Performance of ‘The Photographic Message’ for soprano and flute; the second movement of the my larger work Message without a Code.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/stephanie-lamprea-richard-craig-tickets-678437644257

The premiere of Lights of London (baritone, horn, piano), highly commended in The Lord Mayor’s Composition Prize 2020, will be performed after various delays.

The programme will feature other work by Beethoven, Schumann, and Vaughan Williams.

Premiere of a new work, Message without a Code, for soprano, flute, and fixed electronics, alongside works by Brian Ferneyhough, Emily Doolittle, and Kate Soper.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/messages-codes-tickets-624373968347

Premiere of Equivalence performed by David Palmer at the Milton Court Concert Hall in London.

This work responds to the series of photographs taken by Alfred Stiglitz in the 1920s, entitled Equivalents. The Equivalents (initially titled ‘Music’) are a sequence of cloud photographs which represent a significant development of photography into the realm of abstraction: there is no horizon line, no orientation, merely the texture and colouration of the cloud. Commentaries on the Equivalents notes the importance and new importance of the photographic ‘cut’ (‘the effect of punching the image, we might say, out of the continuous fabric of the sky at large’ (Krauss 1979)), in achieving a destabilising effect within the viewer. In Equivalence, large dissonant chords (using the extremities of fingering) are subject to a ‘cut’, like in Stiglitz’s photographs, leaving a triad as a kind of resolution. The destabilising effect is felt on iterations of the linear material, increasingly disintegrating yet paradoxically becoming more deliberate. Totality is implied through the use of every major and minor triad throughout the piece, played in sequence at the end of the work (albeit in a randomised order from their initial presentation).

My ‘work-in progress’ seminar for my Fellowship at The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Open to all.

https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86535202023
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2

Abstract:

This project examines several Anglo-American case studies throughout the 20th century to explore how photography as both practice and idea came to affect compositional activities in the realm of art music. Beginning with the Music (later Equivalents) series of Alfred Stieglitz (1922) and Ernest Bloch’s Five Sketches in Sepia (1923), I will examine the influence and crossover of ‘impressionism’ and abstraction when considering the immediate medial connections between the two artists. Photography, as a mobile, reproducible medium, finds a companion in the work of Joseph Schillinger and Heitor Villa Lobos, who used photographs as a means of directly generating musical material through the graphing of landscape contours. The political situation in which Villa-Lobos’ work emerged, i.e. Pan-Americanism and the 1939 World’s Fair, also gives insights into the cultural view of photography and music with respect to nationalism, diplomacy, and mechanical reproduction. Following the development of photographic philosophy into the 1940s and 50s, particularly the legacy of the f/64 group (e.g. Ansel Adams, Minor White), I will explore how photography began to be firmly established as a metaphor for certain notational and deterministic practices within music through Morton Feldman and John Cage, probing Adams’ view of the photographic negative as ‘score’ and the print as ‘performance’ (1948). At a similar time, the development and commercialisation of photography, subsequently marketed as an educational tool through the Kodak company’s Photo-Discovery Sets (1966) will demonstrate another aspect of this metaphor, that of creative seriality, seen in Cornelius Cardew’s Two Books of Study for Pianists (1958; 1964). This underlines a further argument as to the effect of photography into creating an emergent visual literacy which finds parallels in musical notation and creative practice. Jumping ahead, the development of the first digital camera in 1992, combined with further mass access to photographic technologies (e.g. Fujifilm’s QuickSnap [1986]) has implications for the relationship between photography and music. This ultra-mobile form of photography finds new artistic expressions in the works of Fred Frith (1999) and Christian Marclay (2007), who, I argue, continue the idea of the ‘vernacular gaze’ of Robert Rauschenberg’s work, centring on improvisation, chance, and a more social view of art music.

I will be speaking as a panellist at the final roundtable of the online symposium: Multimodal translation in the arts: (multi)modalities, languages and codes in/as translation? on 22-23 May 2023.

https://multimodaltranslation.blogspot.com/

A Symphony of Late Liberalism appears as a ‘concept-image’ in Elizabeth Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment (2011), one which represents a critique of liberalism in a transnational, historic, and contemporary assemblage of events. It is further expanded in Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism, to demonstrate ‘a strange way of periodizing [which] creates an even stranger geography’ visible in the image of the Symphony (2016: 169). The Symphony is presented, in musical terms, as a graphic score: a musical text used for performance which prioritises indeterminacy, pictorialism and/or abstraction, suffused with a maximising of the performer’s agency (in lieu of the traditional composer-performer hierarchy).

The Symphony is a fusion of anthropological, sociological, and musicological design. This workshop will host five speakers to bring their disciplinary expertise to unravelling the implications of this enigmatic text. These short presentations will be interspersed with recorded musical interpretations of the Symphony, provided by pianist David Palmer, to demonstrate the radical potential of the text as performative: how can we ‘sound’ the idea of decolonial resistance?

The key questions to be addressed by this workshop include:

• What is it about the design of the Symphony that can further the understandings that Povinelli poses on late liberalism?

• How can, or should, it be read?

• What is gained through performances of the work?

• Having discussed these issues, how can one now see and hear the Symphony as critique of late liberalism in both Povinelli’s framework, but also in new, experimental and decolonial contexts?

Speakers:

• Prof. Elizabeth Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

• Prof. Nadia Abu El-Haj, Ann Olin Whitney Professor of Anthropology; Codirector of the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University

• Dr. Morag Grant, Chancellors Fellow, Reid School of Music

• Dr. Tom Metcalf, Junior Anniversary Fellow, IASH

• Dr. Shakeel Anjum, RACE.ED Postdoctoral Fellow, IASH

This event is supported through the Susan Manning Workshop Fund from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. Image credit: Elizabeth Povinelli.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/notation-decolonial-resistance-and-late-liberalism-tickets-600675284947

An invited lecture on my music and creative process at the Reid School of Music, Edinburgh University.

A showcase concert at the Reid School of Music, Edinburgh, celebrating my ongoing collaboration with composer and pianist David Palmer, kindly supported by IASH, University of Edinburgh.

Further details to follow.

Recording/Performance of H(AI)KU by the NYCGB Fellowship Ensemble.

Premiere of Ennui(t) for piano, as part of David Palmer’s final recital at the Guildhall School of Drama and Music:

Programme:

Metcalf - Ennui(t)

Bellamy - Celestine

Birtwistle - Précis

Adès - Darknesse Visible

Vivier - Shiraz

Messiaen - Le traquet rieur

Broadcast of Rust, performed by Simone Maffioletti, as part of the Milan-based Divertimento Ensemble’s Young Performers on Digital Stage.

https://www.divertimentoensemble.tv/youn-performers-on-digital-stage

World premiere of The Unattended Moment by Ensamble a Tempo as part of the Festival Espresiones Contemporáneas 2021 in Mexico, performed at Poliforum in Morelia.

Performance of Memories of a Pixelated River (Vignette No. 1) by Peter Sheppard-Skærved at Goldsmiths University, London, alongside the premiere of Edward Cowie’s Bird Portraits.

https://fb.me/e/2QG7Doxw4

London premiere of Arrays, performed by David Palmer at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

https://www.gsmd.ac.uk/music/view_all_events/?tx_julleevents_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=7003

Swiss premiere of Rust for solo trombone, performed by Simone Maffioletti at Café Kunstmusuem in the KKL Lucerne, Switzerland.

https://www.kkl-luzern.ch/en/shop-tickets/performances

Performance of DISSOLUTION (2020) alongside new works by Jonty Watt and David Palmer, live at Keble College Chapel.

Culmination of the ‘Pixelating the River’ project, featuring a concert featuring Anne Boyd’s String Quartet No. 2 ‘Play on the Water’, and my new work ‘Pixelating the River’.

The concert will be streamed on YouTube, hosted by The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH): https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/event/kreutzer-quartet-pixelating-the-river

Link available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fad1WNoBRkA&t=2220s

Premiere of Arrays by David Palmer.

Live-streamed by the Jacqueline Du Pré Music Building, St. Hilda’s College, Oxford.

Workshop final for the Benslow Young Composer Competition 2021. Results will be posted online shortly after the event, including a link to the performance if possible.

World premiere of Rust for solo bass trombone, as part of Brandt Attema’s All Alone concert, live streamed from Splendor Amsterdam. Tickets available here: https://www.splendoramsterdam.com/en/agenda/496569/all-alone-1930u

My collaboration with Kwan Q Li, ‘The Weedist’, will be performed at the EMPRES groups’s event ‘The Art of Noises V’ hosted at Modern Art Oxford.