Performed by But What About? on September 7, 2022 
@ TivoliVredenburg Club 9, Utrecht, NL as part of Gaudeamus Muziekweek.

Programme note:
“Unabout, maintaining” is a work that places the value of maintenance at its forefront, inspired by the article Hail the Maintainers! by Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel.  Its foundation, and the vast majority of all musical material in the piece, is re-purposed from the existing vocabulary of the performers. 

Following a series of simple written prompts, each of the members of But What About? provided me with a recorded sampling of their musical palette, a set of personal libraries and instrumental idiosyncrasies. The work almost immediately revealed itself in a set of soft, tender gestures from bassist Julián Sarmiento – a comforting world around which all other sounds and fragments find themselves orbiting. The piece rarely asks for the performers to perform something that isn’t already deeply within their practice and bodies – it is a maintaining work, cementing these sounds and gestures as distinctly by and for “But What About?”

And what else “about?” Really, one of my favourite things about music is that it’s an artform that doesn’t have to be about anything at all. It can be, as one of my students put it, “positively aimless” – the express desire for wandering without a particular place in mind, but an aimlessness that is imbued with a sense of positivity towards formlessness, exploration, play, patience, space, and un-aboutness. The piece is about the piece, about “But What About?”, about being unabout.

Unabout, Maintaining (accordion, bass clarinet, double bass, percussion, electronics)

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This page is predominantly live recordings - please check out studio recordings here:
https://bekahsimms.bandcamp.com/
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Composer Bekah Simms hails from St. John's, Newfoundland and is currently based in Glasgow after nine years living and working in Toronto. Her varied musical output has been heralded as “cacophonous, jarring, oppressive — and totally engrossing!” (CBC Music), “tough, even gutsy...with a sure sense of original and vibrant colours” (Vancouver Sun), and lauded for its "sheer range of ingenious material, expressive range and sonic complexity" (The Journal of Music.) Propelled equally by fascination and terror toward the universe, her work is often filtered through the personal lens of her anxiety, resulting in nervous, messy, and frequently heavy electroacoustic musical landscapes. Recent interests in just intonation and virtual instruments have resulted in increasingly lush and strange harmonic environments.

Bekah's music has been widely performed across North America and Europe. She has worked with some of the top interpreters of contemporary music internationally, including Crash Ensemble - with whom she is currently an artist-in-residence - Riot Ensemble, Eighth Blackbird, and l’Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal. Bekah has also been the recipient of over 35 awards, competitive selections, nominations, and prizes, including the 2019 Barlow Prize and the 2023 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year. The resulting work from the Barlow Prize, "metamold," was nominated for the 2022 Gaudeamus Award. Works from her debut album “impurity chains” were nominated in both 2019 and 2020 for the JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year. Her music has thrice been included in the Canadian Section's official submission to World Music Days (2016, 2019, & 2021), and in 2016 the CBC included her among their annual 30 hot classical musicians under 30.

Bekah is a Lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, following previous academic positions at the University of Toronto and University of Western Ontario.  Her principal teachers during academic studies were Gary Kulesha and Andrew Staniland, alongside significant private study with Clara Iannotta and Martin Bédard.