devote my working life to composition

It is a gentle stream of tones, with velvet gong-like resonances beneath it. 

The melodic stream echoes Philip's playful way with alternation and additive patterns that can grow longer, or suddenly surprise the unconscious

There are, in turn, quaver and semi-quaver pulses at different moments. 

It has the insistence of PG's music, and I have echoed my favourite characteristics of his sound into the composing.

The piano is left open to ring most of the time, so is played more like a gong of sound washes, than a counterpoint of isolated notes.

Christopher Hobbs - Amy on the Beach

Biography

Christopher Hobbs

Christopher Hobbs, a pioneer in the field of Systemic Music in Britain, was born in 1950. He studied with Cornelius Cardew at the Royal Academy of Music and was the youngest member of the Scratch Orchestra when it began in 1969. In that year he also joined the improvisation group AMM. In 1970 he, along with John White, Hugh Shrapnel and Alec Hill, formed the Promenade Theatre Orchestra. After its disbandment in 1973 White and he continued as a duo. A pianist and percussionist as well as a composer, Hobbs has performed with a large number of individuals - Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, Steve Reich, John Tilbury, and Christian Wolff among others - and has written music for a large variety of ensembles and situations. He currently teaches at Coventry and De Montfort Universities in England.

Amy on the Beach

(by the composer himself)

Amy on the Beach is a systemic treatment of the piano miniature By the Still Waters by Amy Beach. The piece is played twice, the first time using a pattern based on the number thirteen, which allows certain notes of the original to be played but not others. On the second iteration another part is added to the first, played one octave lower, and using an expanding and contracting pattern based on the numbers fourteen to twenty-two. This is a “covert” system; it is not intended to be followed by the listener, but is instead a way of filtering the notes of the original in a way which is outside my personal choice.

The piece was written in February this year and is dedicated to Nicolas Horvath.