Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 1: 15–21 November 2013

Tempo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (268) ◽  
pp. 75-77
Author(s):  
Sara Mohr-Pietsch
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
New Work ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
Multi Media ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Artistic Director

The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival has, for many years, been the date in the UK new music calendar. Every November, friends and enemies gather under the heavy skies of a Yorkshire micro-climate to listen to, perform and discuss new work. When Graham McKenzie took over as Artistic Director six years ago, there were murmurings that it might change out of all recognition. He certainly made a few bold decisions, introducing more multi-media, cross-disciplinary elements, installations and audio walks, and moving beyond St Paul's Hall to more contemporary spaces like the blending shed at Bates Mill. He also gave the festival's branding the once-over, so that HCMF now always appears as hcmf// (perhaps a nod to the trendy Wire magazine-reading audience he was trying to attract). Little of what he instigated at the start of his tenure has changed, but if there were fears that it would spell the end of ‘proper concerts’, one needn't have worried.

Wien Modern 2014

Tempo ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (272) ◽  
pp. 77-78
Author(s):  
Marcus Zagorski
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
The World ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Visual Element ◽  
Artistic Director

The focus of Wien Modern 2014, according to Artistic Director Matthias Lošek, is best summarised with the two English words ‘on screen’. In his editorial forward to the programme book, Lošek communicated the thinking behind the festival and explained that ‘“on screen” engages with the interface between film/television and contemporary music’. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the majority of events in the festival, which ran from 29 October until 21 November 2014, had a strong visual element. This precedence of the visual in a major contemporary music festival brought to mind a review of this year's Darmstadt courses: ‘Das Auge hört mit’, a reviewer of Darmstadt 2014 concluded in the latest issue of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, ‘the eye listens in’. The world, it seems, is not as we were taught: German-speaking Central Europe, for some the Mecca of absolute music, is looking elsewhere. How could this be?

FIRST PERFORMANCES

Tempo ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 63 (248) ◽  
pp. 46-63
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
List Type ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
Elliott Carter

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2008 John Fallas, Paul ConwayBoston: Elliott Carter Celebrations Rodney ListerLeuven: Transit New Music Festival Peter ReynoldsBelgrade: 17th International Rostrum Donata PremeruLeeds: Bingham's ‘Shakespeare Requiem’ Paul ConwayLondon: King's Place Opening Festival Jill BarlowFurther reports from London and Chichester Malcolm Miller, Martin Anderson, John Wheatley

Ultima 2018, Oslo

Tempo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (288) ◽  
pp. 88-90
Author(s):  
Alec Hall
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Outdoor Setting ◽  
Multiple Pressures ◽  
Experimental Theatre ◽  
New Applications ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
Symphonic Work ◽  
Selection Of

Unfolding over ten days in September 2018, this year's edition of Ultima was centred on the theme of migration, with a focus on both music and people. In his preface to the festival programme, Thørbjorn Tønder Hansen, the new artistic director, writes, ‘The borders of contemporary music are happily eroding, and the scene is in constant flux’. Responding to the multiple pressures of asylum seekers in Europe, demographic inequities in the representation of artists and composers, and the growing collective sense that ‘New Music’ is on the cusp of some kind of significant re-orientation, Hansen and his curatorial team produced a significant accomplishment by bringing together such a varied selection of programming. The range of installations included symphonic work; multi-channel acousmatic pieces with live diffusion to performance pieces with new applications of technology; and experimental theatre pieces set inside the black box or at a rugged outdoor setting far beyond Oslo's city limits. Ultima tipped its cap to just about anything that could set foot within the expanded terrain of ‘music composition’ today.

The Presence of Julius Eastman, London Contemporary Music Festival

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (281) ◽  
pp. 88-90
Author(s):  
Ben Harper
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Music Festival

For four years now, the London Contemporary Music Festival has been organising some of the most exciting new music events in town. In contrast to the eclectic extravaganzas of previous years, LCMF 2016 was tightly focused: three nights only, dedicated to the work of Julius Eastman. The programme was a revelation, even for those who are aware of Eastman and his music.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 3: 24 November 2013

Tempo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (268) ◽  
pp. 79-80
Author(s):  
Richard Glover
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Learning Activities ◽  
Audience Member ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Strong Feeling ◽  
Traditional Dance ◽  
Musical Cultures

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival ended with a folk-themed Sunday, to draw together the interests from the Danish and Norwegian representations with British musical cultures, and to provide a markedly different end to this year's festival than others recent. As an audience member, I found that the focus upon learning activities, free concerts and vernacular and improvisatory approaches to music-making provided a strong feeling of community throughout the day. Danish fiddler Poul Bjerager Christiansen, who coordinated the morning's traditional dance workshop, stated that we can choose to see traditional music as a base for creating new music; it is clear that Graham McKenzie wants to see it as a base for creating new festival environments, in which we are invited to explore and make our own connections.

Presteigne Festival 2014

Tempo ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (271) ◽  
pp. 81-83
Author(s):  
Stephanie Power
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Small Market ◽  
Market Town ◽  
Artistic Director

Based in a small market town just inside the Welsh border, the Presteigne Festival annually punches well above its weight in contemporary music terms. The conductor George Vass has been Artistic Director at Presteigne for 22 of its 32 years, and his tireless advocacy of living and lesser-known composers has garnered not only increasing international respect, but a loyal and substantial audience, including many locals for whom encountering ‘new music’ has clearly become something to relish rather than suffer.

The Dramaturgical and Compositional Genesis of Luigi Nono's Intolleranza 1960

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 101-141
Author(s):  
ANGELA IDA DE BENEDICTIS ◽  
JOHN O'DONNELL
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Ideal Convergence ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Principal Roles ◽  
Technical Principles

AbstractIntolleranza 1960, an ‘azione scenica in two parts based on an idea by Angelo Maria Ripellino, music by Luigi Nono’, was first performed on 13 April 1961 during the 24th International Contemporary Music Festival at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. In the aftermath of the première, critics perceived a gap in the work's realization between intentions and results, a gap perceived mainly in political terms. An examination of the dramaturgical and compositional genesis of the work through the sketches suggests a gap of a very different nature. The work as originally announced was to have revolutionary potential, and the innovations were intended by Nono to affect the musical language, the staging, and the dramatic content. But many of these ideas and innovations remained unrealized in the final production, while the ambitious dramaturgical logic underpinning the compositional process – involving ‘character rows’ for each of the principal roles – was never fully implemented. Nono's first theatrical work proves to be the result of a singular compromise between intention and necessity, something quite different from the original project. Nevertheless, the compositional solutions forced on Nono, partly through pressures of time, were to prove decisive in later works, liberating the now ‘autonomous’ interval from parametric predetermination and classic serial grids. Moreover, the work, which had been envisaged as an ideal convergence of dramaturgical and technical principles, became an emblem not only of the new music theatre but of avant-garde theatre in general.

> rainy days 2017

Tempo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (284) ◽  
pp. 81-83
Author(s):  
Athena Corcoran-Tadd
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
Rainy Days ◽  
Fine Print

Questioning whether new music is ‘losing touch’, Lydia Rilling, in her first edition as artistic director of Luxembourg's rainy days festival, curated a programme which sought, via an exploration of ‘the emotional landscapes of contemporary music’, to ‘reveal’ that this is not the case. The festival's scope extended beyond concerts to sound installations, pre- and post-concert talks, an (all female-presented) conference dedicated to the festival topic, a newly affiliated composition academy, and a closing ‘bal contemporain’ which paired Frank Zappa and Alexander Schubert with onion soup, while composers, musicologists and curators let loose after such extensive reflection upon the question that had been posed at every turn, emblazoned on the yellow telephone book-sized festival programmes (from which all quotations in this review are taken), echoed on individual concert programmes, interrogating the listener from the tickets’ fine print: how does it feel?

scholarly journals Make a Silence

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (02) ◽  
Author(s):  
Barley Norton
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Visual Exploration ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
Free Improvisation ◽  
Music Scenes ◽  
Artistic Images ◽  
Underground Music ◽  
Musical Exchange

The Hanoi New Music Festival 2018 was an historic event. It was the largest festival of exploratory forms of new music that has ever been held in Vietnam, and artists from countries across Southeast Asia and Japan came to Hanoi to participate. The film Make a Silence - Musical Dialogues in Asia showcases the diverse, multimedia performances that took place at the Festival, including sound art for theatre and video, underground music and free improvisation. Like the Festival itself, Make a Silence is a sensory feast of musical and visual exploration. Combining vivid artistic images, conversations with musicians and footage of concerts, the film meditates on transnational dialogue in the contemporary music scene in Asia. Artists featured in the film include Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), Trần Thị Kim Ngọc (Vietnam), Jiradej Setabundhu (Thailand), Red Slumber (Vietnam), Siew-Wai Kok (Malaysia), Otto Sidharta (Indonesia) and Yii Kah Hoe (Malaysia). The film is based on long-term ethnographic research in Vietnam by the director. It examines how transnational circuits of musical exchange in the new music scenes in Asia intersect with postcolonial politics, thereby challenging the often-presumed hegemony of Euro-American lineages of contemporary music.

Deal Summer Music Festival: David Matthews UK and World Premières

Tempo ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 57 (223) ◽  
pp. 83-85
Author(s):  
Mark Doran
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Music Festival ◽  
The World ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
World Premiere

Nestling on the Kent coast between Ramsgate and Dover, the historic town of Deal is the distinctly pleasant home of a Summer Music Festival which in its 21 seasons has come to incorporate a fair amount of important contemporary music alongside more traditional offerings. This year's programme featured a welcome performance of the Seventh Piano Sonata (1956) by Harold Truscott (1914–92), marking the tenth anniversary of the death of this composer (resident in Deal from 1954); the world première of the choral work Town and Country (2002) by the Festival's new President, Kent-born Sir Richard Rodney Bennett (b.1936); and two compositions (and one arrangement) by David Matthews (b.1943), part-time Deal resident and the Festival's Artistic Director since 1989.

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