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Posts tagged 'Ann Cleare'

Ann Cleare's "eyam ii" Premiered by Argento Ensemble

Ann Cleare's eyam series consists of "five attacca pieces for clarinets and flutes, all of which deal with ideas of isolation and infiltration." Cleare's work explores the static and sculptural nature of sound, probing the space between composer, performer, and instrument with texture, noise, sound, and silence. The inspiration for the eyam series comes from the town of Eyam, in Derbyshire, England; it chose to cut itself off from the outisde world when the plague was discovered there in 1665. Positioning instrumentalist as "village", the eyam pieces tug at the differences between individual and multiple, safety and danger, the known and the unknown. 

eyam ii (taking apart your universe), for contrabass clarinet and ensemble, saw its world premiere on October 24th at St. Peter's Church in New York, performed by soloist Carol McGonnell; she will perform it again on October 29th in Washington, DC at the Library of Congress. Presented on a concert program by the Argento Ensemble, eyam ii is being paired Cleare's eyam i (it takes an ocean not to) for solo clarinet, along with Sciarrino's introduzione all'oscuro, a classic work of sculptural sound. Ireland's Contemporary Music Centre has recently featured Cleare's work in a video interview, shown above. Check out more of Cleare's works here.  

Ann Cleare's "Mire |...| Veins" at the Festival of New Trumpet Music



New York's FONT - the Festival of New Trumpet Music - has been pushing the boundaries of brass music since 2003, and this year is no exception. In an abundantly-programmed concert on September 23rd at The New School, Michael Gurfield (principal trumpet for Signal Ensemble and Alarm Will Sound and co-founder of Deviant Septet) has chosen works by contemporary American composers Matt Marks, John Altieri, and Liza Lim, as well as Europeans Vinko Globokar and Mauricio Kagel. But we're most interested in his choice to present a work by a composer not so easily categorized— mire|...|veins, by Irish composer Ann Cleare


(audio: excerpt from mire|...|veins)

Commissioned and premiered in 2013 by Ensemble Apparat in Berlin, this work deconstructs the brass ensemble into three separate groupings that, in Cleare's words, "unknowingly amount to a ball of raucously unfolding moments." The French Horn, in a grouping of its own, "posseses an all-seeing, transmitting and connective capability" between the other players. The horn gradually unveils an extraordinary hybrid sound (mixing the instrumental tone with a whistle placed at the roof of the mouth), which infiltrates the ensemble.

    
(pages from mire|...|veins

Brooklyn Brass Quintet performs mire|...|veins as part of FONT at The New School on September 23. Cleare will also see a performance of her ensemble work Dorchadas in Ireland on September 20th, with Alan Pierson leading the Crash Ensemble as a part of "Composing the Island: Love and Death", a concert series presented by RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. 


(audio: excerpt from Dorchadas)

World Premiere of Mario Diaz de Leon's "O Ignis Spiritus" by the TAK Ensemble

The TAK Ensemble, an ambitious young group from New York, will premiere Mario Diaz de Leon's new composition, "O Ignis Spiritus", alongside a performance of Ann Cleare's "Unable to Create an Offscreen World (C)", at Roulette on May 25th. Supported by a Chamber Music America commissioning grant and the GENERATE program at Roulette, this performance follows a busy month for Diaz de Leon, who recently has performed in venues as diverse as Brooklyn metal mecca Saint Vitus, the Donau Festival in Krems, Austria, and the Tectonics Festival in Glasgow, alongside the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and frequent collaborator Nate Young, of the noise group Wolf Eyes. 

Diaz de Leon's new work, "O Ignis Spiritus", shares its title with a medieval sequence of the same name by Hildegard von Bingen; the text, which translates to "O Holy Fire", compliments Diaz de Leon's compositional aesthetic, which explores the extremities of timbre, texture, color, and form. 

Diaz has written about fire before: check out "The Flesh Needs Fire", a 2007 composition for flute, clarinet, and electronics. 

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