Sound and Music

Cult pop experimenter Simon Bookish will present a selection of his songs in special new arrangements for strings, including songs from Everything/Everything, his 'big band album about science and information' which was released on the Tomlab label last year.

Simon Bookish is the pseudonym of composer and vocalist Leo Chadburn, whose recent projects have included everything from a

new score for Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle for the National Theatre, electronic music for choreographer Frauke Requardt, a site-specific performance, not wanting to say anything about John Cagefor the Magazin 4 gallery (Bregenz) and disco string arrangements for the band Fan Death.

LINKS

www.simonbookish.com

JOHN CAGE Etudes Boreales

John Cage's Etudes Boreales (1972) use the piano as a percussion object; the performer is instructed to use mallets to strike parts of the body of the instrument and strings as well as playing normally on the keys. Similar to his Atlas Eclipticalis (1961), Cage used star-charts published by Czech astronomer Antonín Becvár to place musical events.
Various properties of the stars (magnitude, colour, etc) determine characteristics of the musical event such as which part of the instrument should be struck and with which material.

Performed by Mark Knoop.

LUCIANO BERIO Sequenza I

This solo piece for Flute is the first of 14 works by Berio entitled Sequenza. The specific notation here doesn't dictate note lengths, allowing the performer to control the momentum of the piece although Berio's influence of Serialism remains in his strict organisation of pitch, harmony, articulation and dynamics.

Performed by Carla Rees

CHRISTIAN WOLFF Music for 1, 2 or 3 players

Christian Wolff says about the work that “this music is drawn from the interaction of the people playing it”, Peter Nikolas Wilson comments that [the score consists of] unbound white pages with several notes loosely distributed on the notation systems (but no clef indicated): vertical, horizontal or diagonal lines; numbers in red and black; indications for dynamics and a few graphic symbols. The symbols stand not just for modes of producing sounds, durations of sounds, timbres and so on; above all they define coordination: play this sound after the previous one has begun and hold it until it ends, or: start somewhere, hold the sound until another begins, and end them both together.

TRISTAN BROOKES Threads for amplified viola and 7 loudspeakers

I. Prelude
'Humming wires. Each to each. A different hum.'

II. Ludus
'Footsteps. Below.
Voices
threads. Caught in pavement cracks.'

III. Melody

IV. 'Messages from clouds...'

Performed by Robert Ames

Electronics - Tristan Brookes and Oliver Whitworth