posted | 1 June 2009
As part of the Bath Festival, Material perform works by Fluxus artist George Brecht, including Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event), Timetable Music (by the flowerpots at the London-end of Platform 2 at Bath Spa railway station), and some cards from Water Yam.
posted | 1 June 2009
Material present text pieces in which aspects of sound production happen at a distance. Markus Trunk's Slightly Ajar, scored for any number of doors, sound and light sources employs the fabric of the performance space to create chance-determined layerings of sustained sounds, Alvin Lucier's Newton Park Memory Space brings heard sounds from outside environments into the concert hall, Gavin Bryars' Far Away and Dimly Pealing challenges the performer to cause sounds to occur at great distance, and Takehisa Kosugi's Distance for Piano (for David Tudor) explores other remote-control performance possibilities. From February 2009.
posted | 16 December 2008
Here are some photos from our recent New York performance of Michael Parsons' new version of Walk. The piece was performed in McCarren Park in Williamsberg, New York on the 12th of December in celebration of the composer's 70th birthday.
posted | 1 December 2008
On Monday 24 November as part of Bath Spa's The Invention of Tradition Gavin Bryars festival, Material performed a concert of some of the composer's experimental text scores, including Private Music, Marvellous Aphorisms are Scattered Richly Throughout These Pages, Pre-Medieval Metrics, 1, 2, 1-2-3-4 and Made in Hong Kong.
Material present a series of short events in various locations on the Newton Park campus and in the city centre, drawing on research carried out by the project. The events feature actions, chance, environment, listening, noise, objects, participation, process, repetition, silence, systems, and use any sound-producing means (or not). The precise nature of each event will not be advertised in advance.
posted | 1 October 2008
The first unforeseen event took place in the University Library on Friday 3 October at 9.30am. We performed Werder’s 2005(1) for 30 minutes, with each of the six performers making one sound during this time, using mostly discreet instruments.
posted | 6 October 2008
For the second unforeseen event, Material performed Lucier's I Remember for voices with resonant objects in the Temple by the lake. Lucier's work since the late 1960s has investigated acoustic phenomena as a starting point for musical activity. His best known work, I am sitting in a room (1969), uses the sound of his recorded voice repeatedly played back and recorded in a space, eventually masking the original text with a blurred cloud of harmonics derived from the room’s resonant properties. More recently he has produced a series of pieces which use slow, sweeping pure tones which interact to cause audible beating. I Remember is a combination of both these exploratory techniques. For more information on Alvin Lucier’s music, please visit his website, and you can find Robert Ashley's film on Lucier here.
posted | 16 October 2008
Swell Piece for Alison Knowles is one of Tenney's Postal Pieces, a series of 11 short compositions made from 1965-71 and printed on postcards. The three Swell Pieces ask performers to independently play long tones which move from minimum to maximum volume, and back again. The first piece allows for any choice of pitch, with the other pieces making restrictions (A440 in piece #2, and B/F# in piece #3, after La Monte Young). We performed the piece in the Michael Tippett Centre Gallery on Thursday 16 October at 1.45pm. You can find out more about Jim Tenney here.
posted | 16 October 2008
Fluxus artist and composer Philip Corner’s self-explanatory piece is one of the most focused text scores we’ve looked at so far. It comprises the title, laid out with each word’s letters superimposed to produce a composite graphic. Everyone in the group was asked to make an individual realization of the piece during the week, and document their performance. Read an interview with Corner here.
posted | 3 November 2008
Michael Parsons composed Mindfulness of Breathing for the Scratch Orchestra, a group he co-founded in the late 1960s with Cornelius Cardew and Howard Skempton. The source text comes from Visuddhimagga by Bubbhaghosa, 5th century interpretations of and commentaries on the teachings of the Buddha. Sitting in a semicircle, the singers progress through the same pitch material independently, simultaneously revealing many views of the same thing. Material performed this piece in the stairwell of the main house on 31 October 2008. To the best of the composer's knowledge, this was the first public performance since 1970.
posted | 3 November 2008
Joseph Kudirka's Beauty and Industry (2007) creates a sonic environment where repetitive actions are slowly altered during the performance, and in which the performers' focus is on the act of sound production and its gradual evolution. Material performed the piece in a quartet of violin, clarinet, double bass and banjo in the refectory on the afternoon of Monday 3 November. See the examples page for the score.
posted | 19 November
Pauline Oliveros' Rock Piece (1979) has each player using a pair of resonant rocks as percussive instruments. Each player maintains an independent pulse throughout, and whenever a player percieves that a synchronisation is occuring with another player, the pulse is reset to an unrelated tempo. Material performed Rock Piece by beginning the performance together and slowly dispersing around the campus until each player could no longer hear any of the others. This resulted in a delicate, subtley changing field of pulses and echoes which gradually evaporated over the course of about ten minutes.
posted | 28 November
A Fluxus classic, performed by Material on the back car park at sundown on 20 November. The performers independently work through a series of cards, each featuring a single event, e.g. 'Sound siren', 'Pause', 'Accelerate motor', 'Strike hand on dashboard'. Durations are decided upon using chance procedures. Click play on the above image to watch the whole performance.
Update: Exit George Brecht
posted | 28 November
Dedicated to the composer Michael Parsons on the occasion of his 70th birthday, The Parsons Code for Melodic Contours is for any number of melody instruments. It employs a simple notation system which specifies whether to play higher, lower or repeat the previous pitch. The same score is read by the whole group in unison. However, since each player independently decides on how far up or down to move on each step, unforeseen combinations emerge. Today we performed the piece with three voices, piano, melodica and Yamaha Portasound PSS-130.
