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

Posted on October 12, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

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.

 

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Video of numbers 76-80 : tristan und isolde

Posted on October 7, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

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.

 

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Wonderful reviews of numbers 76-80 : tristan und isolde

Posted on October 7, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

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.

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Contrasts in Space

Posted on October 7, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

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.

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CONTACT dance-floor up and running!

Posted on September 8, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

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…

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numbers 76-80 : tristan und isolde

Posted on August 26, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

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!

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…dark and violent, and so so gay.

Posted on August 26, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

Last week’s performance of Fuck Forever was reviewed by www.sosogay.com.

“There were some really great little works in among the chaff….. Philip Venables’ Fuck Forever managed to tease out a dark and violent portrait of sexual desire.”

Definitely a line I will quote in my biography!

Check out the full review here.

 

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Fuck Forever video

Posted on August 26, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

Fuck forever from Philip Venables on Vimeo.

I’m delighted that my 3-minute Six Word Opera was premiered last week (11th and 12th August) at Riverside Studios in London, as part of the Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival.  It was performed by the wonderful John Savournin (speaker/singer), James Young (piano and MD), Rosalind Acton (cello) and Matthew West (woodblock).  Check out this video of one of the performances.

James Young asked me to write one (and he probably regrets it…) for the second year of the successful Six Word Opera project.  I was very glad to!  As almost all of my recent pieces have involved spoken word in concert music (I —- the body electric, numbers 91-95, numbers 76-80 : tristan und isolde, The Schmürz all in the last 12 months), this seemed a great way to try out some ideas.  Also a good testing ground for the project that I am working on with Jorge Balça and Omar Ebrahim which is also a mini-opera, semi-staged, with themes of sex, sexuality and violence.

Hope you enjoy it!

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Building the Junk Band

Posted on August 4, 2011 by phil| Leave a comment

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.

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numbers 91-95 finished

Posted on July 31, 2011 by phil| 1 Comment

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!

 

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