Works in Contemporary Connections Projects
Four Aspects - Daphne Oram (1925-2003)
Daphne Oram was a pioneering electronic composer. She started her career at the BBC as a music balancer and in the mid 1940s started to conduct experiments in sound, becoming one of the directors of the new Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. After leaving the BBC to set up her own studio in Kent, she is perhaps best-known for developing the Oramics system through the Oramics machine which converted visual information to sound and has been displayed recently at London’s Science Museum. In the 1960s she devoted considerable time to lecturing and in 1968 made a series of instructional videos to help school children experiment with electronic music. In January 1960, she introduced members of the SWM to electronic music by giving a lecture, which included a performance of her concert piece Four Aspects.
Fall of the Leaf - Imogen Holst (1907- 1984)
Imogen Holst spent much of her life editing, performing and programming the works of others, firstly the works of her father Gustav Holst, then as director of Dartington Music Department and finally as Assistant to Benjamin Britten. She was particularly productive, however, with her own music firstly in the early part of her career after studying at the Royal College of Music and later having retired.
Fall of the Leaf was performed by Pamela Hind-O’Malley as part of the SWM Focus on Composers concerts at Leighton House in 1971. It had been written for a Hind-O’Malley Wigmore Hall recital and was also performed at the International Cello Centre. The work is a series of short studies on a sixteenth century English Tune from the Fitzwilliam Virginal book, and reflects Holst’s love of early music and painstaking musicological research. Reflecting different aspects of Autumn, Steven Isserlis said of the piece “I am really fond of the piece…. its quiet poetry is magical’.
See Christopher Tinker, ‘A Survey of the Chamber Music of Imogen Holst’, Imogen Holst: String Chamber Music CD, Court Lane Music CLM37601, 2008, p.5.
Fall of the Leaf was performed by Pamela Hind-O’Malley as part of the SWM Focus on Composers concerts at Leighton House in 1971. It had been written for a Hind-O’Malley Wigmore Hall recital and was also performed at the International Cello Centre. The work is a series of short studies on a sixteenth century English Tune from the Fitzwilliam Virginal book, and reflects Holst’s love of early music and painstaking musicological research. Reflecting different aspects of Autumn, Steven Isserlis said of the piece “I am really fond of the piece…. its quiet poetry is magical’.
See Christopher Tinker, ‘A Survey of the Chamber Music of Imogen Holst’, Imogen Holst: String Chamber Music CD, Court Lane Music CLM37601, 2008, p.5.
Suite for Two Violins - Ruth Gipps (1921- 1999)
Ruth Gipps was a conductor and pianist, but is best known as a composer, studying composition with Gordon Jacob and Vaughan Williams. She went on to win Royal College of Music composition prizes including the Cobbett Prize, as well as having her tone poem Knight in Armour performed by Henry Wood at the last night of the Proms in 1942. She worked tirelessly to promote British music establishing the London Repertoire Orchestra in 1955, becoming chairperson of the Composer’s Guild of Great Britain in 1967 and contributing to the formation of the British Music Information Centre.
Suite for Two Violins was written when Gipps was only 19 years old and was later played as part of the London Season of Arts Festival of Britain in Great Drawing Room 4 St James’s Square 1951. Here its three movements Echo, Reflection and Shadow, were heard by an SWM audience and performed by Bryan Gipps and Mollie Harms.
Suite for Two Violins was written when Gipps was only 19 years old and was later played as part of the London Season of Arts Festival of Britain in Great Drawing Room 4 St James’s Square 1951. Here its three movements Echo, Reflection and Shadow, were heard by an SWM audience and performed by Bryan Gipps and Mollie Harms.
On Standby’ (for voice and single screen video) - Amy Cunningham
Process, transformation and mediation are central to Amy Cunningham’s practice. Her artworks are realised in a variety of media including film, video, sound, drawing and performance. A key medium is her classical singing voice. She sees her artworks as vehicles that travel back and forth between the obsolete and the futuristic, exposing and embracing gaps and glitches in forms, media or ideas. This process has led to a series of works in which a conflation of time periods and subject matter occurs, including a fictional computer game in a real 18th century garden, opera as a video installation and an Internet broadcast as a song cycle. Cunningham has recently been selected for the PRS for Music Foundation, New Music Incubator 2011-2012.
Amy Cunningham studied Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art, London and The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Since 2000 she has exhibited performance, installation and screen-based work in various galleries and Festivals in Europe including: Café OTO, Norwich Gallery, Pitzhanger Manor Gallery London, Soundwaves Festival, Brighton, ZINGERpresents, Netherlands, Towner Gallery Eastbourne, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, SC Gallery Zagreb, Croatia and Serpentine Gallery, London. Since 2004 she has been a key member of the artist collective SpRoUt. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Music and Visual Art, University of Brighton.
http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/staff/amy-cunningham
In 1944, a young Daphne Oram who was later to become pioneer of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, worked at the Royal Albert Hall as a programme engineer. She was on standby to sync up gramophone records with live music in case of a bombing raid. ‘On Standby’ is part of a series of works investigating the role of women in the assimilation of pioneering technology into culture. Shifting between recorded material and live voice, this work uses imagery and sound from contemporary mobile phone advertising and seeks out fault lines and limitations in their construction and content. The voice is intended as a way to access these fault lines, to amplify them and to pose questions.
Amy Cunningham studied Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art, London and The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Since 2000 she has exhibited performance, installation and screen-based work in various galleries and Festivals in Europe including: Café OTO, Norwich Gallery, Pitzhanger Manor Gallery London, Soundwaves Festival, Brighton, ZINGERpresents, Netherlands, Towner Gallery Eastbourne, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, SC Gallery Zagreb, Croatia and Serpentine Gallery, London. Since 2004 she has been a key member of the artist collective SpRoUt. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Music and Visual Art, University of Brighton.
http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/staff/amy-cunningham
In 1944, a young Daphne Oram who was later to become pioneer of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, worked at the Royal Albert Hall as a programme engineer. She was on standby to sync up gramophone records with live music in case of a bombing raid. ‘On Standby’ is part of a series of works investigating the role of women in the assimilation of pioneering technology into culture. Shifting between recorded material and live voice, this work uses imagery and sound from contemporary mobile phone advertising and seeks out fault lines and limitations in their construction and content. The voice is intended as a way to access these fault lines, to amplify them and to pose questions.
Siren Song - Lynne Plowman
Lynne Plowman is a composer and flautist based in Wales, whose music ranges from large-scale vocal, orchestral and theatrical works to intimate songs and instrumental pieces. She has composed two operas for Music Theatre Wales - the first of these, Gwyneth and the Green Knight, won the 2003 British Composers Award.
Lynne's most recent project is 'Captain Blood's Revenge', an interactive pirate opera for young audiences commissioned by Glyndebourne for performances in 2013. She is currently researching new ideas for a series of orchestral sketches with a 'Creative Wales Award' from the Arts Council of Wales.
"I love the directness and wit of this wonderful poem by Margaret Atwood. My original setting for mezzo and piano was commissioned by Les Azuriales Opera Festival and first performed by Anna Burford and Bryan Evans in St Jean Cap Ferrat, France in August 2007. This new arrangement for ensemble was commissioned by Contemporary Connections for a premiere this evening."
www.lynneplowman.co.uk
Lynne's most recent project is 'Captain Blood's Revenge', an interactive pirate opera for young audiences commissioned by Glyndebourne for performances in 2013. She is currently researching new ideas for a series of orchestral sketches with a 'Creative Wales Award' from the Arts Council of Wales.
"I love the directness and wit of this wonderful poem by Margaret Atwood. My original setting for mezzo and piano was commissioned by Les Azuriales Opera Festival and first performed by Anna Burford and Bryan Evans in St Jean Cap Ferrat, France in August 2007. This new arrangement for ensemble was commissioned by Contemporary Connections for a premiere this evening."
www.lynneplowman.co.uk
Moon and Birds - Rhian Samuel
Rhian Samuel was born in Wales in 1944, lived in the United States for many years and has been Professor of Music at City University since 1999. Her music encompasses orchestral, chamber and solo works, and has been performed and broadcast in many countries from Chile and China. Her orchestral pieces range from Elegy-Symphony (Slatkin, St Louis Symphony Orchestra, 1981) to Tirluniau/Landscapes (Otaaka, BBCNOW, BBC Proms, 2000); in particular, she has written many sets of songs and piano pieces. As co-editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers (1994), she has helped raise the profile of undeservedly neglected women composers of the past. Rhian Samuel’s music is published by Stainer & Bell.
www.rhiansamuel.com
www.stainer.co.uk/samuel.html
This set of songs for voice and chamber ensemble was commissioned by Contemporary Connections and marks yet another group in a long series of settings of the poetry of the Anglo-American poet, Anne Stevenson, by the composer, this time accompanied by a poem by Emily Dickinson. The set also exists in a version for voice and piano.
www.rhiansamuel.com
www.stainer.co.uk/samuel.html
This set of songs for voice and chamber ensemble was commissioned by Contemporary Connections and marks yet another group in a long series of settings of the poetry of the Anglo-American poet, Anne Stevenson, by the composer, this time accompanied by a poem by Emily Dickinson. The set also exists in a version for voice and piano.
Songs for Ensemble and Voice - Ethel Smyth (1858-1944)
Ethel Smyth is the best-known British woman composer. In the early part of her career, having studied in Leipzig, she experimented with compositions for string ensemble and strings with piano as well as piano sonatas. After 1887 she ceased to compose for small ensemble and in 1890 returned to London to secure her orchestral debut at the Crystal Palace concert series. During the early twentieth century she was involved with the Pankhursts and The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSUP) as well as the Society of Women Musicians. This was when the String Quartet in E minor 1902-1912 (1914) was completed following a premiere at an SWM concert. She also composed several songs including those connected with the suffrage movement (1910-20) as well as the group for voice and chamber ensemble (1908). She became a public figure not only through performances of her music but also for her role in the fight for suffrage and her colourful volumes of memoirs.
Songs for Mezzo Soprano and Chamber Ensemble (1908) was revolutionary in its use of flute, harp, strings and percussion as Smyth uses wind and voice in chamber music before the French School and others such as Chabrier, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Ives, Webern and Schoenberg. The Songs were played at the Great Drawing Room, 4 St James’s Square on 29 Oct 1958 as part of the Society of Women Musician’s Smyth Centenary Concert and again tonight. Virginia Woolf wrote of the songs:
Well, we listened in. 'How like she is to her music' L. said: a great compliment: for he sees you vividly and warmly. I thought the Anacreontic Ode very exciting - even buzzed as it was across England. And the other, the songs, very satisfying (like a complete demonstration of something). Lord, how they knocked out Berners! How robust, and at the same time piercing.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume 4: 1929-1931 p. 209. http://modernism.research.yale.edu/ynote/?action=object&value=1956
Songs for Mezzo Soprano and Chamber Ensemble (1908) was revolutionary in its use of flute, harp, strings and percussion as Smyth uses wind and voice in chamber music before the French School and others such as Chabrier, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Ives, Webern and Schoenberg. The Songs were played at the Great Drawing Room, 4 St James’s Square on 29 Oct 1958 as part of the Society of Women Musician’s Smyth Centenary Concert and again tonight. Virginia Woolf wrote of the songs:
Well, we listened in. 'How like she is to her music' L. said: a great compliment: for he sees you vividly and warmly. I thought the Anacreontic Ode very exciting - even buzzed as it was across England. And the other, the songs, very satisfying (like a complete demonstration of something). Lord, how they knocked out Berners! How robust, and at the same time piercing.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume 4: 1929-1931 p. 209. http://modernism.research.yale.edu/ynote/?action=object&value=1956