New Stuff

Live performance of Beat Furrer's "Voicelessness (The Snow Has No Voice) at the Bang On a Can Summer Institute. Recorded on Thursday, July 18th 2013 in the galleries at MASS MoCA.

Beat Furrer - Voicelessness (The Snow Has No Voice)

SONG CIRCUS: Impro, inspired by C. Cardew

for Brass Septet
Recording of the german premiere in June 2013

Zug by Enno Poppe

Performed by Anne-Maria Hölscher, Accordion; Daniel Buess, Percussion
Recorded live at soyuz21 concert, Gallery Hauser&Wirth Zürich on May 27th 2011

Magnus Lindberg – Metal Work for Accordion and Percussion (1984)

Parallaxes

Matthias Pintscher
Nemeton, pour percussion 
Victor Hanna
enregistré en direct le 12.09.2014 à l'Ircam 

photo (c)Luc Hossepied pour l'Ensemble intercontemporain

Matthias Pintscher, Nemeton

Pascal Dusapin - Stanze, Mov.2

Pascal Dusapin - Stanze, Mov.1

The Restoration of Objects [2008]
for string quartet.
JACK Quartet

More info <a href="http://www.timothy-mccormack.com/restoration" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>.

The Restoration of Objects [2008] [JACK Quartet]

Tora Augestad - soprano
Uli Fussenegger - double bass

Beat Furrer: Lotòfagos

Orchestre symphonique du Conservatoire et de l'Université Paul Valéry, dir. Débora Waldman Santisteban 25-03-06, Opéra Comédie, Montpellier.

Michaël Levinas - 3 pensées pour Coma, b. Choral mécanique

Saxifrage for String Quartet, performed by the JACK Quartet

Program Note:

Saxifrage is the name of a type of flowering plant that sets its roots into stones. Over time the roots of these plants can create cracks and splits in the rocks that they grow in – a rather impressive accomplishment for a flower. The name Saxifrage in fact derives from the Latin word Saxifraga which means literally, “stone breaker.” I thought it would be interesting to explore this idea in a piece – a stony landscape that gradually becomes broken by a beautiful flower that grows out of it. 

Saxifrage - Performed by JACK Quartet

Roomful of Teeth featuring Virginia Warnken from the album "Roomful of Teeth"

Prix de Composition 2012, Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. Dirigé par Tito Ceccherini et interpreté par l'OLC et Matteo Cesari au Karlax.

Kaala, pour grand ensemble et electronique - Karlax (2012)

Commissioned by Klangforum Wien, award for Impuls International Composition Competition 2011.
Premiered at impuls . International Ensemble and Composers Academy for Contemporary Music 2013, Graz / Austria, by Klangforum Wien and Enno Poppe, conductor.

Eon, for ensemble (2012)

A more experimentative track of mine, using an idea of descending thirds and minor seconds.  Transformations was composed by me in a 2-week period and played by the Jack quartet (http://www.jackquartet.com).  Enjoy!  

Transformations for String Quartet (played by the Jack Quartet)

Trevor Wishart (UK) (b. 1946) has been a pioneer within electronic music, vocal music and academia since the early seventies. Wishart is currently associated with the Durham University as Arts Council Composer Fellow. Wishart has also developed musical software that has been and still is being used by many electrophonic music performers today.

“Anticredos” is written for 6 voices and multi channel sound design/electronic. 
The range of the composition is vast, both vocally and aesthetically speaking. The piece had it’s premiere in 1980, and it is based on a very detailed system of sound and notation published in the book “Book of Lost Voices” (1980). One can find this system in almost all of Wishart’s vocal compositions. “Anticredos” is both vocally demanding and musically very complex and for that reason it has been performed only a handful of times. At the same time the music speaks to us all, with it’s fascinating soundscapes and strong contrasts. Song Circus has since April 2009 performed the piece on several occasions, amongst others at the contemporary music festival PGNM in Bremen, which was broadcasted on the radio (Radio Bremen/Nord-Deutsche Rundfunk). 

THE VOCAL CHAMBER ENSEMBLE SONG CIRCUS
Song Circus is a vocal chamber ensemble consisting of professional singers from Stavanger, Oslo and Gothenburg. The ensemble is continually exploring the voice through projects that combine contemporary music and improvisational music.
The group is seeking collaboration with composers and creative musicians, which have already resulted in collaborations with composers such as Trevor Wishart (UK, Jaap Blonk (NL), Ruben Sverre Gjertsen (NO), Ole Henrik Moe (NO) and David Moss (US/DE). The ensemble was founded in late 2008/early 2009, and has already been noted for their performances which include four large main projects and several rarely performed pieces.

Musical director: Liv Runesdatter.

Singers: Liv Runesdatter (Stavanger), Anita Kaasbøll (Oslo), Eva Bjerga Haugen (Stavanger), Maria Norseth Garli (Gothenburg), Rønnaug Bakke (Stavanger)/Stine Motland (Oslo), Signe Irene Time (Stavanger).

Conductor: Jonas Rogne Skartveit (Stavanger). Sound engineer/designer: Trevor Wishart (UK)/Dag Egil Njaa (Stavanger).

Song Circus performing "Anticredos" by Trevor Wishart live in Stavanger

Chordos Quartet
rec. 2012

http://www.baltakas.net/works/belltree

b(ell tree) for string quartet (2007, full recording)

GOD 16
Bernhard Lang
Monadologie XII 
(Klangforum Wien/Johannes Kalitzke)
www.godrec.com

GOD 16 - Bernhard Lang - Monadologie XII (Klangforum Wien/Kalitzke), excerpts

The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651)
A man is a bubble, (said the Greek proverb), which Lucian represents with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose; saying, that all the world is a storm, and men rise up in their several generations, like bubbles descending a Jove pluvio, from God and the dew of heaven, from a tear and drop of rain, from nature and Providence; and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in the world, but to be born, that they might be able to die: others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion,restless and uneasy, and being crushed with a great drop of a cloud, sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing that it was before.
-Jeremy Taylor

I reread Jeremy Taylor’s exquisite sentence, the opening of The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, throughout my compositional process but, in composing my work, I was not, beyond a general stormy affect in the middle section, musically illustrating Taylor’s imagery. Rather, Taylor’s rhetoric –veering between violent and delicate imagery, and structure, its pauses unable to halt a powerful trajectory, inspired me to compose this work as a type of memento mori. Giving abstract music expressive titles is rare for me, and in any case is a tricky process. But in the wake of recent losses, both personal and national, I was moved even moved by Taylor’s text –a potent emblem of the fragility and precariousness of life.

On a purely technical level, the work is a summation of my work for strings over the last decade, especially my three string quartets composed for the Arditti and JACK Quartets. More than any overdetermining system, my work is governed by the physicality of the instruments and is marked by the gradual introduction of different playing techniques: glassy harmonics, skittish string-crossings, snap pizzicato, or even brutal sawing, often resolving once more to an uneasy calm. I embrace aspects of high modernism - albeit critically, and attempt is create something viscerally expressive, dramatically structured, using pulsing rhythmic energy to veers between extremes of fragility and violence. 

While my work has used scrapping sounds for almost ten years, after watching a recent documentary on Gerhard Richter’s process, I was struck by the aural similarities created by his process which entails dragging a scrapper across the canvas over freshly-applied paint. Scrapping that yields texture and color is important in my work. The subtitle is a nod to Richter, a constant source of inspiration. 

That said, the initial juxtapositions that inspired this work are more personal. I was asked to compose a work to accompany Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings shortly after my grandfather’s passing. Its impossible for me think of either Strauss or my grandfather without thinking of Munich in the spring of 1945, the time when Strauss was finishing (and a bit too ambiguously dedicating) Metamorphosen.  Only a few miles a way, American soldiers liberated Dachau and my grandfather was among the soldiers that aided the victims and then escorted them south through Strauss’ Garmisch, to Salzburg and on to the Hungarian border. It is dedicated to him, and to my grandmother, who passed away shortly before I finished this work, in memoriam.

Review here: http://tinyurl.com/n5ua5g7 and (as performance of the year) here: http://tinyurl.com/l7ayod8

New Stuff

Genuhorn