Open instrumentation

Played on the organ at Holy Trinity Church, Hull by Lauren Redhead

…I want to know about the lull in the storm…

Tape piece written for FOCAM event at Brudenell Social Club in 2009.
Play in a busy room with a bar for historically informed experience.

Translation is the art of failure

For accordion and double bass (extractable accordion sections only)
Performed by Eva Zöllner

flirtations (excerpts)

Solo a sax, solo pno, 2fl (1/picc), cl/bar sax, bs cl, 2 tbns

Jenny Hird (sax); Ben McGowan (pno)

Piece dealing with power, alienation, and democracy
No recording available of revised final movement

Double (original ending)

Music for ob., sax., 2 perc., pno., db., tape.
Performed by Workers Union conducted by Ben Oliver at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, 14 July 2011
Text and pre-recorded voice by Sam Grinsell.

For several years I consciously avoided writing concert music designed to work in combination with other artistic disciplines. Recently I began to think about turning again to this kind of composition, and particularly about the prospect of working with music and verbal language. Coincidentally, the invitation to write for the Workers Union ensemble arrived around the same time that I came across the poem Night Walking by Sam Grinsell. I was struck by the temporal stasis implied by this text; although the protagonist recounts observations made over a short period of time, the language used implies a frozen time, a crystallisation of the scene that permits endless admiration of its beauty. The poem contemplatively describes a conurbation, bristling with artificiality, nestled beneath the vast semi-darkness of the late dusk sky. Particularly striking to me is the emphasis placed on different types of light. I have long been fascinated by the interaction of the artificial and natural light and the way this influences our perception of the world around us. Perhaps the greatest affect is on our sense of space. Here again Sam’s text is particularly evocative, giving a sense of endless, perhaps lonely spaciousness that complements the feeling of suspended time.

Night Walking is not intended as programmatic music. My aim was to manifest in sound a kind of colouristic ballet comparable to the interplay of artificial and natural light observable as the sun is imprisoned by the horizon, the shifting shadows that result, and our subsequent perception of shape and space. The music does not describe visual phenomena. Rather, the spoken word and musical sounds work independently to give the impression of gradual shifts seemingly held in a temporary stasis.

Come with me / We will explore the solitary night / The endless twilight at the edge of town / Where only drunks and madmen care to tread / And which we are / We can decide.


Night Walking (temporary rough version)

for solo viola

Artifacts (one)

Solo hn, fl (+picc + bs), bs cl, perc (1), guit, pno, vln, vla, vc

Programme note:

‘Heterophony’ is the simultaneous sounding of variations on shared source material, in this case a small pool of horn techniques. The solo horn part is thus not ‘soloistic’ in any traditional sense; rather, it exists as a nucleus of technical demands and sonic outcomes that are adopted and re–worked by the remaining ensemble instrumentalists. A certain degree of timbral transposition, so to speak, occurs in this process; the idiosyncrasies of each instrument require different technical approaches and produce equally unique outcomes. The result is a constant play of techniques and, more importantly, colours. This farbenspiel is non–hierarchical and introverted; it neither leads nor cycles. It is heterophonic: simultaneous play and a play of simultaneity.

Tom Bettley (Hn), LS Two, Mic Spencer (Cond)

heterophony/farbenspiel

For 3 voices

A piece of singing, speaking, breathing, and page turning concerned with music's inability to facilitate unequivocally meaningful communication.

Performed by Juice vocal ensemble

At this point add the extra ingredients...

Interpretative text/graphic score for open instrumentation.

Performed by organist Lauren Redhead on 23 February 2013 at St Laurence’s Church in Catford as part of #RPM2013. Recording engineered by Stuart Russell and is available on the album Sound/Image/Resonance (available here: http://laurenredhead.bandcamp.com/album/sound-image-resonance )

This work - which takes its title from the Roland Barthes book of the same name - is as much a product of the performer's creative and interpretative sensibilities as it is a product  of my own compositional whims, perhaps more so. The score consists of several pages of written text (which, incidentally, make up the performance instructions). Each page uses the same basic text rendered differently to create a variety of catalysts for interpretation. Some pages see text strategically deleted, as if whittled like wood, to create shapes, patterns, and images. Others alter the text on a more systematic basis. In all cases the matter of what exactly to do with the score is left unexplained, and purposefully so. The performer is invited to explore the relationships they detect, both within the score and between the score, performance, themselves, and any other 'extra-textual' realms they see ﬁt. There is no speciﬁed instrumentation or given performance length for 'Image, Music, Text'.

Image, Music, Text

Hello and welcome to one of my two SoundCloud pages. Here you'll find a selection of my concert music and electronic music. Increasingly I am becoming interested in the overall experience of a musical performance beyond the purely sonic, so sound recordings are something of a poor substitute for video (largely unavailable) or being there for yourself. Alas. Anyway, I'm sure you'll get the general picture.

The kind of music you can find here represents only a narrow field of view in the very wide panorama of musical activities I get involved with. My other SoundCloud page - http://soundcloud.com/adam-fergler-music - takes an equally narrow view but in a completely different direction. There you can find examples of some of the media music I have worked on.

For more information on my compositions and my other musical work visit my website at http://adamfergler.eu

Happy listening

Adam Fergler