Selected for Blue Touch Paper with poet Steven Fowler

I’m delighted to have been selected with poet Steven J Fowler for the London Sinfonietta’s new Blue Touch Paper scheme.

We were selected in October for our project that is an immersive, 45-minute-long  semi-staged piece for ensemble, electronics and vocalists, about Boxing.  Steve is a really wonderful, critically-acclaimed and very prolific young British poet who also used to be a professional boxer.   Steve’s work has so much in common with my own, with its predilection for violence, and its clear, no-nonsense communication with the reader/listener.  We’re hoping to bring all these qualities into our work, and we’re both really excited about producing something that is really fresh, adrenalin-fuelled and original.

The Sinfonietta are backing the project with lots of resources, advice and support, under their Blue Touch Paper scheme for emerging composers and collaborators.  We’re currently working on the project, having lots of workshop sessions with Sinfonietta players, poets, other composers and vocalists/performers.

We will preview 20 minutes of our project in May 2012 with the London Sinfonietta, and we are also on the look out for production partners who may be interested in taking the complete project, once finished.    Watch this space!

Contrasts in Space

Contrasts in Space was screened at the British Film Institute on 1st December, alongside the premiere of my new soundtrack for it, featuring tape and live viola. Ensemble Amorpha were performing.

Contrasts in Space is a black and white film by Sebastian Schmidt.  Here’s a video of the synced live sound recording from the performance with the film.
 

K, prelude to Mozart Clarinet Quintet (performance from Kings Place)

I’ve just received a video from 2009 of a performance of K, a prelude to the Mozart Clarinet Quintet, given by Endymion at Kings Place in September 2009.

Wonderful playing, and I’m very grateful to Kings Place for making the video of the performance.  The piece, as you can hear, knits neatly into Mozart’s own Clarinet Quintet, making it a thoughtful, contemplative concert opener for that work.  Endymion are performing this again, with the Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintets, at Surrey University Concert Series on Sunday 29th January at 3pm. Click here for more info.

Video of ‘Numbers 91-95′, Wien Modern / Ensemble Adapter

Ensemble Adapter gave the world premiere of Numbers 91-95 by me (text by Simon Howard) at the Wien Modern Festival on 10th November 2011, in the Casino Baumgarten in Vienna.

I’m really happy with the piece and the performance, and so were the Ensemble.  They performed it again the following week at the wonderful Borusan Müsik Evi venue as part of the new music series.

 

Shorts Amorpha at the BFI. 1st December

I’m delighted to say I’ve written a short piece for viola and tape (or optional speaking chorus), as a new soundtrack to Sebastian Schmidt’s short film Contrasts in Space

This will be performed by Ensemble Amorpha at the British Film Institute on 1st December in London, at an event called Shorts Amorpha.

Here’s more info about it.  Do go along if you can!  There’s lots of new scores to silent short films, by some very good composers including Luke StylesChris Mayo and Naomi Pinnock.

Here’s the trailer, too….
 

 

“Signals” now available, with “Metamorphoses after Britten” in it

I just received a copy of the Signals volume of new music for oboe.  It looks great!  It features my Metamorphoses after Britten in it, and I also designed the snazzy front cover!  (not bright pink, this time..)

The volume was edited by the amazing Melinda Maxwell, for whom I wrote my Metamorphoses, and John Stringer an oboist-composer.  It’s now available on musicroom.com - though I don’t know why they haven’t put up my lovely cover yet!  :-)

If you play the oboe, go out and buy it now – it’s got a great selection of stuff in it.  And not all of it that difficult either.  Very suitable for Grade 7-8 upwards to university/conservatoire/professional, I think.

 

Video of numbers 76-80 : tristan und isolde

Here’s a video of the recent premiere of “numbers 76-80 : tristan und isolde”, which I wrote for Endymion and EXAUDI, with text from Simon Howard.

 

Wonderful reviews of numbers 76-80 : tristan und isolde

numbers 76-80 : tristan und isolde was performed brilliantly by EXAUDI and Endymion under the direction of James Weeks on Monday 19th September.  I was really delighted, and the Purcell Room at Southbank was pretty busy too.

There was a wonderful 4-star review by Guy Dammann in the Guardian the following day.  It said

Venables’s text is an extract from Simon Howard’s surreal epic Numbers, concerning a swarm of wasps sculpted into a bust of the Marquis de Sade and presented to the local police. The music is duly playful and occasionally disturbing. The sound image of a face forming from shapeless buzzing was beautifully achieved, as was the concluding high G sustained by the soprano, capturing a nicely pared-down Liebestod.

Really pleased with that!

Seen and Heard were also reviewing the concert, and had great stuff to say about my piece:

Numbers 76-80: Tristan und Isolde, by Philip Venables, began in a striking fashion with the quartet bashing out perfect fifths fortissimo; as the piece develops the excellent EXAUDI singers spoke most of Simon Howard’s strangely exciting if rather baffling poem. There’s genuine wit here, and pathos, and really terrifically flamboyant writing for the instrumentalists. What a thrilling moment there was when the singers suddenly burst into song rather than the spoken word! This composer is gaining a great reputation for original and sometimes quite brutally exhilarating music, and it’s well worth watching out for him.

Read the full Guardian review here.  And the Seen and Heard review here.

Contrasts in Space

So – very busy at the moment with a number of big projects that I’ll be telling you about in the next few weeks, hopefully. But this week I’ve been working on a short instrumental + tape piece to accompany this short film by Sebastian Schmidt. Obviously it won’t have that sound on it, but rather my live-performed piece to go with it.
 

 
The piece has been commissioned by Ensemble Amorpha for their Amorpha_Shorts programme, and they’re premiering the pieces at the British Film Institute on 1st December 2011.  Do go along if you’re around on that night!  Lots of other good composers are involved too, like my very good friend and Berlin buddy, Naomi Pinnock.

CONTACT dance-floor up and running!

What an exhausting but wonderful week of hard work.  We started on Monday morning, when I got off the plane from Berlin and went straight to Kings Place to start constructing the touch-sensitive dancefloor that I designed specially for the Kings Place Festival 2011.

A lot of hammering, measuring, taping, wiring and tweaking.  Here’s a video of the construction process… (in this video you watch it 120 times faster than it happened…)

 
Then we programmed it using the bespoke CONTACT software written by Marc Sutton at www.codev.co.uk, and Ableton Live – making the samples in Logic Studio too.    After 3 hours of mapping the location of each of the 120 sensors under the floor, we eventually got the floor to behave just like a 9-octave virtual MIDI keyboard, that spoke to Ableton and triggered all our samples.

The floor has been programmed with lots of samples about the seasons, from Vivaldi to Oliver Knussen to Girls Aloud to Tori Amos to some death metal.  We’ve also got the sounds of swarms of bees, thunderstorms, children’s songs, crickets, music boxes, clocks and the weather.

The floor opened today at Kings Place.  You can see people here tentatively trying it out when the festival first opened…