We’ve just completed the run of premiere performances of Answer Machine Tape, 1987 with the four co-commissioning festivals: Time of Music in Finland, November Music in the Netherlands, hcmf// in the UK and the Festival d’Automne à Paris. Thanks to all those festivals for supporting the piece, as well as the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, Royal Holloway, University of London, The Marchus Trust and Berlin Neustart Kultur.
Here are some images from the various performances that can be used for press and non-commercial promotion. Please credit the photographers as listed below, and the commissioner and performer Zubin Kanga.
Answer Machine Tape, 1987, my a new work for piano and multimedia, has more performances announced this autumn. Zubin Kanga, who commissioned the piece, will perform the work at the following places:
12th November 2022 — House73 Courtroom in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands, as part of November Music. Click here for tickets and info.
19th November 2022 — Bates Mill in Huddersfield, UK, as part of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Click here for tickets and info.
The piece was made in collaboration with Zubin and programmer Simon Hendry, based on a concept developed in collaboration with Ted Huffman. It focuses on New York visual artist David Wojnarowicz and the turbulent period leading up to the death Peter Hujar, his close friend and fellow artist, from AIDS-related illness in 1987. The focal point of the work is Wojnarowicz’s answering machine tape from the days leading up to Hujar’s death, featuring calls from Hujar, other artists, friends and lovers. Using new sensor technology from the Augmented Instruments Lab, the piano is turned into a huge typewriter to transcribe, comment on and illuminate the messages. The result is, I hope, a poignant and intimate exploration of that period of the New York art scene, queer history and the AIDS crisis.
The piece is made in collaboration with Zubin and programmer Simon Hendry, based on a concept developed in collaboration with Ted Huffman. It focuses on New York visual artist David Wojnarowicz and the turbulent period leading up to the death Peter Hujar, his close friend and fellow artist, from AIDS-related illness in 1987. The focal point of the work is Wojnarowicz’s answering machine tape from the days leading up to Hujar’s death, featuring calls from Hujar, other artists, friends and lovers. Using new sensor technology from the Augmented Instruments Lab, the piano is turned into a huge typewriter to transcribe, comment on and illuminate the messages. The result is, I hope, a poignant and intimate exploration of that period of the New York art scene, queer history and the AIDS crisis.
Some production images from the Ensemble Intercontemporain concert performance of 4.48 Psychosis, December 2021, at the Philharmonie de Paris as part of the portrait of my work in the Festival d’Automne à Paris. The ensemble was conducted by Matthias Pintscher, the singers were Gweneth-Ann Rand, Robyn Allegra Parton, Karen Bandelow, Samantha Price, Rachael Lloyd and Lucy Schaufer, with video by Pierre Martin and Mise-en-Espace by Elayce Ismail. All images by Quentin Chevrier. They can be used for press purposes with the appropriate credit.
The Festival d’Automne à Paris and Ensemble Intercontemporain gave a concert performance of 4.48 Psychosis on 16th December 2021. The concert was part of the Festival feature about my work, and took place in the Cité de la Musique in the Philharmonie de Paris. The concert featured singers Gweneth Ann Rand, Robyn Allegra Parton, Karen Bandelow, Samantha Price, Rachael Lloyd and Lucy Schaufer, and was conducted my Matthias Pintscher, with Aurélien Gignoux and Gilles Durot taking the solo percussion roles. Nicholas Berteloot and Emmanuelle Corbeau did sound design, Elayce Ismail looked after ‘mise en espace’ and lights, and Pierre Martin the video.
The Philharmonie de Paris have just released this trailer video in advance of the concert performance of 4.48 Psychosis there on Thursday 16th December with Ensemble Intercontemporain, in a co-production with the Festival d’Automne à Paris. The 9-minute video features a short interview with me about the piece, and some clips of the staged production from Strasbourg.
Twenty-five years ago, I learnt to play J.S. Bach’s Prelude in D minor BWV940, and ever since then, almost without exception, I play it every time I sit down at the piano to compose. It is the only piece that I can play from memory, with my poor piano skills, and playing this Prelude is a ritual that I go through every time I sit down to write. Improvisation often grows out of this prelude, from mistakes I make, or repetitions and variations. New music is catalysed from old music. This ritual for me is a way of focusing, shutting out other thoughts, clearing the mind, sparking ideas. Indeed, versions of Bach’s Prelude have appeared in a number of my pieces (Scene 19 in 4.48 Psychosis; the male chorus in The Schmürz).
I was asked by Festival d’Automne to make a sound installation for Saint Eustache, and so I decided to try to capture some of this compositional process. For around 50 days I recorded my daily ritual of playing Bach’s Prelude on the digital piano in my studio, complete with my improvisations, my mistakes, my singing, my tangents, my thoughts, improvisations and repetitions, as I sketched out a new piece (also for the Festival d’Automne) for mezzo-soprano and quintet, based on text by the late British poet Simon Howard. Using excerpts from these recordings, I have moulded a kind of ‘meta-composition session’ across 42 speakers in the church. Wander around and you will find small details of different days, but I hope that the whole effect it creates is an honest and reflective meditation on the act of composing, and my personal relationship to this Bach prelude.
In addition to the speaker installation, I was asked to provide a ‘live element’, and so on two evenings during the installation, the organist Baptiste-Florian Marle-Ouvrard will perform a kind of ‘exponential blossoming’ of the Bach prelude. This taps into another love of mine: the spreadsheet. I use spreadsheets in almost every piece I write, usually to chart some harmonic pattern or musical form or rhythmical change using an exponential curve. It’s an approach that I first started in 2011 with the Klaviertrio im Geiste. So for this live element, I decided to put a spreadsheet to work, to turn the Bach Prelude into a kind of ‘mathematical flower’ gradually opening up and revealing itself over a period of 28 repetitions. The idea was for the music to emerge exponentially from a point of a single note (the most recurring note in the Prelude, F4) to recreate the complete Prelude of 170 notes.
I will write below a brief method for how this was done. Suffice to say, the result is (hopefully) more of a conceptual meditation rather than a piece of music, so to speak. But one that gradually reveals the Bach Prelude over a period of around 30 minutes, emerging from a single pitch. It’s a beautiful instrument and a magical acoustic space to do this kind of thing, and I encourage the audience to come and go as they please, wander round the church and soak it up or sit down and let it wash over them.
A brief analysis of the Prelude
To start, I counted the occurrences (prevalence) of each pitch in the Prelude BWV940:
In the table, the ‘central’ tonic pitch of D4 is highlighted, and the most prevalent pitch, F4. I chose F4 to be the central axis of this performance. In total, there are 170 notes in the Prelude (i.e. the sum of all these occurrences), but adding the Tierce de Picardie in an extra repetition gives 171 notes (more about this later).
Then I calculated the distance of each pitch from this central axis F4, counted in number of semitones. I also classified each pitch with a weighting according to how closely-related each pitch, harmonically, to the tonic D minor. I called this the Harmonic Weighting Factor, and allocated the tonic pitch with a factor of 1, immediately related pitches with 2 (i.e. the pitches in the tonic and dominant triads), lesser-related pitches with 3 (the flat seventh and the sixth), and distant pitches with 4 (E-flat, F-sharp, G-sharp, B). The results are shown here:
Using these three parameters (Prevalence, Distance from F4, Harmonic Weighting Factor), I calculated the following equation:
(Distance from F4)2 x Prevalence x Harmonic Weighting Factor
The results are in the far right hand column of the table above, and in this graph:
On this graph, my spreadsheet programme (Google Sheets) calculated the line of best fit, which is marked as a grey line on the graph. The line of best fit had an R2 value of 0.97, which means it’s a very good fit to the given data. The equation for this line of best fit is:
The concept of the performance
I decided that the total length of the performance should be about 35 minutes long, which I worked out would be 28 repetitions of the complete prelude at my preferred tempo. Each repetition would reveal a certain number of the 171 notes in the prelude, and sustain those notes until the next occurrence of a pitch in that particular voice (for the most part, there are three simultaneous voices in the prelude, sometimes four or five). By gradually unveiling pitches in each repetition, the prelude would gradually ’emerge’ or ‘take shape’ from a series of sustained notes based around F4. That, in summary, was the concept — the gradual blooming of a ‘musical flower’.
I wanted the unveiling, or blooming, to also happen exponentially, so that very few notes would be revealed at first, and this would increase through to the final repetition. I used the same logarithmic equation that was derived from the pitch analysis to map out the number of pitches that would be revealed on each repetition of the prelude. In this case, the logarithmic curve must be inverted, in order to start with a low number and end with a high one. x becomes (29–x), since I want 28 repetitions. The equation looks like:
And in order to find the number of notes revealed in each repetition, as a proportion of the total number of notes, 171, the equation is:
The table below shows the results, for each repetition from 1 to 28, rounded to the closest integer:
The pitches were ‘unveiled’ according to the chart above. For practical purposes, the value for repetition 1 was switched with that for repetition 2, so that a pitch was presented at the beginning of the performance rather than just silence (consequently there was no new pitch in repetition 2). Thereafter, 1 new pitch was presented in repetitions 3 to 5, and so on, with 17 new pitches presented in repetition 27.
For artistic purposes, an extra complete repetition was added at the end (number 29) to delay the final pitch (F#4) that forms the Tierce de Picardie. Therefore we have repetition 28 with 21 pitches and repetition 29 with just one, the F#. This, in effect, gives us two performances of the complete Prelude, without and with the Tierce de Picardie.
The pitch allocation is show in the following chart. The pitches were allocated by intuition within this chart, but two guidance lines were plotted on it to aid with pitch placement. These were linear (shaded in blue) and the same logarithmic line as found in the pitch distribution (17136-5065 Ln x) (shaded pink). Pitch distribution roughly followed these curves, in a scattered approach.
I will be making a brand new 42-speaker sound installation at the Church of Saint Eustache in Paris as part of this years Festival d’Automne à Paris. The installation, Venables plays Bach, explores my relationship with J.S. Bach’s Little Prelude in D minor, BWV 940. This Prelude was one of the earliest pieces I learnt to play on the piano when I was a teenager, and a piece that, over the last 25 years almost without exception, I have played as a warm up every time I sit down at the piano to compose. This installation is a kind of ‘composing diary’ recorded over about 50 days earlier this year, while I was writing numbers 96–100, also commissioned by the Festival d’Automne. These ‘diary entries’ form a kind of meta-composing-session, consisting of my improvisations, repetitions, explorations of the musical material for the new piece, growing out from and catalysed by the Bach Prelude.
In addition to the installation, I’ve made a 30-minute durational ‘unfolding’ of the Bach Prelude, to be performed live on the organ in Saint Eustache by Baptiste-Florian Marle-Ouvrard, on the evenings of 8th and 15th October. This is not really a new piece, so to speak, but more a live element of the installation: a conceptual performance based on a pitch-frequency analysis of the Bach Prelude and an exponential revealing of all 170 pitches in the Prelude over the course of 28 repetitions of it.
Venables plays Bach opens on 7th October at 2.30pm and is open every day until 16th October inclusive from 2.30pm–5pm. Entry is free. The organ performances are also free but require prior registration due to covid rules.
numbers 96–100 and numbers 81–85 have been commissioned by the Festival d’Automne à Paris, Music Festival Strasbourg and the ensemble Lovemusic, and will be premiered in these festivals on 1st (Strasbourg) and 26th October (Paris) by Lovemusic with mezzo-soprano Grace Durham.
Musica Festival in Strasbourg has just announced its 2021 programme, and I’m delighted to say there will be a portrait concert of my work in the festival on 1st October. The concert will be performed by Lovemusic, with guest artists Grace Durham (mezzo-soprano), Andreas Borregaard (accordion) and Romain Pageard as the host of the evening. The show is called Talking Music, and will feature Klaviertrio im Geiste, Illusions, My Favourite Piece is the Goldberg Variations and Numbers 91—95 alongside the world premiere of two new settings of Simon Howard’s Numbers: Numbers 81—85 and Numbers 96—100. These new pieces have been commissioned by Musica Festival, Festival d’Automne in Paris, and Lovemusic. Oscar Lozano Pérez will be making video projections and mise-en-espace for the show. Talking Music will be repeated in Paris on 26th October in Theatre de la Ville / Espace Cardin, as part of a larger feature on my work in the Festival d’Automne.
