i’m returning to the world of the miniature today, with Rolf Wallin‘s 60-second orchestral piece Soundspeed. There’s only so much you can expect from a minute’s worth of music, but i like what Wallin manages to cram into this tiny piece.
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Today’s work in the 5:4 Advent Calendar is a typically leftfield piece by British musician Mica Levi. Levi’s music encompasses the deep and the trivial, the profound and the nonsensical, sometimes simultaneously. Their work BOUND. 9 Minuets, for two small snare drums & ensemble, tends more towards the latter than …
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One of the more memorable works performed at the inaugural Baltic Music Days in 2020 was Mundus Invisibilis by Latvian composer Anna Fišere (formerly Ķirse). That piece was concerned with fungal mycelium, and her earlier work Radices for 8 singers and electronics, composed in 2018, is similarly rooted in the …
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Particles by Japanese composer Shiori Usui consists of four minutes of wild textural mayhem. The title suggests it’s all going to be about light, tiny impacts, and that is how the work begins. However, this opening chorus of skitterings is soon supplanted by the significant heft of what sound like …
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In last year’s Advent Calendar i included Patrick Nunn’s instrumental arrangement of the Aphex Twin track ‘Nannou’; today i’m featuring another arrangement, this time Caleb Burhans’ acoustic take on ‘Blue Calx’, the only track on Aphex Twin’s classic 1994 album Selected Ambient Works Volume II to have an explicit title …
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The work i’m featuring today in my Advent Calendar is one that takes its starting point from one of my favourite pieces of music, Mahler’s Symphony No. 3. One of Mahler’s most epic symphonies, in the fourth movement the music turns inward, into a place of mystery, darkness, night and …
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In 2019, Sasha Scott won the senior category of the BBC Young Composer of the Year, with an electroacoustic work titled Humans May Not Apply. The following year she composed a new work for the BBC Concert Orchestra, Nerve, though due to the pandemic its performance was delayed until August …
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There are some composers whose music i keep coming back to not out of love but with the attitude of a nutcracker, trying once again to break through its tough, tenacious surface. i don’t know Milton Babbitt‘s music well (as i admitted when noting his centenary a few years back), …
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Today’s featured work is one for the southern hemisphere, now entering its warmest months of the year. Composed in 1991, Lithuanian composer Onutė Narbutaitė‘s Vasara is a miniature choral homage to the season of summer. The words, written by the composer, have a nostalgic flavour, looking back at the experiences …
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Today’s Advent Calendar piece is the first of two live, untitled performances given by Spanish sound artist Francisco López at Cafe Oto in London in March 2015. The performances were originally presented in four channels, with members of the audience invited to wear eye masks in order to plunge themselves …
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For those of a Catholic persuasion, today is one of the days devoted to Mary in the liturgical calendar, so it’s as good a time as any to feature in my Advent Calendar a setting of Ave Maria by Estonian composer Tõnis Kaumann. A few years ago i explored Kaumann’s …
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Though i don’t (any longer) have a religious bone in my body, i’m nonetheless drawn to the paintings of John Martin, particularly his vast, frenzied depictions of some of the more apocalyptic events described in the Bible. i find myself thinking of Martin’s paintings while listening to On the Face …
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“Everything changes it is extraordinary how everything does change.” That short quotation from Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography has provided Naomi Pinnock with two separate titles for two related works. Everything changes for viola and cello was composed in 2011 as the accompaniment to a short film by Pavla Scerankova titled …
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In last year’s Advent Calendar i featured an untitled piece by Max de Wardener from a live performance at the Southbank Centre in March 2014. On the same occasion he presented a new version of Until my Blood is Pure, originally included on his 2002 EP Stops. That version, for …
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Advent CalendarPremières
Pierre Boulez (orch. Schöllhorn) – Notations Nos. 2, 10 & 11; La treizième (UK Première)
by 5:4Pierre Boulez composed his piano work Douze Notations in 1945. After its première in February of that year (by Yvette Grimaud), the piece was subsequently withdrawn by Boulez (evidently already regarding it as outdated), who only relented and allowed it to be published in the mid-1980s. Despite this, in 1946 …
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Today’s Advent Calendar piece is an example of what may well prove to be a substantial body of work that we might call ‘Covid music’, composed during the pandemic. Hold, by Northern Irish composer Elaine Agnew, is a short work for string orchestra responding to the experience of lockdown in …
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Advent CalendarPremières
Galina Grigorjeva – Molitva (World Première, theremin & strings version)
by 5:4Today marks the 60th birthday of Ukraine-born, Estonia-based composer Galina Grigorjeva. Her music over the last decade or so has progressively moved more closely in both character and ideology to that of Arvo Pärt, rooted in musical simplicity, articulating aspects of Orthodox religious belief. In the case of her 2005 …
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This year’s composer in residence at HCMF, Lisa Streich, was represented by an appropriately large number of performances, allowing for a pretty deep dive into her musical thinking. If i say that a lot of what i heard of Streich’s music was more intriguing than immediately enjoyable, i need to …
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It’s 1 December, so it’s time to begin the second annual 5:4 Advent Calendar. During the next few weeks i’ll be briefly exploring a diverse selection of curiosities, oddities and wonderments. The majority will be short pieces, but i’ll also be featuring larger works occasionally.
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People doing interesting things to objects doesn’t necessarily create interesting music. Can we agree on that? i don’t think that’s a particularly outrageous thing to say, though there were a number of times during my six days at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival when i found myself wondering otherwise. …