New work for Calefax
No Permission Without Trespassing
six musical games for reed quintet
On the 20th of May in the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, Amsterdam, Calefax will premiere a new piece I have written for their Tonale Spelletjes program. May 21, Calefax will play it in Stadspodia, Leiden.
No Permission Without Trespassing is the latest composition in a line of pieces which use a combination of diagrams, traditional musical notation, rules and instructions in text to dictate specific relationships between the performers and how they generate the musical material. One main goal of this method is to amplify the interaction between the players in order to create moments where the characters of the individual players stand out. In live performances I believe that the human element of the performance is just as important as the composition and in these pieces I try to bring the two to equal levels.
For those with some time and interest to follow an artistic line of development, I’ve traced the pathway to this new piece through several of my earlier works.
This was the first time I started experimenting with instructions in scores where some of the actual notes are chosen by the players following the instructions.
Next, I started experimenting with rule based improvisations. For example this rule:
Repeat Button
player 1 plays short cue
player 2 repeats a phrase except when
player 1 restarts player 2 over with same cue
This resulted in Plutoid (2008)
While these kinds of rules are simple, they have the possibility to spin out into very rich musical results, which is an example of an 'emergent system' such as the Game of Life. They do, however, require plenty of interpretation on behalf of the performers to make them work, just as with any score. My challenge is to get the right balance between instructions and freedom where that richness can most easily occur.
Then for a program in 2012 mixing composition and improvisation I created six more pieces, full of these kinds of rules for the reed quintet Calefax and trumpetist Eric Vloeimans, in six pièces mécaniques (2012):
Finally the latest piece, No Permission Without Trespassing (2015) condenses some elements from six pièces with many new ones into a single work for Calefax.
The titles of the six games are:
Hello
Game of Telephone
Harmonic Migration
Double Start-over Button
Social Coalescence
Sample Machine
Also on the programs are works by Bach, Purcell, Tom Johnson and Stockhausen (Tierkreis, one of his most popular compositions).
For those close by, hope to see you at one of the concerts.
Best,
Ned McGowan
* No Permission Without Trespassing was commissioned by Colefax and the Fonds Podiumkunsten.
Dates:
We 20 May |
8:15 pm |
Calefax
No Permission Without Trespassing
Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ | bestel
|
Amsterdam |
Thu 21 May |
8:15 pm |
Calefax
No Permission Without Trespassing
Stadspodia | bestel
|
Leiden |
Fri 29 May |
8:30 pm |
Ensemble Effusions Duo
Workshop
Les Voûtes
|
Paris |
Sun 31 May |
6:30 pm |
Ensemble Effusions Duo
Workshop
Galerie Hus
|
Paris |
Sun 7 June |
4:00 pm |
Splinter Reeds
Wood Burn
Old Presbyterian Church
|
San Francisco |
Thu 15 October |
8:15 pm |
Keiko Shichijo & Sinfonia Rotterdam
Concerto for iPad & Orchestra
"Rotterdam Concerto II"
De Doelen, grote zaal |
Rotterdam |
|