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The Revenge of Miguel Cotto, the work that Steve Fowler and I are working on for the London Sinfonietta Blue Touch Paper project, is going well. The work is moving at a fast pace now, and I’m having some mentoring … Continue reading
I met Theatre Director Nick Blackburn over a coffee in a very cute little knitting shop / café in Nantwich on Christmas Eve. We had long conversations about music, text, violence and theatre, and he filmed a little bit of the conversation, a bit of which is shown here.
This video seems quite relevant to most of my projects this year, as so many of them are connected with violence:
Posted in blog, Projects, Videos
Tagged Blue Touch Paper, Interview, London Sinfonietta, Nick Blackburn, Omar Ebrahim, Steven Fowler, Tete a Tete, Unleashed
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!
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…
Posted in blog, Projects, Videos
Tagged Ableton Live, CONTACT, dance floor, Installation, Kings Place, Lucia Tong, touch-sensitive
Finally, this piece is finished, and sent off to the wonderful EXAUDI singers, Endymion players and conductor James Weeks.
It’s definitely been a struggle to write this piece, but one worth fighting with because I’m pleased with the final result. Notwithstanding, as always, one or two doubts about whether a few bits will work or not. But in general I think I’ve pushed myself with the form of this piece, and the incorporation of speech in concert music – which, as you know, is a running theme in almost all my pieces in the last 12 months. It’s definitely something I want to continue to explore.
Simon’s poem is also wonderful, deep and yet baffling (in a good way) – in fact the poem was so rich and ambiguous that it made the writing process more difficult, rather than facilitated it. Which is, I think, in the end, why I decided to keep so much of the poem as simple narration with musical “illustration’” surrounding it.
Well – I’m curious to hear the results. The performances are at the Southbank Centre on 19th September, 7.45pm, and in Aberdeen on 12th November at 7.30pm. Please come along!
Posted in blog, Performances
Tagged Endymion, EXAUDI, James Weeks, numbers 76-80, Simon Howard, Sound Scotland, Southbank Centre, Speech, tristan und isolde
Here’s a video from a while ago that I hadn’t posted on this site. Its Serge Vuille and I building the Junk Band in Kings Place for the Kings Place Festival 2010. It took us good 5 hours to install in the atrium of the building, but here you can see the process in just a few minutes!
I was reminded to post this video up because I’m currently in the process of creating this year’s Kings Place Festival installation with dancer-choreographer Lucia Tong. We’re building a large touch-sensitive dance floor in collaboration with Codev bespoke software design. Come along to Kings Place, 10th and 11th September to see our performance on this unique new musical instrument!
Building the Junk Band from Philip Venables on Vimeo.
Posted in blog, Projects, Videos
Tagged Installation, Junk Band, Kings Place, Percussion, Serge Vuille
I’m glad to say that I’ve just finished my latest piece, numbers 91-95 for the Berlin-based Ensemble Adapter. The piece is a setting (of sorts) of the poem by the same name by the British poet Simon Howard, whose work I really love. His poetry blog is here.
Ensemble Adapter are a fearless new music ensemble that aren’t afraid to make unusual concert presentations, including video, speaking, improvisation and conceptual performance. This piece by no means pushes the boundaries of what they have done in the past, in this sense, but it certainly does push the boundaries of my work, in that it is for speaker, two tape recorders, flute, harp and woodblock.
My numbers 91-95 is not really a setting in the traditional sense… more just a reading of the poem with musical accompaniment, and some verses of the poem replayed on old cassette tapes, which echoes the themes of dreaming and forgetting in the poem.
The premiere is on 8th November at the Wien Modern festival in Austria… I’ll keep you posted!
Tagged 2011, Ensemble Adapter, numbers 91-95, Simon Howard, Wien Modern
We just finished the ‘about me’ video for the London Sinfonietta’s Blue Touch Paper project, which starts on Friday with the Collaborators’ Day. It’s just a short video introducing my work, my ideas and thoughts about collaboration. Here it is:
About Philip Venables (London Sinfonietta Blue Touch Paper) from Philip Venables on Vimeo.
Posted in About, blog, Projects
Tagged Blue Touch Paper, Collaboration, Interview, London Sinfonitta, Video
I’m delighted: I’ve been picked to take part in the first stage of the London Sinfonietta’s new Blue Touch Paper scheme. The chosen composers, artists, poets, writers, filmmakers, scientists, etc, will all attend a collaborators’ day on Friday 8th July in London, to find out about each other’s work, hear from some established artists about their collaborations, and to begin to pair up with people with whom we might want to make some work.
In the meantime, I have to make a 5-minute video about me and my work… I’m a little stumped about exactly what I want to say.. but it has to be done this weekend, so watch out for it on here!
I’m still buzzing after the BBC Radio 3 interview and broadcast with the Phoenix Piano Trio on In Tune with Sean Rafferty.
They talked about and played a movement from my new piece for them, Klaviertrio im Geiste. They played the Scherzo, which is controlled pitch descent using notes from Beethoven’s Ghost Trio, second movement (the same piano ‘tremolo’ that appears there). The piano descends exponentially, the strings descend linearly. This is all part of my increasing use of process composition. Hopefully, it doesn’t sound clinical or mechanical, but instead gusty and with a natural ‘fall’ towards the end.
Listen to the broadcast here:
BBC Radio 3 In Tune – Klaviertrio im Geiste (Scherzo) by philipvenables
