electroacoustic

Over the last 10 years, as i’ve been immersing myself ever more deeply into Estonian contemporary music, i’ve tentatively reached a point where i feel i can be more or less confident of what certain composers will or won’t do. Yet i mentioned in Part 1 of the lingering sense …

Let’s return to one of the great maxims of not just contemporary but all music: size isn’t important. In the case of Norway’s Only Connect festival, its short, 2½-day duration belied the fact that its content was highly concentrated. As such, one event started to blur into the next, into …

One of the more beguiling things to have entered my ears recently is Figure Pieces, a new 22-minute EP from Danish composer Mads Emil Dreyer. Two of Dreyer’s Forsvindere pieces were featured on his album Disappearer, released last year, and Figure Pieces demonstrates the same fascination with the permutational possibilities …

Especially prominent at this year’s Musica Nova festival was the lavish organ in Helsinki’s Musiikkitalo concert hall, unveiled at the start of 2024. The largest modern concert hall organ in the world, its construction was partly made possible by one of Finland’s greatest composers, the late Kaija Saariaho, who in …

i’ve commented before on my general disinterest, and usual disregard, for music festival themes. Musica Nova, Helsinki’s biennial new music extravaganza, opted for ‘together’ as its theme this year, and while that word is sufficiently vague as to have almost no meaning, there were numerous times when that word insinuated …

An interesting album that came out quite late last year is San Servolo Registri Festival Concert, featuring assorted organ-based electroacoustic works performed by Lauren Redhead and Alistair Zaldua. It’s a curious mixture of music, yet while the pieces demonstrate a certain amount of diversity, several of them share aspects in …

And finally we reach the zenith, the apex of this year’s best albums, each and every one of them a bewilderment of shock, awe and wonder.

It was 16 years ago that my first Best Albums of the Year list was published, and for most of the years since there have been 40 entries on the list. However, there were many times when recommending 40 as genuinely ‘best’ felt like a struggle, and a few years …

Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is an ambitious work by arguably Iceland’s most exciting and radically forward-looking composer of recent years, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir. Ecognosis was composed in 2021, a work for bass clarinet, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and various transduced tam-tams. It was intended to be premièred at the Dark …

Behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a quick bit of fun from British composer Sasha Scott. In 2019, Scott won the Senior category in the BBC Young Composer of the Year Competition with a four-minute orchestral-electronic hybrid titled Humans May Not Apply. It’s a work that both pits the acoustic …

One of the most incredible – and entirely unexpected – performances i’ve heard this year took place in Tartu University Museum in April, at a recital given by Estonian duo Anna-Liisa Eller and Taavi Kerikmäe. These two, in their combinations of kannel, keyboard instruments and electronics, exploring both contemporary and …

6 December is Finland’s Independence Day, so today’s Advent Calendar piece is by Finnish composer Lauri Supponen. Continuo (which i briefly discussed earlier this year) is a short ensemble work, composed in 2021, that’s rooted in much earlier music, Frescobaldi’s Recercar con obligo di cantare la quinta parte senza toccarla. …

Despite the fact that in recent years my general feeling about the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival is that it’s become over-familiar and rather predictable – perhaps in need of a fresh start / reboot – my experience during the opening weekend of this year’s HCMF was genuinely unexpected: music that …

As i mentioned previously, the majority of this year’s AFEKT was focused on solo performers – primarily members of Ensemble Musikfabrik – with or without electronics, and these proved to be the strongest events of the festival.

While the theoretical theme of this year’s AFEKT festival was music theatre, in practice what was projected strongest was intimacy, in terms of one-to-one communication. This was due to the fact that the festival focused primarily on solo performances given by, among others, members of Ensemble Musikfabrik, and even in …

During the considerable time i’ve spent in Estonia throughout the last decade, one of the musicians who has consistently impressed me the most is Tarmo Johannes. His talents are multi-faceted: primarily a flautist, he’s also a long-term member of Ensemble U: and the Ensemble of the Estonian Electronic Music Society, …

Portrait albums can be a double-edged sword. They’re obviously a great opportunity to present a showcase of someone’s work. Hardly surprising, then, that for many composers, securing that first album devoted to their music is regarded as an important, even vital step on the path toward something that might approximate …

Lysis is the name of Canadian composer Amy Brandon‘s latest album, featuring eight works for various chamber, ensemble and electroacoustic groupings. The word ‘lysis’ is a word with several meanings, mostly biological, primarily referring to the breakdown of cells. There’s something very apt in that choice of word for Brandon’s …

Waiting for me on my doormat when i returned from Vienna a few days ago was a new CD of music by the Estonian composer Age Veeroos. i’ve been doubly excited waiting for it to arrive, partly because i was honoured to be asked to write the liner notes for …

Despite being primarily a chamber music festival, the concerts at this year’s World New Music Days in the Faroe Islands devoted significant time to works involving electronics. Five of these were installations, of which two were noteworthy. One was Ringar í Vatni [Rings in Water] by Faroese musician Heðin Ziska …