Little Bird
Copyright © 2021 Tinúviel Greenleaf.
All rights reserved.

Little Bird

Liminal Space
Copyright © 2021 Tinúviel Greenleaf.
All rights reserved.

Liminal Space

Ivan Moody: "O Luce Eterna" (2014). World première by Cappella Musical Cupertino de Miranda, Alcobaça, Portugal, 11 July 2014.

Ivan Moody: Dante Trilogy I: O Luce Etterna

NanoCulture 1

Dominik Karski - Along the Edge of Darkness (1999, for amplified double bass)
Joan Wright (db)
2.11.2016, Scale Variable series, Tura New Music
Perth, Australia

Dominik Karski - Along The Edge Of Darkness

Cité de la musique et de la danse Strasbourg, 26.03.2018

Walter Zimmermann: Wüstenwanderung

“Abiya” is a portmanteau word coined by the early kabbalist Isaac of Acre from the initial letters of the Hebrew names for the four worlds (emanation, creation, formation and making), which, in Kabbala, constitute the entirety of creation.  At the start of my piece, the hierarchical organisation of the four worlds is mirrored by a texture in which the same material (groups of widespread chords) is stated on four levels.  Each level gradually moves away from the opening texture, the outer ones in in a straightforward goal-oriented fashion, while the inner parts develop in a more freely associative, tangential way.

At four points there is an attempt to paper over the cracks created as a result of the disengagement of the four levels of activity in the form of a type of musical red herring.  The discourse is made to act as accompaniment to a florid type of music, different form anything heard thus far.  This music is both “non-pianistic” and anachronistic, evoking a distorted memory of monodic vocal music from the time of Monteverdi.

In the fifth and final section all four strands are drawn together again.  Each now consists of a melodic line complete with its own accompaniment – a distant echo of the sound of the huge iron-keyed gamelan of Tenganan in the east of Bali. This music, too, is subjected to variative procedures.  The four highly complex lines which result for these are both too strenuous for the material to bear and extremely tricky for the performer to articulate, and the work finally disintegrates into silence.

Abiya was written in 1995 and commissioned by Ian Pace (who gave the first performance on 28th March 1997 at Conway Hall, London) with funds made available by the Holst foundation.  It is dedicated with gratitude and affection to Ian Pace and Henrietta Brougham.   

The work has the distinction of being mentioned in Blair Babylon’s 2015 romantic novel “Every Breath You Take”.


Abiya

frammenti di divenire (fragments of becoming) (2018) for soprano and baritone saxophones performed by Michele Selva and Gianpaolo Antongirolami. Area Sismica, Via Le Selve 23, Forlì 47121, Italia

frammenti di divenire (fragments of becoming) (2018)

The piece consists of 4 short movements. Each extracts various types of material from Brumel's Mass, 'Missa Dominicalis' (specifically Kyrie). Such material includes pitches, durations, cadence points, compositional techniques of the Renaissance period. I take these cuttings and translate them into new material via augmentation, diminution, re-layering/ordering, and re-contextualisation. I was interested in how existing material can be reworked via using transnational processes, as in linguistics, as well as how Renaissance material can be transformed into the style of contemporary music. This piece forms part of my PhD funded by the AHRC, which explores how concepts of translation can be productively applied to a compositional environment, and what the consequences of doing so are.  

This is a rehearsal recording, but we are working towards a concert in December, where we will perform the work. 

Performed by: 
Hannah Caroline Firmin, soprano
Elizabeth Wells, flute 
Benjamin Palmer, Bb bass/Bb clarinets

Brumel Translated (2019)

March 15 2020

Vesperum

For James Erber

British composer James Erber was born in 1951 in London of an Austrian father and an English mother. After studying Music at the Universities of Sussex (BA, 1973) and Nottingham (MA, 1975), he was appointed Music Editor at Peters Edition, London. He left Peters Edition in 1979 and began work as a freelance editor, writer and translator.  Still largely self-taught as a composer, it was at this period he produced his first acknowledged score, "Seguente" for oboe and piano (1976-1978, revised 1980). The guidance and encouragement he received from Brian Ferneyhough (whom he had met at Peters Edition) prompted him to a serious study of composition, firstly with Jonathan Harvey at the University of Sussex (MPhil in Composition, 1983), then from 1981 to 1982 with Ferneyhough himself at the Musikhochschule, Freiburg-im-Breisgau. In 1984, at Ferneyhough’s suggestion, he made the first of five visits to the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, winning a Stipendienpreis in 1988. From 1982 to 2016, he combined activity as a composer with teaching and lecturing. Since 2016 he has been able to concentrate solely on composition. 
James Erber's work reflects a wide range of interests, including Renaissance and Baroque music, the music of South-East Asia, Jazz, blues, Mediaeval and Renaissance philosophy, Kabbalah, green politics, recent scientific developments, film noir, Jacobean tragedy, the Gothic novel and historical slang.  His music is multi-layered and complex (especially from the point of view of rhythm and form). Its complexity is, however, combined with harmonic clarity and lyricism as well as a tenuous sense of optimism and a concern with intellectual and spiritual continuity.
It has been performed and broadcast widely by soloists such as Pavlos Antoniadis, Antonella Bini, Mario Caroli, Diego Castro Magaš, Matteo Cesari, Franklin Cox, Gianpaolo Antongirolami, Gleb Kanasevich, Carin Levine, Ian Pace, Jonathan Powell, Nancy Ruffer and Michele Selva, as well as by ensembles including 175 East, the Arditti Quartet, Duo Galeano/Javaid, Exposé, ELISION, Lontano and NOISE. James Erber’s music has been recorded on NMC, Metier, Centaur Records (USA) and Convivium Records. Many of his scores are available from Composers Edition. In July 2022, his complete writings on music (1978-2021) were published by Vision Edition under the title "Fragile Continuities".

Abiya

James Erber

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