#minimal-music-festival — Public Fediverse posts

Het was gaaf geweest als het #muziekgebouw S I M I L A R 1 tot en met 4 van Maxim Shalygin op één dag geprogrammeerd had met elke keer half uurtje ertussen #MinimalMusicFestival #MinimalMusic

Het was gaaf geweest als het #muziekgebouw S I M I L A R 1 tot en met 4 van Maxim Shalygin op één dag geprogrammeerd had met elke keer half uurtje ertussen #MinimalMusicFestival #MinimalMusic

Kate Moore’s Space Junk opens Minimal Music Festival 2019

This year’s Minimal Music Festival in Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ Amsterdam opens with Space Junk that Kate Moore composed for Asko|Schönberg. The piece addresses the huge amount of debris floating through space.

Key concepts in the work of the Australian-Dutch composer are movement, pulse, direction and commitment to our physical and moral environment. For example, she plays a specially built cello by Saskia Schouten, with an inlaid peace sign in memory of the Bataclan attack in France. In 2017 she composed the large-scale oratorio Sacred Environment for the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and the Netherlands Radio Choir, a tribute to the sacred places of the original inhabitants of Australia.

Moore is not only a composer but also a visual artist and performer. She sings, plays the cello and is the founder and leader of the ensemble Herz, in which she plays the bass guitar. She often works with (sound) artists, and builds artful instruments of ceramics and other materials herself. Her ensemble piece The Dam (2015) is based on the sounds of crickets, frogs, birds, insects and other creatures living in a waterhole in the bush. She was the first woman ever to win the prestigious Matthijs Vermeulen Prize in 2017. The following year she was composer in focus at the November Music festival, for which she composed the Bosch Requiem, Lux Aeterna.

This season she is soul mate of Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam, because of her ‘elegant, driving and colourful post-minimal music’. In this capacity she was given carte blanche to programme five concerts at her own discretion. It is typical for Moore that she devoted one of these concerts entirely to the work of fellow composers.

Like father, like daughter

In Space Junk she again testifies of her deep concern for the world in which we live. The composition is inspired by the enormous amount of waste floating through space. Millions of fragments of spacecraft and obsolete satellites collide with each other. The fragments shoot away at great speed and in turn damage satellites that we use for communication, navigation, climate observation and safety.

Moore’s concern about this invisible but life-size problem didn’t come out of the blue. Her father Chris Moore is a physicist at the Mount Stromlo laser tracking station in Australia. For this institute he makes visual models of the data collected about the space waste. Daughter Kate translates this data into music; during the performance of Space Junk, images of the debris floating through space are projected.

‘I have selected fifty pieces of junk, which I have divided into five families’, says Kate Moore. ‘The duration of the notes is based on the time that these pieces are visible on the horizon, but then accelerated 200 times – in proportion, of course. I also calculated the pitches in this way.’

Besides the instrumental music she made a soundtrack in surround sound, also based on the data from the laser research. ‘The soundtrack has four layers, which refer to as many times at which the measurements take place. At night you can sometimes see the objects when they’re caught in the laser beams. You think they are stars, but because they make strange movements, you know that they are pieces of space grit, very scary.’

Miserere

For the recording Moore cut up the famous Miserere by Gregorio Allegri in fragments of 127 syllables, which she recorded herself. In each of the four movements she recites one verse, her voice recording triggered via MIDI. When the waste makes a rising movement, the syllables sound in their normal order, when it falls they are played backwards. The Miserere was very deliberately chosen, says Moore: ‘It refers to Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel, in which Adam and God try to touch each other in vain.’

The Minimal Music Festival runs from Wednesday 3 to Sunday 7 April. It also features a new piano concerto that Vladimir Martynov wrote for Ralph van Raat and Noord Nederlands Orkest. This will be premiered in Muziekgebouw on 4 April. On the programme, too is Future Perfect by The America-Dutch composer Vanessa Lann, which she composed for Oranjewoud Festival 2017. ‘It was inspired by Schubert’s 8th Symphony’, says Lann. ‘It poses the question how this work from 1822 would have sounded had it been written 200 years later, in a modern, minimalistic idiom. Future Perfect lasts 10 minutes, is super rock-and-roll yet winks at the melodies and elegance of Schubert.’

Further concerts are Eklekto’s double bill featuring soundscape artist Ryoji Ikeda alongside deep listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros. Terry Riley and son Gyan play music in which Indian raga meets minimalism and jazz; Sinta Wullur presents Gamelan Clock; Cello Octet Amsterdam perform Michael Gordon’s 8; the Horizon Quartet play Incantatie IV of the Dutch minimalist Simeon ten Holt. – And as a matter of course Terry Riley’s groundbreaking In C is performed by the joined forces of Ragazze Quartet, Kapok and Slagwerk Den Haag.

#KateMoore #MinimalMusicFestival #PaulineOliveros #SintaWullur #VanessaLann #VladimirMartynov

Composer Vladimir Martynov: ‘The sweetest moment is when you get a bright idea’

In April the Noord Nederlands Orkest (North Netherlands Orchestra, NNO) will present the brand new piano concerto Pastiche, composed by Vladimir Martynov at the request of Ralph van Raat. On 2 April I will talk to the composer and the pianist during a free rehearsal in Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ in Amsterdam, where Pastiche will be premiered on 4 april. I interviewed Martynov for the magazine of NNO, this is the English translation.

The Russian composer Vladimir Martynov (Moscow, 1946) had colourful development. He was the son of a musicologist, was taught piano as a matter of course and soon became interested in composing. He enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition. Already during his studies he wrote his first pieces, chamber music, small-scale solo concertos and choral music, in the atonal tradition of composers such as Arnold Schönberg and Anton Webern.

From Schönberg to electronics and rock music

In 1973 he joined the electronic music studio of the Alexander Skrjabin Museum in Moscow. For Soviet composers this was a welcome meeting place for avant-garde musicians; celebrities such as Gubaidulina and Denisov also experimented with electronics here. In the same period Martynov studied musicology, with a particular interest in ethnomusicology. He specialised in the folklore of Caucasian peoples, Tajikistan and other ethnic groups in Russia, about which he published extensively.

Martynov also studied medieval Russian liturgical music and European polyphony from the Renaissance. He has published several collections of works by such composers as Guillaume de Machaut, Andrea Gabrieli, Heinrich Isaac and Guillaume Dufay. He also wrote about theology, religious philosophy and history. During this time he embraced the form of minimalism so typical of the former Eastern Bloc: a static, spiritually inspired style without the exhilarating pulse of American minimalism. With its slow pace and lack of bars, this music breathes the same timeless quality as early music.

From rock music to Gregorian chant

As if all this wasn’t adventurous enough, Martynov also formed the rock group Boomerang, for which he composed the rock opera Seraphic visions of St. Francis in 1978. Around this time he became a teacher at the Academy for Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius in Sergiev Posad, a city about 75 kilometers north of Moscow. In the eighties he wrote a lot of church music and after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 he initially continued to concentrate on Christian themes, such as in Apocalypse (1991), the Stabat Mater (1994), and the Requiem (1998).

Nowadays he composes secular music again, although his bent for spirituality floats unabated through his notes. In 2009, the London Philharmonic Orchestra premiered Vita Nuova, an opera about opera inspired by Dante’s book of the same name. In this book Dante describes the transformation from earthly to heavenly love. In his version, Martynov says he investigates the question of whether it is still possible to write ‘opera in our modern age’. From his conviction that there is nothing new to say, in Vita Nuova he combines Gregorian chant with style quotes by Mozart, Wagner, Mahler and Strauss.

La Grande Bellezza

In 2014 Martynov composed Beatitudes for the Kronos Quartet, which was used in the Academy Award winning film La Grande Bellezza. Now we have the brand new Piano Concerto Pastiche, which he composed for Ralph van Raat and the Noord Nederlands Orkest. The title refers to the opera genre of the same name, says the composer. ‘In a pastiche arias from all kinds of famous operas were glued together. According to some, this would show a lack of respect for the composers concerned, but nowadays such a method is very common. The principle of a pastiche is to give the listener a kind of déjà vu. I don’t use literal but style quotations, for example of romantic and classical music.

While composing he listened to CD recordings by Ralph van Raat: ‘I did not know him, but had been considering the idea of writing a new Piano Concerto for years. By listening a lot I tried to find out what his taste is, how he plays, what he likes and what he doesn’t like. I took his preferences and possibilities into account and tried to use the sound of the piano as authentically as possible. I have the feeling that we have in common our great love for the pure piano sound.’ There was no personal contact, composer and soloist meet for the first time in April, when rehearsals begin. Martynov: ‘Of course I did consult with the orchestra about the lineup and the duration of the piece.’

No struggle but peaceful coexistence

Martynov wrote Pastiche with the general sound of piano and symphony orchestra from the nineteenth century in mind. Yet the piece has only one movement instead of the usual three. Moreover, there is no traditional ‘struggle’ between orchestra and soloist. ‘Of course the piano and the orchestra each have their own material and function, but it is rather a question of peaceful coexistence than of mutual competition.’ In his new concerto we search in vain for elements from folklore or old liturgical chants. ‘That would not be fitting, it is performed in a concert hall intended for symphonic music.’

He finds it difficult to assess whether his piece was successful: ‘The most important moment in the composing process is when you have an incursion that you can work out further. There is nothing like this wonderful, sweet moment – not even a good performance or a nice review. When you finish a piece you are always satisfied with it, but only when it actually sounds you can ascertain if it meets what you originally had in mind. That always remains exciting.’

The public rehearsal on 2 April and the premiere of Pastiche on 4 April are part of the Minimal Music Festival in Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ. The concert is repeated on 5 April in Oosterpoort Groningen, and 6 April in De Doelen Rotterdam

#Beatitudes #LaGrandeBellezza #MinimalMusicFestival #MuziekgebouwAanTIJ #NoordNederlandsOrkest #RalphVanRaat #VladimirMartynov