An event curated by Elision, the University’s ensemble in residence, is to feature major works by Huddersfield composers Bryn Harrison, Mary Bellamy, Aaron Cassidy and Liza Lim. Out Hear, a series of events put together by leading promoters and musicians in the worlds of contemporary and experimental music and multi-media performance, is taking place at Kings Place in London on Monday 15 March. 

The event will be the first time the entire Elision Ensemble has appeared in London.  Conducted by Manuel Nawri, the concert is presented in collaboration with the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM). 
The works being performed are an outcome of University research grant which has supported the Elision residency and after the Out Hear event it is planned to record the works for DVD in London and for CD at the legendary Sendesaal Studios of Radio Bremen in Germany.  The works are:

Mary Bellamy - new work (2009)
Aaron Cassidy - And the scream, Bacon's scream, is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth (or, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion) (2009)
Bryn Harrison - surface forms (repeating) (2009)
Liza Lim - Songs Found in Dream (2006)
And works by James Dillon (Once Upon a time, 1980) and Brian Ferneyhough (Terrain, 1992 – with virtuoso violinist Graeme Jennings).

The event starts at 8.00pm and tickets cost £9.50 from www.kingsplace.co.uk

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The Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Dance, Drama and Music PALATINE

P A L A T I N E (Performing Arts Learning and Teaching Innovation Network) is the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Dance, Drama and Music.

The Performing Arts Learning and Teaching Innovation Network (PALATINE) held its latest event in the Creative Arts Building, hosted by the Department of Music and Music Technology.  The topic for discussion at this day-long event was ‘Teaching Composition – Engaging Students: a Big Conversation’. 

Organised by Dr Bryn Harrison in conjunction with the department’s research arm, CeReNeM (the Centre for Research in New Music), participants focused on current approaches and challenges in the field of composition teaching in Higher Education.  Delegates across the north of England had a ‘big conversation’ on the subject, sharing ideals, ideas and approaches.

Invited speakers included:

• John Habron, Senior Lecturer in Music at Coventry University
• Bryn Harrison, CeReNeM, University of Huddersfield
• Jonty Harrison, Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music, University of Birmingham
• Vasco Hexel, Area leader in Composition for Screen at the Royal College of Music
• Adam Moore, musician, teacher and student, teaching in FE and  HE in Norwich, whilst maintaining a semi-professional career performing, writing, recording and engineering. Currently reading for a PhD in Music Education at the Institute of Education, London, under the supervision of Professor Lucy Green

Bryn says, ‘Teaching Composition – Engaging Students: a Big Conversation’ offered an exciting opportunity to bring together educators from all over the country to share their experiences of teaching composition.  I am delighted that the University of Huddersfield was able to host this PALATINE event.’

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As part of Festival d’Automne à Paris, Liza Lim's opera 'The Navigator’ was performed at the Opéra National de Paris Bastille on 8 December 2009.

It was the 12th performance of the opera, this time in a concert version with ELISION conducted by Manuel Nawri with the same cast of singers as for the original production. This follows three performances in Moscow on 25, 26, 27 June 2009 at the Fomenko Theatre as part of the Chekhov International Theatre Festival.

A review of the Paris event by Tim Rutherford-Johnson appears in Musical Criticism:www.musicalcriticism.com/concerts/bastille-navigator-1209.shtml

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‘Making the Tudor Viol’ a five-year research project run by Professor John Bryan and Dr Michael Fleming and funded by the AHRC, has recently launched its own website. It is full of information about the project and imminent plans are being made for displaying illustrations of viols from the 16th century onwards on the site. John and Michael would like to encourage people to get in touch, either with contributions on the subject, or with their own pictures of these typically-English instruments.

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The artistic result of a unique collaboration between lecturer and student is to be screened at the Leeds International Film Festival in November.

Senior lecturer, Robin Kiteley (pictured right), teamed up with Music student Samuel Stocks (pictured far right) to produce an experimental moving-image piece that has already received critical acclaim at festivals around the world.

Carbon Dating Angels is the result of a three-month project which saw Robin and Sam leave their own realms of expertise to explore the medium of ‘screendance’, in which processes of framing, editing and the capacity to manipulate time and space, are used as fundamental aspects of movement composition and choreography.  The eleven-minute film incorporates 1930s archive footage of x-ray techniques alongside Sam’s musical and sonic interpretation and explores the reconfiguration of cinematic spaces and the bodies within them.

“The archive footage of the x-ray techniques inspired us to think about the ways in which these scientific processes were able to tell us new things about our bodies and new ways of looking at things,” says Robin. “We then started thinking about applying these scientific processes to things which are currently ‘unknowable’, and came up with the idea of Carbon Dating Angels.”

The project initially came about through Robin’s involvement with the Artists Access to Art Colleges (AA2A) scheme, in which he was one of only four local artists to take part in the scheme’s first year at Huddersfield. AA2A offers artists the opportunity to use the facilities of Higher Education institutions to undertake a period of research or realise a project.

“I was keen to collaborate with a music student or sound artist in order to achieve a final piece in which visual and audio elements were intimately related,” explains Robin.  “It was important that Sam was very involved from the beginning, and I was lucky to find a student who shared my vision for the piece and who had a good understanding of what I wanted to achieve.  His creative input was key to the development of the film and we both influenced each other in terms of our working practices.”

Says Sam: “To me, this project was an ideal opportunity to transfer some of my artistic aesthetic onto a new canvas, and exploring the realm of the supernatural and scientifically immeasurable in the form of video-art and ‘screendance’ seemed to be a fitting way for us to represent these unseen forces in the universe.  I like to think of this film as perhaps a kind of representation of the cosmic dance which places some kind human order in a seemingly infinite and utterly chaotic universe of possibilities – or to perhaps make a comment on how far we humans really need to go in our scientific efforts to fathom existence and ‘carbon date’ the angels.”

Adds Robin: “I’ve always had a keen interest in art, especially digital media, and have recently completed a part-time MA in Contemporary Fine Art Practice.  I wanted to explore this hybrid practice of ‘screendance’, because it’s something that I’ve never done before, and the movements in Carbon Dating Angels are all really controlled and precise, and there was something hypnotic about them that I wanted to capture.”

The film has already been well-received at festivals around the world, including the namaTRE.ba 3 Video Exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts, Trebinje, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Square Eyes Festival in the Netherlands, and is due to be screened at the International Video Dance Festival of Buenos Aires and the Leeds International Film Festival in November.

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CeReNeM staff and students in Stockholm

Rose Dodd, CeReNeM visiting research fellow, is curating a concert series over two nights in November for SEAMS at the Fylkingen Institute.  These concerts present recent Huddersfield research in an international context, with works by Rose Dodd, Huddersfield staff members Monty Adkins and Bryn Harrison, and Huddersfield students Adam Jansch, Ben Isaacs, and Sam Stocks, performed by pianist Kate Ledger, who recently completed her MMus in Contemporary Music Performance.   Rose will also present a guest lecture at KMH, Stockholm on 6 November about her compositional practice and will give a paper The Living Dolls of Electronica. Sonic Image in Electronic Music : the use of subversive text and narrative to expose gender dichotomy at the international conference ‘Representing Gender in the Performing Arts’ to be held at the University of Groningen November 12-13, 2009.

Monty Adkins in Buenos Aires, Stockholm and Rome

Monty Adkins, Reader in Music Technology and Director of Research for Music/Music Technology, continues to expand his international profile with a wide-ranging portfolio of activity:  25th Oct, premiere of new work commissioned by the Tsonami Festival in Buenos Aires; 3rd Nov, guest lecture on his research at the KMH Stockholm and on 10th Nov, his video-music work  Symbiont, originally commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2002, will be performed at EMUFEST di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Italy.

Aaron Cassidy listed in Grove Dictionary

Grove Music Online, one of the leading reference resources for music, has added an entry on the compositional work of Senior Lecturer Aaron Cassidy in its recent editorial update.  Subscribers to Oxford Music Online can access the article here.

Pierre Alexandre Tremblay releases two new CDs

Dr Tremblay releases two new albums of his music, both sharing his practice-based research interests in improvisation and electronics.

The first, entitled La rage, is a fifty minute suite for free jazz drummer and electronics. The piece, originally in 8 channel, has been remixed in 5.1 in the university’s studios and is available as DVD-audio on the prestigious acousmatic label Empreinte DIGITALes, with Stefan Schneider on drums.

The second is the result of a duet session with American drummer/circuit-bender Rodrigo Constanzo. The album, entitled Drum and Bass and the Horse You Rode in on, is very unique in that it will be release in a very limited number of copies, all hand-made, before being made publicly available online later in the year.

Cassidy String Quartet in NYC

Aaron Cassidy’s String Quartet (2002) was performed as part of the Moving Sounds Festival at Le Poisson Rouge by the JACK Quartet on 14 September, 2009, and received a favourable review in the New York Times.  The quartet will again feature the work at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and the Eastman School of Music in mid-October.  They recorded the work for a future commercial release during their Huddersfield residency in March 2009.

Cassidy is currently working on a new piece for the group commissioned by Südwestrundfunk and the Donaueschinger Musiktage for performance in 2010.

Continued success for PhD student Richard Glover

PhD composer Richard Glover recently presented a paper at the 2nd International Conference on Music and Minimalism at the University of Missouri Kansas City.  The paper explored experiental aspects of the music of Phil Niblock; its positive reception has led to forthcoming publications on this composer and drone music.  Richard is currently composing a new work for MusikFabrik which will be premiered on November 28th at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and is also working towards a portrait concert of his music to be played by the Bozzini string quartet.

Liza Lim: Ochred String released on Neos CDs and recent performances

Liza Lim’s Ochred String (2008) recorded by soloists of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra has come out on the Neos label (Neos 10931) as part of a 5-disc documentation of the 2008 Musica Viva Festival.  Liza recently produced the CD recording of her work City of Falling Angels (2007) for 12 percussionists with Ensemble XII and conductor Steve Schick at UCSD. The Navigator opera (2008) clocked up its third season at the Chekhov International Theatre Festival (Moscow) in June.  It will be presented in concert at the Opera Bastille on December 8 as part of the Festival d’Automne à Paris.  A recording of the opera from the ELISION Ensemble is in the works for release in 2010.  Pianist Marilyn Nonken has given several performances of the large-scale piano cycle The Four Seasons (after Cy Twombly) (2009) in Helsinki, New York and Woodstock this year with the next performance scheduled for 17 November at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, linked to an exhibition of Cy Twombly’s work.

CeReNeM at ICMC

The International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), held this year in Montreal, was buzzing with staff and students from the department’s Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM).  Mark and Julie Bokowiec performed their Suicided Voice, Monty Adkins gave a paper on the production and archival of the [60]project, Michael Clarke presented his analysis of Stockhausen’s use of octophonic loudspeakers setup, and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay and Scott McLaughlin presented the conclusions of their Thinking Inside the Box project.

Cassidy performances in Thailand

Aaron Cassidy’s asphyxia for solo soprano saxophone was featured in a concert by the young American saxophonist Ryan Muncy at the 15th World Saxophone Congress in Bangkok, Thailand, on 9 July, 2009.  Muncy also presented the work in a concert with the Anubis Quartet at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

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Dr Graham Cummings (pictured right) has recently been appointed Reader in Historical Musicology in the recent round of promotions. Graham has taught at the University for 37 years, focusing his research study on Italian opera in London 1710-1760, with special reference to Handel. His particular interest is Handel’s Poro, and he has been music text consultant for four productions of this opera – two in Germany and two in the UK. As a prelude to the recent BBC Radio 3 broadcast of the Göttingen production, Graham was interviewed about the work – its music, its poetry and the singers, and how it compared with better-known Handel operas.

In addition to his research work, Graham is the University Organist, teaches historical musicology and harpsichord studies and pursues his interest in late 17th and 18th century keyboard music. Away from the University, he enjoys fine wines, cooking and gardens.

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