hcmf day two—two live broadcasts

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With these two links, you can follow two events at the Huddersfield festival live, wherever you are, today (Saturday November 19th). If I were home in Boston I’d call it tomorrow, but I’m here in Huddersfield and couldn’t be happier that two such promising (and different) events are available to be shared across so many geographical divides.

1) Starting at 11am and running for a full 24 hours, Simon Limbrick and James Saunders will perform surfaces.

For 24 hours, in a near-silent space, sound components are produced from actions on the surfaces of ecologically sourced materials. A live webcam permits access across global timezones.

Watch it here.

2) The ELISION Ensemble‘s world premiere of Richard Barrett’s CONSTRUCTION will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now at 10:30pm UK time.

CONSTRUCTION is a two-hour composition involving twenty-two musicians and a sixteen-channel sound installation. Its principal “theme” is the relationship between idealised “utopian” cities and real ones, between pristine visions abstracted from history and the violent disruptions, even total destructions, which mark the evolution of human conurbations. This basic tension, drawing from literary, philosophical, and political tracts, forms a discourse explored in this multifaceted composition.

It is a “construction” in twenty components, formed from four five-part “cycles” which interlock and reflect upon one another in many ways.

Cycles 1 and 2 consist respectively of five mostly instrumental and five electro-acoustic pieces relating in diverse ways to “utopian” ideas – including Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis; Plato’s Republic; William Morris’ News from Nowhere; Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun; the surreal cities of Giorgio de Chirico, the “invisible” ones of Italo Calvino and the dream-architecture of Francesco Colonna; the ideal societies of Aldous Huxley’s Island and Farid ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds; and finally “Germania”, Hitler’s vision for a new capital city, before the final part of the music undergoes a transformation into free improvisation – the only possible “hopeful” conclusion being for the musicians as a collective to find a way out, or a way forward.

Cycle 3 is a highly-compressed setting of fragments from Euripides’ The Trojan Women, almost like a series of fragments from an “opera”, the rest of which remains unheard, or lost: the action takes place before a city laid waste by the Greeks between women about to be shipped out into slavery and forced marriages, their husbands killed in the war and their children murdered.

Cycle 4 is a five-movement composition for solo violin and ensemble, wound, taking the form of a sequence of “laments” with the violin as protagonist.

The sound-installation or “sound-house” derives from an idea in Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1605), where an inhabitant of the New Atlantis is describing technological wonders to the visitor from Jacobean England, including microtones as well as reverberation and diverse other kinds of “sound-processing” – a kind of sonic utopia which can be brought into being now.

You can read more about it at The Rambler and on ELISION’s site.

Here is a short video about CONSTRUCTION, produced by Sound and Music:

Richard Barrett: CONSTRUCTION.

LyX

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I have a habit of trying out new software tools, so when I came across this post about a free program called LyX, that more or less flattens the learning curve for LaTeX, I took an interest. I was about to start writing up my latest text score, and while I didn’t anticipate any special formatting needs, I didn’t want it to look like just another MS Word document.

It works like a dream. I’ve found that the “Verse” style works well for isolated instructions within a score.

LyX is available for OSX, Windows, and Linux. They highly encourage you to read through the documentation, but it boils down to the fact that it’s WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean), so select a new attribute for every new line that has a new function (title, paragraph, etc.) and keep checking the preview to make sure it looks the way you want. Don’t bother with extra lines, tabs, and spaces. Just say what you’re doing and it will set it all right. It’s very configurable, and the output looks great.

Grúndelweiser

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BBC Hear and Now’s radio broadcast of the Cut & Splice festival featuring the Wandelweiser collective and Grúpat is in two parts. The first will be available through UK midnight tomorrow, and the second will be broadcast tomorrow at 22:30 (again UK time) and available for the following week. I’ve spent some quality time with the first broadcast and plan to keep listening to it, and I’m looking forward to hearing to the second installment, most likely on the plane ride over to the UK on Sunday evening.

Here are several in-depth reviews from Richard Pinnell at The Watchful Ear, with another by him to follow at The Wire. Another review is at Culture Wars, but before reading it, you might want to have some background provided in the final paragraph of Jennifer Walshe’s bio.

Before including a couple of images from the Cut & Splice facebook page, the first of the Wandelweiser collective’s performance and the second of the Grúpat exhibit, I’ll just point out an article by Tom Johnson that discusses, among other composers, the Wandelweiser collective. It was published a couple of years ago, but I had never seen it before last week and it makes some valuable points.