All Categories

River world première at Hundred Years Gallery

19/12/2017

Here's news of an early première, tomorrow evening!
Mid-Winter Solstice : Rude Mechanicals & Guests
Thursday 21st December 7:30 | entry by donation
Hundred Years Gallery, 13 Pearson Street, London E2
Everyone is welcome to the second night of our Mid-Winter celebrations, featuring the legendary Rude Mechanicals & Guests. Celebrated radio personality and improvising polymath Ivor Kallin will play a solo (or perhaps collaborative) set of wild and furious viola and Glaswegian glossolalia.
Mervyn Diese performs Badger Kull, and to start things off a world premiere screening of composer, writer and filmmaker Robert Robertson‘s River, scored for large orchestra (on the soundtrack... not in the room).
Gabriella's festive pannetone and chilli brownies free with drinks.

Noi, Persone Speciali - We, Special People

14/12/2017

NOI, PERSONE SPECIALI - WE, SPECIAL PEOPLE
by Cristina Marchesan
Illustrated by Dennis Dracup

I've read this book, and I have much enjoyed it.
It's a very positive experience to read these texts by the various young contributors.
And the images make a very effective counterpoint to the experiences they describe.
There's a sense of delight there too, a pleasant surprise which makes one think about creativity in a different and stimulating way.
It's important to have a book like this at this time, when all kinds of prejudices are currently increasing with regard to people being falsely perceived as being fundamentally different from oneself.
http://www.lulu.com/shop/cristina-marchesan/noi-persone-speciali-we-special-people/paperback/product-23410769.html

Inspiring rehearsal at the Royal College of Music

2/10/2017

Delightful experience yesterday afternoon, at the Royal College of Music.
We went to an inspiring rehearsal of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, with not one, but three excellent violinists, one for each movement: Emily Sun, Maria Gîlicel (who played a Stradivarius violin made in 1728), and Line Faber.
The acoustic in the Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall is wonderful, and the playing (as often with top student orchestras) was full of passion, energy, vigour, and total commitment.
The conductor, Mark Messenger, emphasised precision in the rhythmic details, and made intriguing points (as for example how Beethoven’s silences are very different from Mozart’s silences), and generally he strongly emphasised the improvisatory qualities of this concerto.
(This reminded me how years ago a filmmaker had asked me, as a composer, what I thought of improvisation. I told him that for me, the best notated music should sound like the best improvisation imaginable).
I particularly enjoy rehearsals like this one, as in them you experience the actual progress of composition of the music, its separate parts, its assemblage. In this rehearsal we were vividly presented with Beethoven’s huge variety of orchestral colours in this concerto, and his melodic vivacity, harmonic daring, rhythmic force: all the inner workings of inspired music, and music-making.
www.rcm.ac.uk/masterclasses and www.rcm.ac.uk/events

Tolstoy's confession

16/9/2017

Tolstoy isn’t immediately associated with a sense of humour, and it’s not there very much in his relatively short text A Confession. At one point he makes a wonderfully astute comment on ignorance:
‘when it does not know something it says that the thing it does not know is stupid.’
Due to censorship, A Confession couldn’t be published in Tolstoy’s lifetime, and the same fate was shared by his text What is Art? In part of this text he writes a hilarious account of a production of Wagner’s opera Siegfried.

Machines (Start) from Diversions

16/8/2017

In one aspect our digital age can be compared to that distant time of my favourite Early Greek philosophers (one of whom I celebrated in my dance opera Empedocles). In those days ideas were transmitted by speeches and discussions, like today. However, for the future, these ideas were set down in rolled parchments (of course publishers didn’t exist at that time), which is probably why only fragments from this wonderful early philosophy have survived. Now we have instant communication and continuous information transferral. And paradoxically this amazing technology often results in fragmentation, hence this extract, which is the start of my music/film Machines, the first movement of Diversions for orchestra and moving/still images:
Machines (Start)

Charlottesville, Virginia

14/8/2017

Dismayed at the appalling racist violence in Charlottesville, as well as by the feeble initial statement about it from Donald Tweet. This ineptitude and underlying racialist and jingoistic tendencies emanate from someone who apparently is the most powerful person on the planet - how long can this dangerous situation last? And how long are people going to bother propping him up by trying desperately to paper over Tweet's absurd and chauvinistic blunders?

Inspirational screening at Hundred Years Gallery

23/7/2017

At a time of chronic and abject conformity (when even the BBC publishes guidelines on how to be innovative), and when for some inconceivable reason, women earn a fraction of what their male counterparts earn, it was very refreshing to attend an inspired screening of artists’ films at the continuously innovative Hundred Years Gallery, part of its As-it-Stands season.
(And this happens at a time when I was seriously considering organising collective screamings somewhere, to counter the lack of screenings).
http://hundredyearsgallery.co.uk/as-it-stands-screenings/
Four films (two by two artists) stood out for me, memorably:
- A dead flower reanimates by Paula Garcia Stone.
A dance-like sequence of the artist’s drawings of a flower. Its transformations powerfully evoke human states of mind and body, and also present surprising forms that aren’t normally noticed, amidst the grit and grind of the everyday.
- Drumming About Architecture by Nick Cash.
In his film about the vast St Peter’s Seminary, Nick Cash literally performs this marvellous but crumbling building, mostly with wire brushes and a cymbal, dragging and dropping them, drumming on its varied surfaces to bring the decaying building rhythmically alive again. The film includes statements from Isi Metzstein, who along with Andy Macmillan, were the architects who designed St Peter’s Seminary.*
- Dreaming track by Paula Garcia Stone.
I have no idea how this magical and hypnotic film was made, which heightens its evocative power. It features drawings of freight trains, which glide past and interact with drawings of trackside trees. Here is how the artist describes what inspired it:
‘Sounds enter the ears and images float out with the breath. Strangely, this intermittent interruption of the approaching and then gliding freight trains makes a huge musical and soothing contribution to sleep. The heaving mixes in with deep breathing, the clanking of the wheels on the track, metal on metal, highlights the dramas of a dream not remembered’.
www.paulagarciastone.com
- Craft v. Craft by Nick Cash.
In this delightful well-observed film we see various encounters which the artist experiences, as he paddles his colourfully collaged cardboard and paper boat on the Grand Union Canal, from its urban London surroundings right through to lush greenery, kilometres later. He is overtaken by a fast paddler in a glossy canoe; a cyclist reads his texts, peddling near the water’s edge; a swan slowly paddles past, looking straight ahead. Then, once the intrepid artist is at a safe distance, the swan turns its head and looks round at him, watching him as he paddles away in his precarious-looking little boat, the swan probably wondering ‘well, what the hell is going on there then?’, in its own language.
www.thenickcash.com
*Metzstein set up the Macallan Club (the Macallan was his favourite whisky) for architects who had suffered the demolition or neglect of their work, inevitably an extremely depressing part of an architect’s life. He also taught at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, where his colleague and friend was the equally charismatic Director of the School, Andy Macmillan. For the infamous Research Assessment Exercise, Macmillan (who loathed academic bureaucracy) in 1992 tellingly submitted, as his research evidence, a T-shirt from a conference he’d attended.

Diversions

4/7/2017

Just adding the titles to Diversions in Three Movements, a work which combines my pre-digital score for large orchestra with a digital film. Two ages come together in this audiovisual work.
The other day I came across this thought about stories from the wonderful writer Primo Levi. Today we're told that everything must have a story - this is probably related to the obsession with brands. Anyway, this is what Primo Levi pointed out:
'... the more interpretations a story can give, the more ambiguous it is... a story must be ambiguous or else it is a news story, therefore everything is valid, rationality is valid, the science-fiction world is valid, and even the sensation of dreams is valid.'
This idea certainly applies to the ambiguities in Diversions, a stream-of-consciousness music/film.

Fellini quote

24/6/2017

Claudette said that it's bleedin' obvious why I should put this quote from Fellini here:
“All my life I've had a natural resistance to whatever everyone likes, or wants, or is ‘supposed’ to do”.
Federico Fellini

June 15th, 2017

15/6/2017

Two appalling tragedies in London: the terrorist attack on London Bridge, and nearby Borough market, and the terrible fire in the Grenfell tower block in North Kensington. It is so sad to see those who are trying to locate loved ones who may have been in the tower, and then there were those who were visiting London, and others who died in the earlier attack. The lives of everyone involved in these tragic events have inevitably been permanently traumatically affected. These horrific events have to provoke those in authority, those who have the power to do something, to take immediate action to prevent these awful tragedies from happening again.

<<Previous

Forward>>