Future Music #4, Royal Northern College of Music Concert Hall, 19:30
Tickets here.
With Juliet Fraser (voice)
threaded | spinning | abrading | possibly breaking - Sam Longbottom & Tanguy Pocquet
Sound Sculpture No.5b [WP] - Simon Knighton
Lost in your whole world [WP] - Ellen Sargen (+ the house of bedlam)
Growing Block* - Sarah Hennies
Crow rotations [WP]* - Larry Goves (music), Matthew Welton (text)
*Juliet Fraser
This concert of new and recent works is loosely connected by elusive responses to scientific theories, processes, and materials. Sam Longbottom and Tanguy’s Pocquet’s intimate installation of string instruments tuned to just intonation activated by fishing wire and variable speed turntables exemplifies the dynamical systems which has inspired Simon Knighton's new work. It’s appropriate that the latter emerges from the harmonies of the former.
Ellen Sargen’s recent work, preoccupied with long-term collaborations, is situated within the discussions, interactions, and surveys typical to the social sciences in this new work, she blurs territories between composed, devised, suggested, improvised, and transcribed improvised materials.
Sarah Hennies' Growing block is based on the scientific theory of the same name that suggests that past and present time exist, but future time does not. Here the musicians behave “as though inside a snapshot of a moment in time, if one could move around inside a moment without going forwards or backwards”.
Larry Goves and Matthew Welton’s new 30-minute cycle of eight songs combines sumptuous sounds, images, and words within a formally severe framework as the texts gradually reduce in scale, and the music gathers more harmonic variety. Patterns of repetition and rotation in the music are inspired, in part, by the patterns found in organic chemistry, from the relative simplicity of hydrocarbons and alcohols, to the staggering complexity of the chemical compounds associated with the colour of a crow’s wing.
While these ideas serve as starting points, the priority here is on the qualities of the wide variety of sounds and their, and the performers’, interactions.
Supported by:
PRiSM, the Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music at the Royal Northern College of Music funded by the Research England fund Expanding Excellence in England (E3); and
The RVW Trust
