solo

One of the more memorable pieces to have been featured in the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival’s annual ‘Shorts’ day (comprising a conveyor belt of miniature concerts, all free to the public) in recent years is Borneo Rivers 2 by Larry Goves. In many ways it’s an unassuming piece: just six …

i’m turning to music that’s more abstract, though no less powerfully evocative, for the next work in this year’s Lent Series. The title of Chaya Czernowin‘s short 2018 guitar piece Black Flowers comes from a text by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard: In the depths of matter there grows an obscure …

The next piece i’m featuring in this year’s Lent Series, focusing on grief and loss, is probably the shortest i’ve ever explored on 5:4. Naomi Pinnock’s We are consists of a mere 12 bars of music, lasting around 60 seconds. The piece was part of BBC Radio 3’s ‘Postcards from …

Today’s Advent Calendar door contains a miniature by James Dillon. Similar to Dragonfly, explored during this year’s Lent Series, Charm (2008) is another short piano work composed quickly for a friend. The title is interpretable in a variety of ways (in a pre-concert talk, Dillon even mentioned the charm quark …

It’s Rebecca Saunders‘ birthday, so behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a short work of hers investigating slide guitar techniques. Composed in 2018, Study For Metal Bottle Necks comes across as rather different in tone from the majority of Saunders’ work. The usual liminal balance between abstraction and emotional heft …

i said at the start of this Advent Calendar that many of the pieces i’d be featuring would be miniatures, but in the case of the piece behind today’s door, technically a complete performance would last 24 hours – or, indeed, could continue endlessly. Renate Fuczik by Peter Ablinger is …

Today’s Advent Calendar work is one of Webernesque miniature proportions. Composed in 1976, Howard Skempton‘s One for the Road for solo accordion is a typically strange piece, full of paradoxes. In a not dissimilar way to a more recent work like Oculus, Skempton’s material is obsessive, cycling around a single …

Tipping my hat to the fact that this time of year still has, for some people, a connection to things religious, behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a piece from surely the largest cycle of liturgical music ever composed. There are some composers whose music i could write about practically …

Today is Finnish Independence Day – Hyvää Itsenäisyyspäivää! – and to mark the occasion, behind today’s Advent Calendar door is a short work by Pekka Jalkanen. Kuulen lumen tulon (I hear snow coming) is the first part of Jalkanen’s 2017 triptych November, the three movements of which are for one, two …

Though this year it only lasted five days instead of ten, i came away from the 2021 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with the distinct impression that, somehow, the usual quantity of music had been compressed into a reduced time frame. That’s not, mercifully, because of any attempt to shoehorn many …