The Smith Quartet.  27 February 2009.  Artrix, Bromsgrove

Photo:Robert Taylor 
http://taylor-photo.co.uk/

Dances On a Ground (2009) for string quartet

Text by Lydia White
Soprano: Celine Wasmer
Piano: Lucas Buclin
Violin: Francois Girard Garcia
Viola: Noémi Bialobroda
Cello: Hilde Skomedal

I am your reflection (extracts)

I am your reflection: III

GHB/tanzaggregat

Twenty layers of the same recording of Beethoven's unusual and delightful Choral Fantasy [Fantasia in C minor, op. 80 - Alfred Brendel]; placed on top of each other, with each successive track squished a second shorter, resulting in bizarre reiterations bordering on the electronic, looking at itself between two mirrors garnering impressive cycles, amassing reverberated windings and pulsating extreme overlapping echoes - in this way the sum of all the parts gradually becomes blended into a logically chaotic brouhaha.

Choral Fantasy [EXTREME REMIX: 1808/2017]

Soloist (mandolin, percussion) plus fixed media, lighting, and image projection.

Ian Shanahan - Arcturus Timespace (1987 & 1994) [studio]

EXAUDI

Juliet Fraser, Amanda Morrison (soprano)
Lucy Goddard (mezzo)
Tom Williams (countertenor)
David de Winter, Alastair Putt (tenor)
Simon Whiteley, Jimmy Holliday (bass)

James Weeks (conductor)

world premiere 
live performance

Milton Court Concert Hall, London
22 March 2019

commissioned by EXAUDI with funds provided by Arts Council England's National Lottery Project Grants scheme

'Pocket Universe is an ebullient, and at times zany, setting of words from Galileo Galilei's Dialogo i due massimi sistemi del mondo tolemaico e copernicano and Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in their respective languages. What interests me in using these texts is not so much their meaning—which most of us know and few of us understand—but the energy behind them. The same goes for the music whose material is on the whole commonplace, but whose energy accumulates on account of dialectical/modular principles and coalesces into a self-supporting “universe”. These principles can be explained by analogy. Imagine musical blocks that snap together in various ways, like Lego, or assembling a wardrobe from IKEA without the instructions: by such principles a novel entity is created. The processes in the music combine rigour and “Eureka moments” in much the same way as I imagine these authors did.'

Geoff Hannan: Pocket Universe (2016)

Suite of Nine Pieces for Solo Fingers

1. Left Hand, 3-4
2. Left Hand Thumb
3. Left Hand, 1-2; Right Hand, 1-2
4. Left Hand, 1,2,5; Right Hand, 2
5. Left Hand, 4
6. Right Hand, 1-5
7. Left Hand, 2; Right Hand, 2
8. Grand Finale: All TEN fingers!
9. Epilogue: Two Wee Fingers

Solo Fingers

Rachmaninov's 2nd + 3rd piano concertos, superimposed; the 2nd up a semitone + the 3rd down a semitone, with the duration of each layered movement dictated by the lesser length

Moderato Allegro Ma Non Tanto [I]

Photo credit: Robert Taylor 
http://taylor-photo.co.uk/

Dances On a Ground (2009) for string quartet

Morgan Hayes