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Samuel Holloway  

Austerity Measures

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 2012
for recorder, koto and guitar

John Rimmer  

Beyond the Call

Duration: 04' 00" Year: 2012
A short celebratory piece for John Elmsly and Leonie Holmes on the occasion of their 60th and 50th birthdays respectively

  • Instrumentation
    Flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano
  • Programme Note

    This short celebratory piece is based on some of the stylistic qualities of John Elmsly’s and Leonie Holmes’ compositions.

    Up to about the “golden section” (just over 3/5 of the piece), the pitch material is based on John’s name and uses some of his favourite intervals. The rest of the piece uses pitches from Leonie’s name and some of her favourite gestures as in the sudden fast rhythmic patterns.

    The title is doubly significant. It refers not only to the piece itself with its celebratory ‘fanfares’ or ‘calls’ and their colourful resonances which lead the listener into another soundworld but also to the outstanding personal qualities of these two composers. Like most university staff, John and Leonie work industriously beyond the call of duty.

    After listening to the 2012 CD of the Karlheinz Company, I realised that in my coloured resonances I had subconsciously used a similar technique found in John Elmsly’s striking work “Ritual Auras”. Such is the nature of serendipity.

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Alex Taylor  

burlesques mécaniques

Duration: 11' 00" Year: 2012
ten miniatures for piano trio

  • Instrumentation
    Piano, Violin, Cello
  • Programme Note

    burlesques mécaniques is a rather extroverted collection of grotesque miniatures whose characters are not people or animals but dances. These dances have been mechanised, electrified, and often obscured by their own rhythmic impulse. Old forms and formulaic tropes are given new identities, freed from the confines of metric stability and the expectation that they be “danceable”. The essentially mechanical, artificial aspect of music (and of art in general?) is embodied in the piano, here a brittle, seedy protagonist whose string limbs hover and flail about it. Conflicting rhythms dominate the surface, oscillating between insistent repetition and mad, angular flourishes. The generally jerky, muscular rhythmic material is periodically frozen throughout the work, most strikingly in the ninth movement (chain). Here a string of rich, impressionistic chords briefly reveals an alternative, interior world which is then rudely dismissed in an almost haphazard finale.

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Alex Taylor  

figments

Duration: 07' 00" Year: 2012
for mixed chamber sextet

  • Instrumentation
    flute/alto flute, Bb clarinet, bass clarinet, bass trombone, cello, double bass
  • Programme Note

    “Do or do not; there is no try.” – Yoda

    figments represents a series of “tries”: attempts to remember, recast and reconfigure an earlier work, also called figments, that was lost or destroyed early in 2012. The only surviving material of the original is contained in a small number of photographs taken while composing. These photographs offered triggers for building up material in a non-linear fashion, a collage of moments.

    In this new work, every so often a cohesive narrative emerges, but equally often the train of thought is obscured or lost, only to be taken up again, remembered differently or approached from a new angle. The task of completion and reconciliation of competing and conflicting materials is eventually abandoned, leaving tangents to integrate and disintegrate freely, the initial goals perhaps concealed or missed in the remembering.

    To me, “do or do not” is an oversimplification bordering on authoritarianism; “trying”, while transient and rich with flaw and slippage, is the only tangible and realistic form of action here.

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Ross Harris  

Fjärran

 Year: 2012
for clarinet and string quartet

Karlo Margetic  

Lightbox

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 2012
for piano trio

  • Instrumentation
    Violin, Cello and Piano
  • Programme Note

    When I think of a piano trio, I immediately think of a transparent interplay of lines. This has something to do with the fact that the instruments that make up the modern piano trio are not particularly homogeneous, unlike say, a string quartet. It’s as if somebody had strewn some line drawings of simple three dimensional objects on a photographer’s lightbox, all on top of one another, resulting in an unexpected and strangely beautiful assemblage.

  • Availability

Alex Taylor  

quasi concertino

 Year: 2012
for bassoon and string trio

Rachael Morgan  

Refracted White

Duration: 10' 00" Year: 2012
for chamber ensemble

Karlo Margetic  

Restlessly, While the Leaves are Blowing

Duration: 08' 00" Year: 2012
for two clarinets, percussion and piano

  • Instrumentation
    2 Clarinets (2nd doubling Bass Clarinet), Percussion (Marimba, Crotales, 3 Triangles) and Piano
  • Programme Note

    ‘Restlessly, While the Leaves are Blowing’ is one of many possible, yet not quite adequate, translations into English of the last line of Rilke’s poem Herbsttag: “Unruhig wandern, wenn die blätter treiben”. This linguistic decay, and the fact that we have to accept the inherent imperfection in any translation (including any translations of this programme note), is reminiscent of Rilke’s description of Autumn. Though you could say that, just as Autumn will eventually give way to other seasons, translation adds another layer of meaning; a different way of understanding and interpreting, serving to enrich the original.
    KM

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Michael Norris  

Save Yourself

Duration: 12' 00" Year: 2012
for chamber ensemble

  • Instrumentation
    flute, clarinet, accordion, synth, violin, cello
  • Programme Note

    Save Yourself is a further development of my preoccupation with sonic analogues to visual stimuli. In this work, I imagine a series of monohued “colour fields” which have been overwritten with surface figurations and gestures.

    The accordion and melodicas provide the cyclical progression of harmonic fields—subtly coloured by gliding sine tones—whilst the winds and strings provide the aggressive gestural activity. The contrapuntal, textural writing gradually decays into more syncronized figures towards the end of the piece, whilst at the same time developing the noise-based timbres from the very opening.

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