What a beautiful piece! Stunning vocals and composition.

Cracks Between The Reflections

Premiered at Cycle Festival  15. august 2015 by The South Iceland Chamber Choir directed by Hilmar Orn Agnarsson. 

Program notes:
After my graduation from Mills College in 2015, I returned to Iceland for the summer.  The bright Icelandic summer light welcomed me in all its beauty. My eyes had gotten used to the Californian daylight,  more golden and dreamy than the Icelandic light. Icelandic daylight is colder, sharper, and somehow more clear.  My eyes needed time to adjust—it had never felt so bright, so colorful, so clear.  The Icelandic sunset and sunrise even have a completely different texture than in California. In Iceland the brightness projects  different colors on the landscape—the mountains in Iceland are blue, the mountains in California are gold.  Here, everything gets a sharper edge and different tone. These thoughts translated into ideas of difference in sound.  The color qualities of the human voice have always fascinated me, and in this piece I try to communicate different colors  and degrees of brightness. The Icelandic language has over one hundred words describing the brightness of daylight from dawn to dusk.  I used them as inspiration and but the piece is without words. Let the voices draw the pictures and shape the piece.

Recorded by Árni Möller for Cycle Festival 2015
http://www.cycle.is       

BIRTA (Brightness)

Michele Marelli, corno di bassetto solista
Divertimento Ensemble
Dir. Sandro Gorli

Dispositivo per la continuità

A recording of the premier performance by Caput Ensemble  in Harpa Concert Hall during Dark Music Days on January 29th 2016. 

Erfiljóð handa Guðmundi

For double bass and electrically stimulated bass drums.
Dario Calderone double bass, 
Davide Ianni electronics.
Performed on 07/12/2016 at Composit New Music Festival

Beneath The Music From A Further Room is scored for solo double bass and 2 "singing" bass drums.   The piece is  really a solo for the double bass however , the sonic realm that the instrument creates ends up inhabiting 2 bass drums sitting on stage, which start to 'sing' taking over the soloist. This piece plays with the perceptual shifting that occurs from the breaking of the concert ritual. As the bass drums take over enveloping the hall with their sound, the listener is subtly transported into a different sonic reality and syntax which appears to be removed from the performer and  composer's control. This music now inhabits inanimate objects projected in space unaware of the circumstances that generated it. The concert ritual is slowly dissolved, and we are now left to engage with sounds without a specific paradigm.

Beneath The Music From A Further Room

Suzuki Baleno performed by TAK Ensemble.

Score: https://issuu.com/baragisladottir/docs/suzuki_baleno__a__n_sello____merged?e=23234531/30000297

Suzuki Baleno

From Snorri Hallgrímsson's debut album 'Orbit' (Out Now)

stream/buy 'Orbit' (CD/Digital)
Bandcamp: https://bit.ly/2vJLgP2
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2ldL4PU
iTunes: https://apple.co/2JWVgu3

Homeless

stream/buy

Snorri Hallgrímsson - Homeless

Inexpressible v.2 (2013/2015)
written for and premiered by Ensemble Third Sound
Havana Festival for Contemporary Music
November 2015

Sooyun Kim, flute
Karen Kim, violin
Michael Nicolas, cello

In "Inexpressible," each voice is treated as a unique line, its activity independent from the other. In a way, this is a piece of music for three soloists played simultaneously. Whereas polyphonic music traditionally found the relation between voices in a shared "harmony," the musical lines in "Inexpressible" share two things: speed and energy. Harmony, though existent, is subsumed by velocity and athleticism, gesture and force.

The text, ghosted within the notes, is Ludwig Wittgenstein, words from his "Tractatus"about the impossibility of knowing.

"Inexpressible" was originally written for Ensemble Pamplemousse and premiered in New York City in April 2013. "Inexpressible v.2" was adapted for Ensemble Third Sound and premiered in November 2015 in Havana, Cuba.

Inexpressible v.2

041419 Expression masters v1

Ashrei

Georg K. Hilmarsson (b.1982) graduated from the Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2013 and proceeded his graduate studies at Mills College in California, working closely with renowned composers Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Roscoe Mitchell and John Bischoff. Georg graduated 2015 from Mills College with honors, were he was honored with the Paul Merrit Henry Prize for excellence in composition for stringed Instruments.

Georg’s pieces have been performed widely, Salisbury Arts Festival í England, Summer Dream Choir festival in Sweden, Center for Contemporary Music in San Francisco and the Berkley Art Museum. Georg’s pieces has span a variety of instrumentation and groups amongst those who have premiered his work are; Eclipse Quartet, Celli@Berkely, The Reykjavik Cathederal Choir and the South Iceland Chamber Choir.

Georg has been active in the Icelandic music scene as a bass player and songwriter, most notably with the band Sprengjuhollin. 


BIRTA (Brightness)

Georg K. Hilmarsson

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