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  • Lent SeriesPremières

    Peter Maxwell Davies – Symphony No. 7 (World Première)

    by 5:4 March 9, 2023 • 07:07
    March 9, 2023 • 07:07

    Do you now see the possibility of several symphonies? Yes, yes, I do, which just five years ago I would not have seen at all. But I do now feel … that it’s perhaps not too far-fetched to think that possibly I might be able to develop that. Paul Griffiths,…

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  • Lent SeriesPremières

    Laurence Crane – Chamber Symphony No. 2 “The Australian” (World Première)

    by 5:4 March 4, 2023 • 05:00
    March 4, 2023 • 05:00

    Laurence Crane‘s music often sounds like a cross between a game and a puzzle, and that’s certainly the case with the next work i’m featuring in this year’s Lent Series, his Chamber Symphony No. 2 “The Australian”. That subtitle can be safely ignored; Crane has spoken of enjoying combining abstract…

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  • Lent Series

    Huw Watkins – Little Symphony

    by 5:4 February 27, 2023 • 08:43
    February 27, 2023 • 08:43

    The idea of a symphony can tend to suggest grandiosity and an epic sense of scale or significance, exemplified by those of Bruckner, Mahler, Scriabin and Pettersson, among others. But it needn’t be anything of the kind, working just as well at the opposite end of the continuum, greatly reduced…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Dark Music Days 2023 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 February 7, 2023 • 16:34
    February 7, 2023 • 16:34

    Larger-scale works featured in several Dark Music Days events. One of the toughest to engage with was given by Caput Ensemble, a concert marred by the yawningly awful Polo by Simon Mawhinney, a quarter of an hour’s worth of relentless, faceless, arbitrary blarney. Veronique Vaka‘s Holos was marginally more interesting,…

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  • FestivalsPremières

    Dark Music Days 2023 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 February 3, 2023 • 11:05
    February 3, 2023 • 11:05

    While it’s normal to feel a sense of familiarity returning to a festival year after year, it was stronger than usual at the 2023 Dark Music Days in Reykjavík since it was only 10 months since last year’s festival, which had been delayed due to the pandemic. It also served…

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  • CD/Digital releasesFree music

    Darren McClure – The World Is Made Of Words

    by 5:4 January 26, 2023 • 09:00
    January 26, 2023 • 09:00

    Today’s piece of freely-available music comes via Yugen Art, an online repository of sound art that in some respects resembles a netlabel but is more aloof, publishing things online with an absolute minimum of fuss or extraneous (or even pertinent) information. i’ve written about works from the Yugen Art archive…

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  • CD/Digital releasesFree music

    Seaming – Mermaid

    by 5:4 January 23, 2023 • 09:00
    January 23, 2023 • 09:00

    Seaming To is an English singer and musician whose work seems to be the product of, to date, three distinct periods of activity. She was a guest vocalist on some singles in the early 2000s, followed by her own first EP, Soda Slow, in 2006. Then things went quiet until…

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  • CD/Digital releasesFree music

    Gelg – Look Around You

    by 5:4 January 19, 2023 • 09:00
    January 19, 2023 • 09:00

    The next music i’m featuring in my series exploring interesting free music is another soundtrack, again very short, this time from television. It’s something of an oddity, partly because it was never a ‘release’ in the usual sense of the word (and isn’t really available any longer), partly because it’s…

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  • CD/Digital releasesFree music

    Gareth Davis, Jan Kleefstra, Romke Kleefstra – Sieleslyk

    by 5:4 January 9, 2023 • 08:24
    January 9, 2023 • 08:24

    To begin my usual January focus on interesting free music, i’m returning to the ephemeral world of netlabels. Rural Colours appeared in 2010 as a tangential off-shoot from parent label Hibernate, which had begun the previous year. What distinguished them both from other netlabels was the fact that their releases…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Maurice Ravel (orch. Colin Matthews) – Oiseaux tristes (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 23, 2022 • 05:00
    December 23, 2022 • 05:00

    In last year’s Advent Calendar i featured an arrangement of one of Ravel’s piano works by Boulez; this year i’m exploring one by UK composer Colin Matthews. Ravel completed his five-movement piano suite Miroirs in 1905. He subsequently orchestrated two of the movements himself, Une barque sur l’océan and Alborada…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Michael Finnissy – Polskie tańce ludowe (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 21, 2022 • 05:00
    December 21, 2022 • 05:00

    Michael Finnissy’s Polskie tańce ludowe (Polish folk dances) have had multiple lives. Their origins are in a volume of Polish folk music given to Finnissy as a child by his godfather, Peter Klos. Finnissy recently recalled to me that … he served with the Polish Airforce, he was not a…

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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Mica Levi – BOUND. 9 Minuets (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 17, 2022 • 05:00
    December 17, 2022 • 05:00

    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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  • Advent Calendar

    Aphex Twin (arr. Caleb Burhans) – Blue Calx

    by 5:4 December 14, 2022 • 05:00
    December 14, 2022 • 05:00

    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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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Sasha Scott – Nerve (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 12, 2022 • 05:00
    December 12, 2022 • 05:00

    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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  • Advent Calendar

    Naomi Pinnock – everything does change

    by 5:4 December 6, 2022 • 05:00
    December 6, 2022 • 05:00

    “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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  • Advent CalendarPremières

    Max de Wardener – Until my Blood is Pure (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 5, 2022 • 05:00
    December 5, 2022 • 05:00

    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

    Elaine Agnew – Hold (World Première)

    by 5:4 December 3, 2022 • 05:00
    December 3, 2022 • 05:00

    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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  • FestivalsPremières

    HCMF 2022 (Part 2)

    by 5:4 December 1, 2022 • 15:24
    December 1, 2022 • 15:24

    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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  • FestivalsPremières

    HCMF 2022 (Part 1)

    by 5:4 November 30, 2022 • 14:27
    November 30, 2022 • 14:27

    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.…

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  • Seasonal

    Peter Maxwell Davies – The Fall of the Leafe

    by 5:4 September 23, 2022 • 02:03
    September 23, 2022 • 02:03

    Today, at 1:03am GMT (the same moment this article is published, in fact), is the equinox, when day and night become equal at the midpoint between light and dark, and the season of autumn begins. i’ve always been especially fond of this season, with its split connotations of positive and…

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5:4
  • About
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    • Listening History
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    • Albums and EPs reviewed on 5:4
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    • Best Albums of the Years
    • The Proms premières – Poll results
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  • Mixtapes
    • Mixtapes
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