CeReNeM Newsletter, September 2021

At CeReNeM, as elsewhere, the first half of 2021 was characterised by a certain ‘new normal’ of the pandemic era. Whereas in 2020 we had to quickly adapt to unexpected obstacles, in 2021 the focus has clearly shifted to finding ways of maximising the artistic and scholarly potential of some of the new technologies, new platforms, and new performance and dissemination environments that have emerged over the last 18 months. Despite some continued challenges for travel, we have found ways to maintain the international scope and reach of our research, and several exciting new opportunities have emerged along the way.

Centre Events & Activities

CeReNeM’s weekly Colloquium continued online, which allowed us to host several special international guests and networking events. Guest speakers included Prof Tyshawn Sorey (University of Pennsylvania, USA), Prof Cathy van Eck (Hochschule der Künste Bern, Switzerland), Dr Laura Bowler (RNCM), and the eminent composer Tom Johnson, as well as an exciting pair of exchange events between CeReNeM’s postgraduate community and the Iranian Female Composers Association, with contributors scattered between Canada, the USA, Iran, Europe, and Australia. Our CeReNeM seminar series also included a session on new technologies for remote musical collaboration, featuring Shelly Knotts (Network Music Festival), musician Cath Roberts, along with Tom Ward, Sam Andreae, and CeReNeM MA student David Birchall, who presented their work on the Autonomous Noise Unit, an R&D project supported by Innovate UK that developed a low-latency interface to enable users an accessible way to play music together online with high-quality audio, even when separated geographically by long distances.

Likewise, the continued limitation on concerts led to an exciting yearlong project in partnership with the New York-based International Contemporary Ensemble, as part of their Re.Co.Lab (Remote Composers Laboratory) project, which examines new modes of technology-supported collaboration between composers and performers across continents. The partnership led to eight new compositions by CeReNeM staff and PhD students, recorded to video for dissemination through CeReNeM’s YouTube Channel and ICE Ensemble’s Digitice platform.

CeReNeM also continued its partnership with hcmf// and SPARC, City University London, as a curator of the hcmf// Artist-to-Artist series. The latest CeReNeM installment featured a discussion between the Irish composer Ann Cleare (Asst Prof, Trinity College Dublin, and a previous CeReNeM guest) and German composer Carola Bauckholt (Prof of Composition, Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität, Linz, Austria).

This summer, CeReNeM staff have served as mentors for the Sound Pioneers project of the Yorkshire Sound Women Network. Aaron Cassidy, Alex Harker, and Monty Adkins have assisted with residencies in Huddersfield’s 25.4-channel SPIRAL studio by project composers Nwando Ebizie, Lottie Sadd, and Rachael Gibson. The new works created through these residencies will be presented at hcmf// in November and Electric Spring in February.

The HISS is co-producing a performance at the Marsden Jazz Festival. The system will be used to create a 360-degree, immersive audio-video environment to present the Chronotope project, site-specific performances in a number of iconic locations on Marsden Moor.

Finally, we are pleased that Prof Jøran Rudi joins us as Leverhulme Visiting Professor for the 2021–22 academic year. From 1993–2010 Prof Rudi was responsible for establishing and developing NoTAM, the pioneer in digital music in Norway and a key CeReNeM partner institution. As part of this residency, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Prof Rudi will deliver six public lectures as part of the CeReNeM Colloquium series.

Alumni News

The first half of 2021 saw some exciting news for several current and former CeReNeM postgraduate students. Alumna Cassandra Miller was named as one of the recipients of the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Awards; the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra presented concerts during the 2021 Tectonics festival featuring alumni Scott McLaughlin (Leeds University) and Heather Roche (Goldsmiths, University of London); alumnus Seth Parker Woods (University of Chicago) presented several concerts at Merkin Hall (NYC) and the TIME:SPANS Festival featuring CeReNeM staff; alumna Dr Pia Palme’s ‘On the Fragility of Sounds‘ project at Kunstuniversität Graz, Austria, funded by the FWF Austrian Science Fund, featured events that included alumna Dr Chikako Morishita; and current PhD candidate Hakan Ulus was appointed Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the Gustav Mahler Privatuniversität für Musik in Klagenfurt, Austria.

HCR

On 15 October 2021, Huddersfield Contemporary Records (HCR) will launch its 25th release, Singing in Tongues, a three-CD boxset of the operas and major vocal works of former CeReNeM Director Liza Lim (now Professor of Australian Music at University of Sydney) written for the ELISION ensemble. The release includes The Navigator (2008), Mother Tongue (2005), Chang-O Flies to the Moon, (scene 6 from Yuè Lìng Jié (Moon Spirit Feasting, 2000), and a re-release of The Oresteia (1993), which has been out of print for 20 years. The liner notes were authored by Tyler Bouque, a new CeReNeM Masters student in musicology and vocal performance. The release was funded through a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts.

We are also putting the finishing touches on a new disc of solo violin music performed by PhD candidate Dejana Sekulić, as part of her Temporality of the Impossible research project. The disc includes works by Clara Iannotta, Rebecca Saunders, Liza Lim, Evan Johnson, Cathy Milliken, Aaron Cassidy, and a work by Dario Buccino newly commissioned for the project.

FluCoMa

First, a farewell and two welcomes. For our final year of the Fluid Corpus Manipulation project, we will be joined by two new research fellows in creative coding, Dr James Bradbury and Dr Ted Moore. Their focus will be to strengthen the community around the use of Fluid Corpus Manipulations within their respective creative coding environments, Max and SuperCollider. Dr Gerard Roma has been offered a full-time position at Leeds Trinity University, and as such will contribute to a lesser extent to the project. We wish them all the best in their new adventures!

From 7–10 July, FluCoMa delivered its final plenary session, along with a concert with premieres at Dialogues Festival in Edinburgh, including the premiere of a new work by Dr Alex Harker. The team has also published a series of videos introducing and demonstrating the FluCoMa Toolbox on the project YouTube channel, which have been released over the last several months. After the first successful experimental workshop in Edinburgh, the team is going on the road to further test various approaches to workshopping machine learning and machine listening with our toolset, alongside the wider questions these endeavours raise for creative coders. Parts of the team will travel in the coming weeks to Basel, Chicago, Oslo, Phoenix, and Utrecht for various workshops and events.

Also in July, FluCoMa presented a paper titled ‘Digging it: Programmatic Data Mining as Musicking’ at the International Computer Music Conference 2021, hosted online by Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago. The paper, which can be read here, was awarded the Paper of the Year Prize from the ICMC. Many congratulations to the FluCoMa team for this honour!

And on 7 August 2021, compositions by Hans Tuschku (Harvard University) and Sam Pluta (University of Chicago) developed as part of the FluCoMa project were featured on the BBC Radio 3 New Music Show.

Staff Publications and Research Activity

Prof Monty Adkins’ work Winter Tendrils, for cello and electronics with a film by Zoe McLean, was performed by CeReNeM alumnus Seth Parker Woods at the University of Chicago as part of the SOUNDsites online series in February and May. The work was also performed in a streamed event from Merkin Hall in New York in May 2021 as part of the Kaufman Center’s Ecstatic Music series, and again at the TIME:SPANS festival in New York on 26 August, alongside Prof Pierre Alexandre Tremblay’s asinglewordisnotenough 3 [invariant]. Monty’s With Love. From an Invader, an installation developed with Huddersfield colleague Yan Wang Preston, will be released on Cronica (Portugal) on 26 October 2021. Movements of the work were performed at BEASTFEaST 2021, University of Birmingham, in April and at the NoiseFloor Festival, University of Staffordshire, in May.

Monty also organised the conference “Gerhard: Reappraising a Musical Visionary,” 2–3 July 2021, funded by the British Academy.

On 20 February Igor Contreras Zubillaga was invited to France Musique to talk about his new book on the Spanish musical avant-garde in Franco’s Spain. The podcast of the interview is available here.

Igor also recently co-edited with Eva Moreda Rodríguez (University of Glasgow) a special issue of Journal of War and Culture Studies on international musical responses in support of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War. There will be an online launch through Zoom of the special issue, to take place on 6th October at 5.15pm (UK time) as part of the RMA Research Colloquia in Music at the University of Glasgow. The roundtable will include the editors and authors of the issue and Annegret Fauser (University of North Carolina) and Mari Paz Balibrea (Birkbeck, University of London) as respondents.

Igor and Prof Robert Adlington are organising the final event for the Music and Democracy Study Day series. The topic will be ‘Rethinking Participatory Processes Through Music’, 14-15 January 2022 (online). The keynote speakers will be Hélène Landemore (Yale University), Anna Bull (University of York), and Raymond MacDonald (University of Edinburgh).

In August, Prof Pierre Alexandre Tremblay‘s nureinwortgenügtnicht4 was performed by CeReNeM alumna Heather Roche and Eva Zölner as part of their concert at the Darmstadt Summer Courses. PA’s asinglewordisnotenough3 was presented several times by CeReNeM alumnus Seth Parker Woods, including at Merkin Hall (with choreography from dancer Roderick George) and at TIME:SPANS in NYC. The Merkin Hall concert was highlighted in the New York Times on its list of “10 Classical Concerts to Stream in May.”

In mid-July, PA’s Les trois petits c… (‘The Three Little P…’) was presented in Brussels and online by its commissioner, Musiques & Recherches, and on 21 August the Futura festival presented his Attempt at Stillness in Crest, France.

In October, the Empreintes DIGITALes label will release its fifth album of PA’s music. Entitled Quatre poèmes, it is a stereo (physical & online) and 5.1 (online only) release of several fixed media works from the last seven years. The release has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Mary Bellamy’s new work Flight for solo violin, written for the Royal Academy of Music 200 Pieces Project, was premiered by Academy violinist Charlotte Spruit in a live-streamed concert on 27 April 2021.  The work was inspired by different forms of bird flight, particularly soaring, gliding and diving, and explores how the varying speed and motion of these might be captured in sound. The score is available from Composers Edition.

Mary has also recently completed a new solo percussion piece, titled dual impulse, for Ross Karre, which will be recorded as part of CeReNeM’s partnership with the International Contemporary Ensemble. The work is created for online distribution and uses sound combinations that lend themselves to audio-video recording. It features a small collection of mainly metal instruments and explores the different qualities of resonance and sustain that can be created through the use of close miking. Ross will premiere the piece on 27 September at Target Margin Theater, Brooklyn.

Steven Jan has been closely involved in the Steering Committee which implemented a merger between the CSMC conference series (the first iteration of which was held at the University of Huddersfield in 2016) and the MuMe series. The new community website is at https://aimusiccreativity.org. The second iteration of the merged AIMC Conference was held online in July from Graz, for which Dr Jan chaired a session.

Prof Aaron Cassidy’s work has been featured as part of ELISION’s recent Performance Series, a collection of videos documenting some of the ensemble’s long-term collaborative relationships. These include recordings by Daryl Buckley of The wreck of former boundaries for electric lap steel guitar and electronics, and a pairing of his two trombone solos — Because they mark the zone where the force is in the process of striking (or, First Study for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion) and songs only as sad as their listener — performed by Ben Marks.

Aaron has also had several recent projects in Germany as a conductor. In June he was a guest conductor for Schola Heidelberg in a video production for the Rhein-Neckar Biennale für Neue Musik of his former colleague Erik Oña’s final piece, Per Aures. In July, he had two projects with Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne, the first a concert of six new works by students at the Institut für Neue Musik at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz, Köln, which included a concert and video recordings of all six works. The second project was two recordings of a new work by the Turkish composer Turgut Erçetin, Thousand dead bodies under my bed, all cloaked with the breath of the living, which they recorded for broadcast at the WDR Funkhaus Wallrafplatz for the Musikfabrik im WDR concert series, and also in an all-day studio session for a future release on the Wergo record label. 

More recently, Aaron was called as a last-minute substitute to fill in for Enno Poppe for a concert at the Berlin Philharmonie, again with Ensemble Musikfabrik, in a portrait concert of works by Ann Cleare for Musikfest Berlin, part of the Berliner Festspiele.

Prof Cassidy recently completed 27. Juni 2009, a work for solo E-flat clarinet commissioned by Carl Rosman with funds from the Nordrhein-Westfalen Covid Cultural Recovery Fund. He is currently working on a Piano Concerto, commissioned by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, scheduled for premiere by ELISION in Melbourne and New Zealand in September 2022 with the Stuttgart-based pianist Alex Waite, with Aaron as conductor.

And finally, there have been two recently published PhD dissertations about Aaron’s work: Ralph Lewis (University of Illinois), “Resilient Structures and Indeterminate Localities in Aaron Cassidy’s Second String Quartet,” and Samuel Fibich Yulsman (Columbia University), “Free Jazz Simulations and Political Despair in Aaron Cassidy’s The wreck of former boundaries.”

Prof Bryn Harrison‘s new work for solo violin, A Coiled Form, was premiered by Sarah Saviet in a concert by the Riot Ensemble at Wigmore Hall in London. The work was a commission from Zeitgeist funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Bryn’s A Coiled Form II (2020) for solo vibraphone will be premiered 10 November at the Royal Academy of Music by Meadow Brooks. This was one of 200 commissions to mark the 200th anniversary of the RAM. 

Bryn’s newest CD, Time Becoming, was released by Neu Records in March in an immersive 5.4.1-channel 3D recording and other high-quality audio formats. The release includes performances of repetitions in extended time (2007) by Ensemble Plus-Minus, conducted by Mark Knoop, and the premiere recording of How Things Come Together (2019), performed by Ensemble Contrechamps (Switzerland), conducted by Vimbayi Kaziboni. The release includes a beautiful new essay by Bryn, as well as video documentation and interviews from the recording sessions at Auditorio de Zaragoza, Spain.

Ted Moore, a new member of the FluCoMa team, has three upcoming performances at the Ear Taxi Festival in Chicago (1–3 October), including a new work for Wet Ink Ensemble titled lacunae. His band Binary Canary is the featured ensemble at the Southwest Electronic Music Festival in Phoenix. And the forthcoming edition of Wet Ink Archive includes an article by Ted on AI and musical creativity titled ‘Expression, Collaboration, Intuition’. 

Finally, many congratulations to Hyunkook Lee, who has recently been elected as a Governor of the Audio Engineering Society!

CeReNeM Newsletter, January 2021

Centre Events & Activities

Despite the continued restrictions and obstacles, the staff of CeReNeM have continued our artistic and scholarly activities as best as possible, including taking advantage of some of the new collaborative opportunities afforded by Zoom, live streaming of performances, and online conferences.

Though travel is of course now largely impossible, the international span of our activities remains intact, not least in the makeup of our postgraduate student community. We have had new students join us from Columbia, Australia, Canada, Russia, Italy, Iran, etc., but unlike previous years, rather than coming together under one roof in Huddersfield, this year we are connected each week online across far-flung time zones, and there has been a certain elegance in watching students interact in our seminars from their homes in Tallinn, Melbourne, and Moscow.

That online international network has included our Colloquium guests as well. In October, under the guise of our Speculations in Sound international research network, we welcomed Prof Vijay Iyer (Harvard University) to discuss his work as a performer, composer, and improviser. And in November we organised a panel discussion in our seminar series on Race & New Music with Anahita Abbasi and Niloufar Nourbakhsh (representing the Iranian Female Composers’ Association), CeReNeM alumna Chikako Morishita (representing the Japanese Women Composers Meeting), Ross Karre (Artistic Director of New York’s International Contemporary Ensemble), and CeReNeM alumnus Seth Parker Woods (currently Artist in Residence with the Kaufman Center and Lecturer/Artist in Residence at the University of Chicago, a partner institution in the Speculations in Sound network).

CeReNeM also curated an online event for the hcmf// Artist-to-Artist conversation series, in partnership with SPARC at City University, London, between composers Clara Iannotta and Cassandra Miller. We’re pleased to announce that this series will be extended, with future online conversations to be published in 2021.

‘Virtual’ Ensemble in Residence

We are also pleased to be able to continue our annual visiting artist programme, despite the constraints of the pandemic. The International Contemporary Ensemble (USA) is our ‘virtual’ ensemble-in-residence for the 2020–21 academic year. As part of the ensemble’s Re.Co Lab, or “Remote Composers Laboratory,” which brings distant composers together by way of different combinations of specialized microphones, headphones, conference systems, digital audio workstations, audio transport systems, and cloud services, a selection of seven postgraduates and staff researchers of CeReNeM will develop new compositions in collaboration with the ensemble across the year, with high-quality videos of the resulting works published jointly through the group’s Digitice platform and CeReNeM’s YouTube channel in the early summer of 2021. 

The partnership amplifies two particular areas of activity common to the Ensemble and CeReNeM. First, it brings together both institutions’ work on networked artistic collaboration through music technology, and will include opportunities for knowledge exchange of best practices for realtime online audio collaboration, video production, documentation, and dissemination strategies. Second, as with CeReNeM’s recent series on ’new music & social change’ and its current series on new music & race, the International Contemporary Ensemble has demonstrated a strong commitment to inclusion, equality, and diversity in its programming and practices. This year’s partnership will include opportunities for discussion and action around equitable practices in the arts, including exchange and collaborative events with members of the Iranian Female Composers’ Association.

Huddersfield Contemporary Records

HCR’s 24th release, Smoke, Airs, featuring performances by New York’s Wet Ink Ensemble, was released in September. The recording was produced in partnership with hcmf// 2019, with support from Horizon2020.

This is the third HCR release linked to CeReNeM’s Speculations in Sound international research network, and includes contributions from three Wet Ink members associated with network partner institutions—Alex Mincek (Northwestern University), Sam Pluta (University of Chicago, and also Visiting Research Fellow with CeReNeM’s Creative Coding Lab), and Alice Teyssier (NYU)—in performances of works by CeReNeM staff Bryn Harrison and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, Marie Skłodowska- Curie Postdoctoral Fellow Kristina Wolfe, and Charmaine Lee, who was also featured previously on Phantom Images (HCR17).

As part of the project, Dr Teyssier (NYU) contributed an article discussing the four compositions and the collaboration and development process between the four composers and the performers of Wet Ink: “ECHOES OF ECHOES: Memory, Perception and Contemplations.”

Elsewhere, recordings from Juliet Fraser’s spilled out from tangles, released on HCR in April 2020, have been featured in several high-profile festivals in recent months, as online streaming events have replaced in-person concerts. In August, beautiful new video productions by Inga Lankenau of Nomi Epstein’s collections for Juliet and Sivan Eldar’s Heave were presented at the TimeSpans festival in New York, with a similar event at the Festival für Immaterielle Kunst, Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg in September, and at November Music in s’Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands.

FluCoMa

Dr Gerard Roma, Dr Owen Green, and Prof Pierre Alexandre Tremblay of the FluCoMa team presented their paper “Audio Morphing Using Matrix Decomposition and Optimal Transport” at the 23rd International Conference on Digital Audio Effects in September.

Owen also had a performance at XCoax with his trio Raw Green Rust in July, a solo performance at the NIME conference (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, July 2020), and was featured with Raw Green Rust on BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show in August.

FluCoMa PhD student Jacob Hart delivered papers at the Royal Musical Association 56th Annual Conference in September, and at Les Journées d’Informatique Musicale 2020 in Strasbourg in October.

In the coming months, FluCoMa will be present at the Dialogues Festival in Edinburgh, with world premiere performances of new works using the FluCoMa toolset by Owen, Gerard, PA and Dr Alex Harker.

Staff Publications and Research Activity

CeReNeM alumnus Seth Parker Woods is creating an immersive mediated performance of Prof Monty Adkins‘ work for cello and electronics, Winter Tendrils, that incorporates the architecture of the campus at the University of Chicago and filmed elements by Zoe McLean. The resulting music video will air on 26 February via the Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry YouTube channel and then will be available on Vimeo thereafter. The special collections library at University of Chicago will also hold a copy of the film. 

November 2020 saw two significant publications arising from Prof Robert Adlington’s ongoing project on music and democracy. Finding Democracy in Music (Routledge) is a multi-authored volume exploring democracy as a source of inspirations for diverse kinds of musical production over the past 100 years; the contributors address music ranging from Percy Grainger to Christian Wolff, and from jazz to early internet network music. The volume was edited by Adlington and Esteban Buch (EHESS, Paris). A related sequence of essays appears in the latest volume of the Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, based on papers delivered by Prof Adlington, Noriko Manabe (Princeton University), Cathy Milliken, and Georgina Born (Oxford University) at the 2018 Darmstadt Ferienkurse.

In October, Robert delivered a guest lecture entitled ‘Practising egalitarianism: small ensembles, free improvisation and democracy’ for the Royal Northern College of Music. He was also convenor, together with Dr Igor Contreras-Zubillaga, of the online symposium ‘Music and Political Democratisation in the Late Twentieth Century’, which attracted speakers from Spain, South Africa, Senegal and the UK, and acted as chair and respondent for the panel session ‘Music and the Third Wave of Democratisation in Southern Europe and the Global South’ at the 56^th Royal Musical Association Annual Conference in September. Adlington’s monograph Musical Models of Democracy is nearing completion, and he is awaiting the outcome of a collaborative funding bid that would explore means of connecting the unique music collections of Heritage Quay (including the archives of the British Music Information Centre and the Society for the Promotion of New Music) with other nationally significant music collections for scholarly and public benefit.

Dr Mary Bellamy is on sabbatical from January to July 2021, during which time she will be working on a new solo percussion piece with Ross Karre from the International Contemporary Ensemble. 

Prof Aaron Cassidy has had several online events and performances since the spring. His 1999 work metallic dust was presented by Carl Rosman twice in the Ensemble Musikfabrik ‘Concertini’ series, broadcast live online on 23 July, and the same work was recorded for the group’s extensive ‘Lockdown Tapes’ series in August. His short oboe solo memento/memorial was recorded by Peter Veale in November, and will be added to the video series later this year.

In September, Aaron’s new fixed media electronics piece Study for Self-Portrait, 1964 was premiered at the Mixtur Festival in Barcelona, for which he also contributed a Zoom lecture for the participants in the festival’s Workshop on Composition and Sound Experimentation, entitled ‘A way of making ghosts—on self-portraits, musical and otherwise’, a talk he reprised for the Bath Spa University Creative Sound Forum in November. 

Aaron is currently completing a new piece for the unusual combination of soprano, recorders, Uillean pipes, triple harp, and cello, to be premiered by ELISION in Melbourne later in 2021, a solo for E-flat clarinet commissioned by Carl Rosman, and has started work on a new piano concerto for pianist Alex Waite and ELISION, commissioned by the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung for performance in 2022. 

Inside Computer Music, the primary publication emerging from the AHRC-funded TaCEM project (Technology and Creativity in Electroacoustic Music) of Prof Michael Clarke, Dr Frédéric Dufeu and Prof Peter Manning (Durham University), has been published by Oxford University Press. The book is dedicated to the history and analysis of nine key works from the electroacoustic repertoire by composers John Chowning, Barry Truax, Philippe Manoury, Hildegard Westerkamp, Francis Dhomont, Trevor Wishart, Jonathan Harvey, Cort Lippe, and Natasha Barrett. It is accompanied by a substantial package of free software including video interviews, emulations of the techniques employed in each work, and interactive aural analyses. An important aspect of the publication is the use of demonstration videos, enabling readers to see the software in action before downloading it.

Dr Igor Contreras-Zubillaga‘s new book, « Tant que les révolutions ressemblent à cela ». L’avant-garde musicale  sous Franco [“As Long as Revolutions Look Like This”: Avant-Garde Music in Francoist Spain], was published by Éditions Horizons d’Attente, Paris, in January. In December, Igor participated in the ‘Music and Resistance‘ Symposium hosted by Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini (Lucca, Italy) with a paper titled ‘A Way of Resistance? The Spanish Musical Avant-garde at the 1976 Venice Biennale’.

Over the summer Prof Bryn Harrison completed a commission from the Ernst von Siemens Foundation, a solo violin piece entitled A Coiled Form, which was written for Sarah Saviet for the Riot Ensemble’s Zeitgeist commission series. This will be recorded at Deutschlandfunk Köln early this year.

Bryn’s new portrait album Time Becoming (Neu Records, Barcelona) was released in late January. It features two of Bryn’s pieces, Repetitions in Extended Time (2008) and How Things Come Together (2019), performed and recorded by ensemble plus minus (Mark Knoop, conductor) and Ensemble Contrechamps (Vimbayi Kaziboni, conductor). The launch of the disc will take place in Geneva later this year. The album is available in CD and digital download formats in both HD Stereo and Surround 5.1.

Ensemble Contrechamps (Vimbayi Kaziboni, conductor), recording Bryn Harrison’s How Things Come Together, Auditorio de Zaragoza, Spain, September 2019. Photo: Cordelia Alegre

Dr Steven Jan participated at The 2020 Joint Conference on AI Music Creativity (October 2020, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) as a member of the steering committee, paper session chair and speaker at a panel titled ‘The Future of MuMe + CSMC‘. His main focus in 2020 was finishing a book project for Cambridge University Press, the manuscript for which was submitted in November.

Dr Ben Spatz gave a video talk at “The Art of Video (in) Research” online symposium hostedby the Zurich University of Arts in January. The talk was titled “Queering Annotation” and examined the practice of annotating artistic research video, understood as a method for articulating the queer entanglement of technique, identity, and place.

CeReNeM Newsletter, July 2020

As with nearly all areas of activity worldwide, CeReNeM has of course faced significant disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of the international span of our work, there have been countless projects, performances, collaborations, guest lectures, and publications that have been cancelled or postponed, and many of our international creative partners have faced frightening and often legitimately existential threats as the funding models for art, theatre, and music have been upended by the sudden shuttering of venues worldwide.

The research work of our staff was temporarily put on hold while we scrambled to move our teaching online, and in response there has been an impressive mobilisation of equipment and software to support undergraduate and postgraduate students confronting the new challenge of studying remotely and without access to the university’s studios, instruments, ensembles, or performance venues. Assessment regulations and procedures were quickly revamped, lectures moved to Zoom or to pre-recorded videos, and novel solutions to providing pastoral support for students (and for each other!) were invented.

Across these past several months, I have been deeply impressed by the work of our staff. They have been creative, resourceful, nimble, and responsive, but above all they have demonstrated a commitment to their work as teachers. Our work as an institute is of course focused primarily on high-level research, but that work is always grounded in—and indeed made possible by—a passion for education. I know from conversations with colleagues around the world that these kinds of acts were echoed and mirrored repeatedly across institutions and across disciplines, but still, I am particularly proud of the people who I have the privilege to have as colleagues.

That creativity and ingenuity has played out on the research front as well. Despite all the cancellations and disruptions, new models have emerged that have provided some very interesting new opportunities for exchanges, guest lectures, interviews, and collaborations, as well as new platforms to share and distribute creative work.

As such, we’ve arranged this newsletter a bit differently than in the past, first highlighting the many ways that CeReNeM staff have responded to the constraints of lockdown and travel restrictions, and then highlighting some of the major events and publications from the first three months of the year.

— Aaron Cassidy, Director, CeReNeM

 

News from the coronavirus lockdown

Over lockdown, Prof Philip Thomas managed to learn and record as near a complete set as anyone has ever managed of Christian Wolff’s Keyboard Miscellany. He recorded video performances of one piece per day over 60 days (with a few days absence due to illness). This is the largest set of collected performances of the Wolff pieces so far.

Prof Monty Adkins has had several international broadcasts of his music in recent months. His album Five Panels was live-streamed by Phlexx Records on April 3, and the album Fragile.Flicker.Fragment was broadcast by Paul Gough (aka Pimmon) on 2serFM, Sydney Radio Australia. His recent work At the Water’s Edge was presented on 5 June in a livestream celebrating Audiobulb’s 100th release, in advance of the album release in late June. Earlier in the lockdown period, CeReNeM alumnus Seth Parker Woods played Monty’s Winter Tendrils on April 15 in a livestream performance for the Gray Sound Sessions produced by the University of Chicago, one of the partner institutions in CeReNeM’s Speculations in Sound network:

Prof Aaron Cassidy’s metallic dust (1999) was recorded by clarinettist and CeReNeM PhD candidate Carl Rosman for the Ensemble Musikfabrik ‘Lockdown Tapes’ video series, set for release later this summer. Aaron has also given several online talks during the pandemic lockdown. On April 15, Aaron was interviewed by Andrew Watts as part of the ‘Language Lost’ class at the University of California, Santa Barbara, focusing on his approach to text and language in his compositions for voice. On June 10, Aaron gave a guest lecture for the Fellows at Kulturstiftung Schloss Wiepersdorf, Germany, entitled ‘A way of making ghosts’, discussing his two recent quartets based on the self-portraits of the painter Gerhard Richter:

On June 4, he recorded an interview for the Boston-based Alinéa Ensemble’s Everything But The Kitchen Sink Summer Zoom Festival as one of the invited “Composers-in-(their)-Residence”, alongside CeReNeM friends Chaya Czernowin, Rebecca Saunders, Michael Finnissy, Liza Lim, Evan Johnson, and many more. The interview will be broadcast online on July 17, alongside a performance by Tyler Boque of his work I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips (2006). 

In June, Prof Pierre Alexandre Tremblay was the keynote speaker for the Sound and Music Computer Conference 2020, Torino, Italy. His keynote ‘A Beautiful Mess: tales of in-between-ness in SMC research’ was delivered via the event’s livestream, followed by a live Q&A.

Earlier in the month, the light.box project—the improvising duo of Alex Bonney (trumpet) and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay (bass)—launched their album halftoning on the Not Applicable label at the Hundred Years Gallery, London.

Dr Ben Spatz was interviewed by Prof Paul Bowman as part of the Martial Arts Studies Research Network at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC), Cardiff University, UK, discussing his research on embodiment:

Two external members of Dr Ian Gibson‘s Adaptive Music Technology Research Group—Elin Skogdal (UiT, Arctic University of Norway) and Tim Anderson (software designer)—were involved in a live-streamed concert of adaptive music technology for children with physical disabilities from the SKUG institution in Norway. The Sommerkonsert can be seen on their Facebook page here.

Dr Hyunkook Lee was invited to deliver a talk for the most recent Audio Engineering Society convention, AES Virtual Vienna, in a session called ‘Goodbye Stereo’. Hyunkook talked about 3D audio psychoacoustic principles and his recording techniques, providing binaural demos. This session was very well received—it turned out to be the most ‘favourited‘ session of the convention, and AES did a live encore Q&A session exclusively for AES members.

CeReNeM’s postgraduate seminar and colloquium series also moved online. We welcomed CeReNeM alumni Scott McLaughlin (University of Leeds) & Heather Roche (Goldsmiths, University of London) to discuss their work for McLaughlin’s AHRC-funded Forking Paths project, and Prof Robert Adlington arranged a series of Zoom sessions specifically addressing how various collaborative projects have adapted their working methods in response to the pandemic lockdown. These have included sessions by CeReNeM friend Katherine Young (Emory University, USA), who discussed her longterm collaborative project with current CeReNeM PhD candidate and Distractfold Executive Director Linda Jankowska, entitled ‘Boundarymind‘; Andy Ingamells (Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) and CeReNeM PhD candidate Kathryn Williams discussing their duo Private Hire, which was awarded support from the Help Musicians Fusion Fund to create a new work together during lockdown; and a session with Edward Henderson and Caitlin Rowley of the London-based collective Bastard Assignments, discussing the group’s ‘Lockdown Jams‘, which included a group performance/exercise that involved all of us slowly tracing the ‘boundaries’ of our newly ubiquitous Zoom rectangles:

 

Additional CeReNeM Publication and Research Activity

In January, we were very pleased to be able to welcome guest lecture presentations in the CeReNeM Colloquium from distinguished guests Prof Georgina Born (University of Oxford) and composer Anna Meredith (UK). In February, the annual Electric Spring festival of electronic music featured guest performances from Lauren Redhead (Goldsmiths, University of London) & Alistair Zaldua, Louise Rossiter (De Montfort University), Emma Margetson (UK), Weston Olencki (USA), and Leafcutter John (UK). As part of Electric Spring, CeReNeM hosted the third annual Creative Coding Lab Symposium, a series of presentations and discussion of cutting-edge technological research in electronic music, featuring guest speakers Leafcutter John, Andie Brown (University of Huddersfield), Alice Eldridge (University of Sussex), and Weston Olencki.

There has also of course been continued progress on CeReNeM’s two ERC-funded projects. The newly updated IRiMaS website documents the wide range of topics and papers that outline the activities of the IRiMaS team and the use of the TIAALS software. Team member Dr Cristina Ghirardini presented at her paper “Il dono di natura. Forme et usage de la langue et de la voix dans la joute poétique chantée en ottava rima en Italie centrale” at Épistémologie de la musique: analyses, formes, contextes, Archives Poincaré, Université de Lorraine. Other IRiMaS team members Prof Michael Clarke, Prof Amanda Bayley (Bath Spa University), Dr Frédéric Dufeu, Dr Keitaro Takahashi, and Maria Sappho Donahue had paper submissions selected for nine different international and national conferences, however many of these opportunities have been postponed. The team has recently produced two demonstration videos of the TIAALS software which are now available:

The FluCoMa project is now in full development mode for their second toolbox. The FluCoMa code is now available via github, with a release candidate of the software in the works. As planning gets underway for the next FluCoMa plenary, the video presentations from the last plenary meeting are now available online, featuring keynote presentations from Alice Eldridge (University of Sussex) and Michael Zbyszyński (Goldsmiths, University of London) and PhD Candidates James Bradbury (Huddersfield), Jacob Hart (FluCoMa, Huddersfield), and Ted Moore (University of Chicago).

The outcomes from a two-year collaboration between CeReNeM and Ensemble Musikfabrik were presented in Cologne on March 9, just as coronavirus headlines began to dominate the front pages of newspapers across Germany. The project saw the world premieres of Prof Aaron Cassidy‘s Self-portrait, 1996 (2019–20) and Dr Mary Bellamy‘s behind the transparent surface (2020), both conducted by Cassidy. Dr Bellamy’s work features the unique resources of Musikfabrik’s Harry Partch instrument collection, including the harmonic canon, ‘spoils of war’, and the adapted viola. Both pieces were recorded for future release on portrait CDs scheduled for Kairos and Huddersfield Contemporary Records in 2020 and 2021. The concert also featured the German premiere of Cassidy’s The wreck of former boundaries (clarinet) (2016), as well as work by former CeReNeM professor Liza Lim, and was preceded by a pre-concert interview between clarinettist Carl Rosman and Prof Cassidy.

In February, Huddersfield Contemporary Records launched its 23rd album, spilled out from tangles, by soprano Juliet Fraser. The four tracks on the disk—by Lisa Illean, Sivan Eldar, Nomi Epstein, and Lawrence Dunn—were written for Fraser over the past three years; Lawrence Dunn’s work was written as part of Fraser’s CeReNeM residency in 2017. Displaying an understated lyricism, these composers’ approaches show the breadth of creative possibility for crafting a sonic environment for the voice to inhabit.

Harp and zither gain a harmonic sheen that hovers in the background, high overtones joining Fraser’s duplicated voice in ghostly chorus. She sings delicately, but with a quiet strength, her vibrato more expressive when singing poetry.

– Ben Harper, Boring Like A Drill

Juliet spoke about the record in an interview with CeReNeM in February:

 

Prof Philip Thomas’s and Prof Martin Iddon’s (University of Leeds) book John Cage’s concert for piano and orchestra launches in August. Published by Oxford University Press, the book was produced as one of the major outputs of the Cage Concert project, a joint AHRC-funded endeavour by the Universities of Huddersfield and Leeds, which also has included two extraordinary and innovative apps that provide completely new ways of studying and experiencing Cage’s groundbreaking work.

“A monumental achievement — in considering Cage’s watershed Concert with respect to historical context, sketch study and compositional realization, and performance as well as interpretation, Martin Iddon and Philip Thomas have produced a milestone in Cage scholarship.” — Rob Haskins, Professor and Chair, Department of Music, University of New Hampshire

“This extraordinary book gives John Cage’s monumental Concert for Piano and Orchestra the “full treatment.” Iddon and Thomas examine Cage’s revolutionary indeterminate score from multiple perspectives in a virtuoso synthesis of criticism, performance practice, music analysis, sketch studies, and reception history. That a single work has inspired such a massive, multidimensional study vividly demonstrates that the incendiary music of a notorious agent provocateur has now entered the musical mainstream.” — David W. Bernstein, Mills College, Oakland, CA

Philip also featured on four Apartment House recordings released on Another Timbre: Giuliano d’Angiolini’s Antifona, Luiz Henrique Yudo’s Chamber Works, Adrián Demoč’s Žiadba, and Ryoko Akama Dial 45-21-95.

In February, Prof Robert Adlington gave a guest lecture at the Royal Birmingham Conservatory titled “On the ‘undemocratic’ – in music, and elsewhere”. This incorporated new research arising from his ongoing book project Musical Models of Democracy, which will be completed later this year. A related multi-author volume, Finding Democracy in Music, which Robert co-edited with Prof Esteban Buch (EHESS, Paris), was submitted to Routledge in March and will be published in November. Smaller publication projects this spring have included a programme-book essay for the London Sinfonietta and a review-article on Jonathan Impett’s major new study of Luigi Nono (to be published in Fontes Artis Musicae later this year). Prof Adlington has also been collaborating with the new music foundation Tempo Reale in Florence and academic colleagues at the University of Nottingham on a grant application for a project on postmodernism in Italian music.

Dr Julio d’Escrivan has continued his busy schedule of international commercial and film work. His orchestral trailer cues recorded last year at the famous EastWest Studios in Hollywood will soon be published by Sencit music for their Imagination series. He has also recorded virtual instrument demonstration pieces for PulseSetter Sounds in Los Angeles—three for their collection of Dystopian Guitars and one for virtual orchestra and sound design, featuring Canadian cellist and producer Sam Villagomez—for their new Re:Coil Omnisphere 2.5 sound set. He has also recorded two new projects for the music licensing service The Nerve Media: Espressivo, an album of violin and piano music featuring CeReNeM PhD candidate Irine Røsnes, was published in January, and Poisoned Air, an album of ‘moody electronica’ in collaboration with former Huddersfield student Felipe Gutierrez, was released in March. Julio is also presently collaborating with Felipe on a hybrid virtual orchestra and sound design album consisting of horror/slasher music, to be released in early August.

Prof Bryn Harrison‘s Receiving the Approaching Memory was performed by Aisha Orazbayeva (violin) and Mark Knoop (piano) at The Fabric of Music on January 23 at Kettles Yard, Cambridge. Bryn has been on sabbatical leave in the first six months of 2020, working on several new projects. He completed a book chapter entitled ‘The Remembrance of Things to Be: An Approach to Memory, Repetition and Cyclical Structures” for a forthcoming volume on musical temporality edited CeReNeM alumnus Matthew Sergeant (Bath Spa University) and Michelle Phillips (RNCM), to be published later this year by Boydell and Brewer, and has been working on a 40-minute string quartet entitled Shelter for the Bozzini Quartet and a 70-minute, as yet untitled, piece for two pianos for Mark Knoop and Philip Thomas.

Dr Ben Spatz presented his paper ‘White Molecules: Experimental Methods and micro Racialization in the Judaica Project’ at the Jews and Whiteness in Colonial Spaces workshop, coordinated by the Centre for Jewish Studies at SOAS, University of London. His paper ‘Ancestors: Layers of Illumination for a moment of Broken Songwork’ was presented at the Song Studies Network Conference, University of Ghent, Belgium.

Prof Pierre Alexandre Tremblay toured Vancouver, Seattle and Montreal to speak about FluCoMa and his work as a composer and performer, speaking at the CIRMMT workshop at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, University of Washington’s CompLab composers’ colloquium, and at Cégep de Saint-Laurent in Montreal.

 

 

CeReNeM Newsletter, January 2020

Over the past six months, CeReNeM has hosted its third Speculations in Sound research network gathering, which welcomed guest speakers including Joseph Browning (University of Oxford) and Jennifer Torrence (Norwegian Academy of Music), as well as representatives from a number of industry and third sector organisations, including Alyson Frazier (Play for Progress), Almir Koldzic & Dijana Rakovic (Counterpoints Arts), Tim Rutherford-Johnson (independent music critic), Juliet Fraser (independent musician), and Claire Docherty (Sonic Bothy). The network also welcomed Prof. Cat Hope (Monash University) to speak during hcmf//, discussing her recent wordless opera and her approach to inclusivity in this project. The Creative Coding Lab welcomed Volker Böhm (Musik-Akademie Basel Hochschule für Musik) who discussed some of his recent coding projects and how they relate to his musical practice.

In November, the Fluid Corpus Manipulation (FluCoMa) team hosted their third plenary activity, bringing together creative artists from the first and second FluCoMa showcases together to share their thoughts and reactions to the latest iteration of the FluCoMa toolbox. The plenary welcomed guest speakers Dr Alice Eldridge (University of Sussex) and Dr Michael Zbyzsynski (Goldsmiths) to discuss their work in creative computing, machine learning and computer-derived decision making. The first creative showcase of work utilising the FluCoMa toolbox was presented at the Reactive Flows concert as part of hcmf// and featured performances by Rodrigo Constanzo, Lauren Sarah Hayes, Olivier Pasquet, Owen Green, and Leafcutter John.

The IRiMaS project is now well underway. Many aspects of its innovative approaches to music analysis and musicology were presented at further international and local conferences over the last six months. Michael Clarke, Keitaro Takahashi and Frédéric Dufeu presented and discussed the latest TIAALS (Tools for Interactive Aural Analysis) software to 24 postgraduate and postdoctoral students at the annual workshop of the Society for Music Analysis in Southampton at the end of July; they also delivered a formal talk at SMA conference immediately following. Maria Donohue, Amanda Bayley and Michael Clarke presented the IRiMaS strand on improvisation at the 5th edition of the Tracking the Creative Process in Music conference in Lisbon on October 10th. Michael Clarke and Frédéric Dufeu presented a talk, co-authored with Keitaro Takahashi, at the Society for Music Theory in Columbus, Ohio, on November 9th, discussing the potential of software developments for investigating musical data with dynamic charts and visualisations. Finally, Keitaro Takahashi and Frédéric Dufeu presented their work on TIAALS as software developers at CeReNeM’s Creative Coding Lab on December 2nd.

Philip Thomas‘s Cage Concert project, a joint AHRC-funded endeavour by the Universities of Huddersfield and Leeds, launched its final and most significant outcome for the project, the Cage Concert website cageconcert.org. The new cageconcert.org website includes a series of documentary films made with musicians from acclaimed new music ensemble Apartment House about performing the Concert, and two new interactive apps that enable users to engage with the notations and with audio samples and recordings, to create their own realisations and new audio versions of the work. Congratulations to Philip Thomas, Martin Iddon, Christopher Melen and Emily Payne for this incredible work.

In November, Huddersfield Contemporary Records celebrated its ten year anniversary, releasing two new releases at hcmf//, ELISION Ensemble‘s world-line and Kathryn Williams‘ Coming Up For Air. world-line presents the forces of ELISION on HCR for the fourth time, once again pushing the boundaries of instruments in search of visceral, expressive musical experiences. Presenting works by Richard Barrett, Timothy McCormack, and Liza Lim, the album showcases three very different aesthetic approaches, crafting dynamic and innovative sound worlds from the ensemble’s instrumental resources. Coming Up For Air collects 40 different responses to one straightforward question: what can be communicated in a single breath? The record collects a range of different interpretations from artists including Chaya Czernowin, Oliver Coates, Amber Priestley, Andy Ingamells, Larry Goves, Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, Newton Armstrong, Mary Bellamy, Stephen Chase, Sarah Hennies, and Mauricio Pauly. 

Recent recordings from HCR and CeReNeM staff have received noteworthy attention, including inclusion on several ‘best of’ lists:

• Philip Thomas: Christian Wolff, Preludes, Variations, Studies and Incidental Music –#48 in The Quietus’ 100 Albums of the Year
• Philip Thomas: Morton Feldman Piano – #5 in The Wire’s Top 50 Releases of 2019
• Philip Thomas: Morton Feldman Piano – National Sawdust’s Best of 2019: Notable Recordings
• Riot Ensemble: Speak, Be Silent; ELISION Ensemble: world-line – Sequenza 21’s Best Recordings of 2019
• Kathryn Williams: Coming Up For Air – The Daffodil Perspective’s Classical Recordings of the Year 2019
• ELISION Ensemble: world-line – Tim Rutherford-Johnson/The Rambler’s Albums to look out for in 2020
• Riot Ensemble: Speak, Be Silent; Philip Thomas: Morton Feldman Piano – The New Yorker’s Notable Performances of 2019 and of the Decade
• Riot Ensemble: Speak, Be Silent – The Nation’s 10 of 2019’s Best Albums
• Bozzini+ – nominated for Album of the Year in modern, contemporary music at the CQM Opus Prize

Staff Publications and Research Activity

In September Prof Robert Adlington hosted the 11^th Biennial International Conference in Music after 1900, which involved 60 speakers representing institutions from across North America, Asia and Europe. A highlight of the conference for all delegates was the three performances by CeReNeM postgraduate composers and performers Dejana Sekulić, Irine Røsnes, Maria Sappho, Brice Catherin and Pablo Galaz. In December, he attended the formal launch of his volume New Music Theatre in Europe: Transformations Between 1955 and 1975, which took place at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, and involved presentations from me, Professor Jonathan Cross (University of Oxford) and Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini (Fondazione Isabella Scelsi). He also gave a presentation at the third British Music Collection Study Day at Heritage Quay in Huddersfield. Robert has multiple forthcoming publication activities, including the final editing for his volume ‘Finding Democracy in Music’, co-edited with Prof Esteban Buch (EHESS Paris); the preparation of the proceedings of his study day on democracy at the 2018 Darmstadt Summer Course for publication in the Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik; continued progress with his forthcoming monograph ‘Musical Models of Democracy’; a programme-book essay on musical modernism for the London Sinfonietta; and a review of Jonathan Impett’s recent book on Nono for the journal Notes.

Prof Monty Adkins‘ work has been programmed in several international venues over the past few months. In October, Monty’s work Symbiont was performed in Reynolds Recital Hall at the Montana State University School of Music as part of their Sunday Night Multimedia Series, Rondures, a co-composition with Paulina Sundin, was performed by the Stockholm Saxophone Ensemble at the ECCO concert at the Royal College of Music, Stockholm. In December, his work Secret Dreams was included as part of ambientblog.net’s 8-hour Winter Solstice ambient music special for Dutch Radio Station Concertzender Nederland. His work Saenredams Dream was released on the final release by Eilean Recordings – Eilean 100 – six hours of music featuring everyone who contributed to the five year project. Music Beyond Airports: Appraising Ambient Music, edited by Monty Adkins and Simon Cummings, has been downloaded over 10,000 times, making it one of the most popular publications on University of Huddersfield Press.

In July, Prof Bryn Harrison was invited by Prof Lisa Lim (University of Sydney) to present a paper at the the Music and Ecological Time Symposium at Sydney Conservatorium, before spending two weeks in September as one of three guest professors to teach at the 9th International Young Composers Academy in Tchaikovsky-city, Russia. The academy saw him give guest talks on his music as well as receiving performances both in Tchaikovsky-city and Moscow of his piece Rise, performed by the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble (MCME). On the 24th September his piece How Things Come Together for 23 performers was premiered by Ensemble Contrechamps in Geneva. The project, funded by the Ernst von Siemens foundation, saw the ensemble spend a further two days recording the piece in Zaragossa, Spain, for a forthcoming recording on the Neu label. In December Bryn returned to Zaragossa with Ensemble Plus Minus to record Repetitions in Extended Time, which will also be featured on the disc. At hcmf// this year Bryn’s new work Dead Time was premiered by the Wet Ink ensemble, and received its second performance in New York city on December 13th at St Peter’s Church, Chelsea. More recently, Receiving the Approaching Memory received its seventh performance by Mark Knoop and Aisha Orazbayeva at Kettles Yard, Cambridge on 23rd January, 2020. Many congratulations, as well, to Bryn for the honour of being promoted to the role of Professor of Composition.

Dr Mary Bellamy has recently completed two pieces slated for performance and recording in early 2020. Her piece behind the transparent surface will be premiered by Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne, Germany, in March, while her forthcoming piece for ELISION Ensemble will be premiered at the ISCM World Music Days in Auckland, New Zealand, in April, with a further performance in Melbourne in May. Both works will be recorded for release on Huddersfield Contemporary Records on an upcoming portrait CD in autumn 2020.

In addition to wrapping up the Cage Concert project, Prof Philip Thomas has completed a busy period of activity, releasing three featured recordings on Another Timbre—a selection of chamber work by Adrián Demoč, a collection of pieces by Ryoko Akama, and a 5-CD boxset of Morton Feldman’s solo piano music—as well as featuring on Chris Burn’s record as if as, released on confront recordings. Philip’s 2-CD collection of music by Christian Wolff—Preludes, Variations, Studies and Incidental Music—was included in The Quietus’ Albums of the Year, while his release of Feldman’s Piano Music was listed 5th in The Wire’s Top 50 Releases of 2019.  Philip has also performed extensively over this period, with notable performances taking place at Cafe Oto, UK; MACBA, Barcelona; Chappel Hill, Sheffield; FAB Festival International des Arts de Bordeaux Métropole; and hcmf//.

Prof Aaron Cassidy‘s work A republic of spaces, written for percussion trio Line Upon Line, had three performances in Austin, Texas, and was featured in the trio’s autumn European tour, with performances at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, Germany; City University, London; and Open Circuit Festival, University of Liverpool. The trio also recorded the work in November for a future CD release on the Kairos record label. Meanwhile, The Crutch of Memory was performed by Karin Nakayama in Shimokitazawa, Japan, in September. Aaron was also invited as a panelist at November Music/Buma Cultuur New Music Conference, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, and he was on the juries for the IN VITRØ sonic arts exhibition in Matera, Italy, and for UNM Danmark—the Danish branch of Young Nordic Music Days—for the UNM 2020 festival in Tampere, Finland.

As part of his British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship on music and the transition to democracy in post-Francoist Spain, Dr Igor Contreras Zubillaga convened, in collaboration with Giulia Quaggio (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), the International Conference ‘Arts and Models of Democracy in post-authoritarian Iberian Peninsula’ (University of Huddersfield, 28-29 November 2019). This event brought together scholars from Spain, Portugal, the US and the UK to engage in an interdisciplinary and comparative debate on how the field of artistic culture (literature, visual and plastic arts, cinema and music) framed different ideas of democracy in the Iberian post-authoritarian transitions during the 1970s and early 1980s. Igor has also given papers at the Eleventh Biennial International Conference on Music Since 1900 (University of Huddersfield, 8-10 September 2019) and the 55th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association (University of Manchester/Royal Northern College of Music, 11-13 September 2019). Igor was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in November, where he spent several weeks.

Dr Ben Spatz has given talks and workshops at Trier University (GER), the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (LTU), and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (London, UK). They’ve also finished work on two books, Blue Sky Body: Thresholds for Embodied Research (Routledge 2020) and Making a Laboratory: Dynamic Configurations with Transversal Video (Punctum Books 2020), as well as convening the Embodied Research Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research in Shanghai this past summer. Ben’s Windows into Worlds exhibition is running at Temporary Contemporary Market Gallery in Queensgate Market, co-created with Rowan Bailey from the School of Art, Design and Architecture, and with additional support from the Department of Music and Music Technology. All are welcome to visit the six-screen video exhibition and the participatory “Open Lab” installation.

CeReNeM @ hcmf// 2019

CeReNeM staff, students, and alumni are presented in several events at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

The products of the yearlong Professional Development Program for Female Composers of Electronic Music (a joint initiative by hcmf//, CeReNeM, and the University of Huddersfield) are set to be exhibited at various times on Monday 18th November. The five participants – Georgia Rodgers, Heloise Turnstall-Behrens, Lia Su, Sophie Cooper and Nicole Raymond – have spent the year working with the Huddersfield Immersive Sound System (HISS) under the tutelage of Pierre Alexandre Tremblay and Aaron Cassidy, utilising the monolithic network of 48 channels and 66 speakers to expand the scope of their music.

The Wet Ink Ensemble will premiere new works by CeReNeM staff Pierre Alexandre Tremblay and Bryn Harrison, as well as a work by former Marie Skłodowska-Curie post-doctoral fellow Kristina Wolfe, across two concerts in this year’s programme. The ensemble includes Sam Pluta on electronics, who is also a participant in the FluCoMa project and a Visiting Research Fellow of CeReNeM’s Creative Coding Lab.

The FluCoMa project sees the first creative showcase of its toolset in Reactive Flows, a concert featuring the work of project members Owen Green, Rodrigo Constanzo, Olivier Pasquet, Lauren Sarah Hayes, and Leafcutter John. This free late-night concert promises a wide range of approaches  to the newly developed corpus manipulation toolset.

CeReNeM alumnus Seth Woods performs to a sold-out audience in the Bates Mill Blending Shed. Iced Bodies readdresses Charlotte Mooreman’s original Ice Music (1972) and sees Woods perform on an obsidian ice cello as Spencer Topel spatializes the sounds from the ice across seven panes of glass distributed around the performance space.

The edges ensemble will again be present throughout hcmf// this year, performing passages from Yoko Ono’s ‘Grapefruit’ as interludes between concerts. The ensemble, led by Philip Thomas and made up of music students at the University of Huddersfield, will blend into the environment just enough to keep the audience at a level of constant participation, performing Ono’s off-the-wall art as if it were a self-help guide for going about your daily business.

Philip Thomas’s AHRC-funded Cage Concert project will see the launch of its suite of apps and information relating to John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra. The app presents a dynamic way to interface with Cage’s original score, allowing the user to create their own solo piano score, their own performance of the Concert, and learn about the piece through text, images, performances and interviews with Apartment House.

Australian composer and Monash University professor Cat Hope will present a public talk on Tuesday as part of CeReNeM’s ‘Speculations in Sound’ international research network, after performing with her guitar/bass noise duo Super Liminal at Northern Quarter the night before. Prof Hope will discuss the evolution of her work with the Decibel ScorePlayer, a unique music notation programme that produces animated scores presented across tablet computers, and will present excerpts from her opera, Speechless.

Finally, the festival welcomes back many friends and partners of CeReNeM, including the Riot Ensemble and Quatuor Bozzini, who have both had recent releases on the Huddersfield Contemporary Records label. Riot Ensemble perform two concerts – the first a portrait concert of Irish composer Anne Cleare, the second a concert of work by Evan Johnson, Omri Abram, and Lisa Streich – while Quatuor Bozzini join Ensemble Dedalus and soprano Peyee Chen for the world premiere of Jürg Frey’s Grounds of Memory.

CeReNeM Newsletter, July 2019

Our summer newsletter begins with the sad news that former CeReNeM Director Prof Liza Lim is leaving her post at the university at the end of July to focus more fully on her work at Sydney Conservatorium, University of Sydney. Liza has made an immense contribution to Huddersfield and to CeReNeM since her arrival in 2008. It would be nearly impossible to overstate the impact of her work over those 11 years, guiding CeReNeM into one of the leading international centres for new music, with a thriving CD label, two journals, massive growth in our postgraduate community, and a vibrant network of industry and academic partners. Liza led the process of building an infrastructure that has continued to propel the centre to new heights, providing new professional connections and opportunities, new publication platforms, and new funding streams to help enable ever-more-ambitious artistic projects. There are countless pieces, performances, and publications from across the CeReNeM staff that simply wouldn’t have existed without her leadership. As a staff, we are deeply grateful for her contributions and her leadership, and we wish her the very best in her future ventures.

Institute Activities

Over the past few months, CeReNeM has welcomed guests including composers Evan Johnson (USA) and Richard Barrett (UK/NLD/SRB), as well as ELISION Ensemble (AUS) who premiered Barrett’s entoptic for percussion and electronics at their concert at St Paul’s Hall in April. The Creative Coding Lab welcomed Benjamin Hackbarth (UK) in March to speak at its colloquium, where he discussed his concatenative synthesis system AudioGuide. These presentations and performances are all available via the CeReNeM YouTube channel. CeReNeM has also hosted a number of visiting artists who have undertaken short residencies in the SPIRAL studio over the past six months, including Michel Tétreault (CAN), Steven Naylor (CAN), Hans Tutschku (USA), Matt Brennan (UK), and Rob Mackay (UK).

The Fluid Corpus Manipulation (FluCoMa) project has made great advances in the development of its first toolbox, with betas of extensions for Max, SuperCollider, PureData and command-line almost ready to go public for MacOS, Windows and Linux. The knowledge exchange website and the public discussion platform are also well underway. The FluCoMa team presented at NIME and ICMC this summer, and hosted their second plenary in May, which brought creative consultants Hans Tutschku (Harvard University), Lauren Sarah Hayes (University of Arizona), John Burton (aka Leafcutter John, independent artist), Olivier Pasquet (independent artist) and Rodrigo Constanzo (RNCM) together to the University of Huddersfield for three days of development and experimentation with the FluCoMa objects ahead of a concert of premieres composed with the toolset in November 2019 at hcmf//. Presentations from the first FluCoMa plenary in September 2018 are now available online.

Similarly, initial work from the Interactive Research in Music as Sound (IRiMaS) project have been presented at several national and international conferences this year. Prof Robert Adlington with Dr Keitaro Takahashi presented the paper Metaphors for changing sound in spectral music: the potential of the IRiMaS project at the Spectralisms 2019 conference, Paris, Ircam in June, and Dr Frédéric Dufeu presented the paper authored with Dr Keitaro Takahashi, Dr Axel Roebel, and Prof Michael Clarke titled The IRiMaS Software: Integrating interactive listening and play into musicological research at the International Computer Music Conference/New York City Electroacoustic Music Conference, NYU, in June. Prof Michael Clarke, Prof Jonathan Stock, Cristina Ghirardini, and Laurens Van Der Wee will present their paper IRiMaS: An interactive aural approach to analysing world music at the Analytical Approaches to World Music conference at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in July, whilst Prof Michael Clarke, Dr Keitaro Takahashi and Dr Frédéric Dufeu will present both a workshop and a talk at the Society for Music Analysis conference in Southampton at the end of July. Further IRiMaS papers have been accepted for presentations at the Tracking the Creative Process in Music conference in Lisbon and the Society for Music Theory conference in Columbus, Ohio, later this year.

On 20 and 21 June, the Music and Democracy: Beyond Metaphors and Idealisation Study Days were held at the University of Huddersfield, organised by British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Igor Contreras Zubillaga and Prof Robert Adlington. These two days brought together eleven researchers from the United States, France, Austria and the UK with the aim of promoting reflection upon the use and boundaries of the idea of ‘metaphors for democracy’, as well as thinking beyond them. Esteban Buch (EHESS, Paris) showed in his keynote lecture the variegated uses of the notion of democracy in many musical genres and situations, and its instability. 

In March, Huddersfield Contemporary Records released its 20th recording in an ever growing catalogue, Speak, Be Silent. The record showcases premiere recordings of works from Chaya Czernowin, Anna Thorvaldstóttir, Mirela Ivicevic, Liza Lim, and Rebecca Saunders, performed by Riot Ensemble. The record has already received overwhelmingly positive reviews on allmusic, I Care If You Listen, sequenza21, and in Limelight Magazine.

Speak, Be Silent is one of 2019’s best recordings and certainly one of its most culturally relevant ones as well. (Christian Carey, sequenza21)

Staff Publications and Research Activity

ELISION Ensemble, composers, and guest performer Wu Wei at the National Concert Hall, Taipei, 31 May 2019

Prof Aaron Cassidy has had several recent international performances with ELISION Ensemble. In April he toured with the group to the Center for 21st Century Music, University at Buffalo, New York, which featured the premiere of his work Self-Portrait, Three Times, Standing (15.3.1991–20.3.1991), along with a further performance of The wreck of former boundaries (solo clarinet). Aaron also conducted the ensemble in the world premiere of Liam Flenady’s Anchor in the Road, as well as conducting in the ensemble’s concert of student works the following day. In May he joined the group in two concerts in Taiwan. At Forum Music Taipei, three works from The wreck of former boundaries were presented (for contrabass, clarinet, and electric lap steel guitar & electronics), and Aaron joined the ensemble as an improvisor. His Self-Portrait, Three Times, Standing (15.3.1991–20.3.1991) received its second performance in a concert at the National Concert Hall, Taipei, alongside a performance of Prof Liza Lim’s How Forests Think, with sheng master Wu Wei. He is currently at work on a companion work, Self-Portrait 1996, for Ensemble Musikfabrik, part of a collection of works on the self-portraits of Gerhard Richter titled A way of making ghosts.

Daryl Buckley performing The wreck of former boundaries, Forum Music, Taipei, 29 May 2019

Prof Robert Adlington continues to develop his project on music and democracy, with recent talks at Utrecht University and the Guildhall School of Music. In June, together with Dr Igor Contreras, he co-organised two study days on music and democracy at the University of Huddersfield, which attracted speakers from across Europe and the United States. With Prof Esteban Buch (EHESS, Paris) he is editing a volume of essays arising from the Finding Democracy in Music conference held at Huddersfield in September 2017; this will be published by Routledge in 2020. Progress also continues on his monograph Musical Models of Democracy, which will address varied manifestations of the preoccupation with democracy in music of the last 60 years. As senior researcher on the Huddersfield ERC-funded project Interactive Research in Music as Sound (IriMaS), Robert is working with members of the research team to develop new software designed to engage with the way in which listeners attribute physical metaphors to heard sound; in June he delivered a paper on this work at the ‘Spectralisms 2019’ conference at IRCAM. He has also continued his work on Dutch music of the 1960s, giving a keynote presentation at the symposium Reconstructie/Deconstructie: Kenschetsen van het Nederlandse muziekleven in de periode 1965-1980, held at the Nederlands Muziek Instituut in March. In May, Robert’s new edited volume New Music Theatre in Europe: Transformations Between 1955-1975 was published by Routledge. It contains 13 chapters by scholars from across Europe addressing different themes within experimental music theatre of the ‘long 1960s’.

Prof Monty Adkins was composer-in-residence at Dartmouth College 13–20 February 2019 where he worked on a new piece for cello and electronics for Seth Parker Woods, which will be premiered at Octave9 in Seattle in February 2020. He also gave five individual masterclasses to Masters students and a guest lecture about his work and its relationship to painting and image. Monty has been awarded an £8k British Academy Conference Grant to host a conference in 2020 on Roberto Gerhard to mark the 50th anniversary of Gerhard’s death. The conference will include guest speakers from the Australian National University, Oberlin College, University of Montreal, Birbeck College London, as well as scholars from Spain and Germany. Music Beyond Airports, co-edited by Simon Cummings, launched towards the end of July. The book is a product of the Ambient@40 conference held in February 2018, the presentations from which are now available online via the CeReNeM Youtube channel. Several of Monty’s collaborative works have also received repeated exhibitions: Rondures, written with Paulina Sundin for the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, was selected by the European Contemporary Composers Orchestra for performance in Stockholm in October, while the 360˚ video version of Rear View, Monty’s collaborative work with Susie Green and IOU Theatre, was exhibited at the Hebden Bridge Arts Festival on the 29th June after its earlier premiere at Square Chapel Arts centre earlier in the year. 

Prof Philip Thomas has had several high profile performances, performing work by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jürg Frey, Linda C Smith, Olivier Messiaen, Joseph Kudirka, and Michael Parsons at Cafe Oto, Kings Place, and Southbank Centre. In the coming months he will perform work by Michael Finnissy, Georgia Denham, Nomi Epstein, Tim Parkinson, Marc Sabat, Thomas Stiegler and Christian Marclay at City University London, St Mary at Hill, and MACBA, Barcelona. Philip’s 2CD collection of work by Christian Wolff entitled Preludes, Variations, Studies and Incidental Music was launched by the SubRosa label. Philip contributed a chapter to a new book on the work of Michael Finnissy published by Routledge in July, and will present a paper with Emily Payne entitled Suggestions for action: Notation and movement in recent music by Christian Wolff at the RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group at Kings College London.

Dr Bryn Harrison has been mentoring as part of the London Symphony Orchestra Sound Hub scheme, which culminates in a concert at LSO St Luke’s London on the 20th July. He joined Dr Michelle Phillips at the Again & Again conference on memory and repetition in late Feldman at City University in April, and gave a presentation on memory in music at the Chew the Fat event in Leeds in May. Bryn will give a paper at the IMS Intercongressional Symposium in Lucerne in July before presenting at Liza Lim’s Music & Ecological Time Symposium in Sydney. From 29 August–15 September he will teach on the 9th International Composer’s Academy in Russia. Later that month he will fly to Geneva for the premier of his new piece for Ensemble Contrechamps, before recording recording the piece in Saragossa, Spain, for release on the Neu record label.

Prof Pierre Alexandre Tremblay and Dr Alexander Harker were invited participants at the University of Chicago’s CHIME Festival in May, with PA presenting a talk entitled Fluid Corpus Manipulation: blurring taxonomies through creative convergences of practices and Alex presenting his talk entitled FrameLib – Music and DSP in Slices of Time. Katie Schoepflin Jimoh performed works by both composers, La rupture ineluctable by PA and Fluence by Alex. The visit was part of CeReNeM’s ‘Speculations in Sound‘ research network, which has enabled numerous staff exchanges between Huddersfield and the University of Chicago since 2015.

Prof Tremblay is also currently undertaking several creative projects, including a new work for Wet Ink Ensemble to be premiered at hcmf// in November, the development of a new laptop instrument, as well as contributing to Moss Freed’s large ensemble project Union Division. Several improv albums are due to be completed and released in the coming months, as well as the start of a new duet with Kasper Toepliz. PA also travelled to Basel Horeschule to deliver a series of masterclasses, and brought a class of college composition students from Montreal to Huddersfield to develop new works in the music departments studios.

Dr Hyunkook Lee is an academic partner with the Volumetric Audio Synthesis for Augmented Reality (VASAR) project, a new 18-month project that will assist with creating immersive musical experiences for augmented reality and mixed reality environments. The project receives a total of £326,299 from Innovate UK, which is part of the new official body UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). VASAR’s goals are to improve immersive experiences for music fans when they listen via special augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) headsets or multichannel loudspeaker systems. By making improvements in technology, it is hoped to shorten production times and lower the cost of producing audio material for AR and MR. Congratulations also to Hyunkook’s Applied Psychoacoustic Lab, which has recently been elevated to a ‘research centre’ in the university’s nomenclature for research bodies.

Dr Mary Bellamy‘s work unfurling for lupophone and piano was premiered by Christopher Redgate and Philip Thomas in March in St Paul’s Hall as part of the lunchtime concert series. unfurling has since been recorded for release next year, alongside Mary’s solo oboe piece dispersion for the Howarth-Redgate oboe. Mary travelled to Cologne to work with Ensemble Musikfabrik and the Harry Partch instruments in March for a new work scheduled to be premiered in March 2020, and she is also at work on a trio for ELISION for percussion, harp and contrabass, to be performed at the ISCM World Music Days in April 2020.

Dr Geoffrey Cox gave a public talk and screened some archive films at the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, with Dr Fiona Jardine of Glasgow School of Art on 24^th April 2019 called The Colour of Scotland. It relates to the chapter he wrote about filmmaker Eddie McConnell and composer Frank Spedding for the Soundings collection he edited with Professor John Corner. He also gave a talk and had his film Mill Study shown at a special screening session at Mapping Spaces, Sounding Places: Geographies of Sound in Audiovisual Media conference on 20th March, Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage, University of Pavia, Cremona, Italy. His article ‘Shape, Form, Colour’ … and Music: Abstraction, Meaning, and Nostalgia in 1960s Scottish Industrial Documentary was published in Music & Letters, August 2018.

Dr Julio d’Escriván premiered music as part of a new contemporary dance piece for MDV Danza, ‘Agate Deuna‘ at the Arriaga Theatre in Bilbao, Spain, in February. In June he travelled to Los Angeles for an orchestral recording session at East West Studios in Hollywood of six new film trailer cues for Sencit Music for the ‘Imagination’ project. In September Julio will present on his recent work for moving image at the Music and Sound Design for the Screen conference at Maynooth University, Ireland. 

Post-doctoral Research Fellow Dr Kristina Wolfe attended the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) in December, presenting a paper entitled Composing with Place: A Retextured and Sonified 3D model of the Sculptor’s Cave, NE Scotland co-authored by Prof Ian Armit (University of Leicester) and Dr Lindsey Büster (University of Edinburgh). She also participated in the Ensemble Evolution residency at the Banff Centre, and was selected as composer in residence for the Missouri International Composers Festival, where she will write a new work for Alarm Will Sound. 

Stewart Worthy‘s Mirror Screen installation was premiered at Electric Spring in February, whilst Tungsten Ghost was exhibited at the Curve Theater in June as a part of the Interfaces Sound Art Festival, Leicester, UK. Tungsten Ghost is an installation designed specifically for Curve that focusses on one of the standard theatre spotlights that can be seen rigged from the mezzanine, projecting down onto the ground floor. These types of theatre lights are gradually being replaced as the quality and affordability of LED equivalents improve. The installation uses acoustic and electrical sound from the light itself as well as images that relate to the lamp inside the light, which contains a tungsten filament.

CeReNeM Newsletter, March 2019

Over the last few months, CeReNeM has welcomed a number of guests including performers Jessica Aszodi (AUS), Serge Vuille (CH/UK), Catherine Laws (University of York), and Sarah Saviet (USA/DE), and composer Rebecca Saunders (UK), who spoke to the CeReNeM Colloquium ahead of receiving an honorary doctorate from the University. Meanwhile, the Creative Coding Lab welcomed Francisco Colasanto (CMMAS, Mexico) for a presentation of his work for hybrid analog and digital electronics.

Electric Indigo (Susanne Kirchmayr)

The Electric Spring Festival, now in its 24th year, welcomed a wide range of international electronic artists to Huddersfield, including Benjamin Thigpen, Lauren Sarah Hayes (Arizona State University), Electric Indigo, and exclusiveOr – the duo of Sam Pluta (University of Chicago) and Jeff Snyder (Princeton University). Installations were exhibited by Huddersfield’s Andie Brown and Stewart Worthy, while the the Creative Coding Lab Symposium welcomed talks from Lauren Sarah Hayes, Rebecca Fiebrink (Goldsmiths), Jeff Snyder, Desmond Clarke (University of York) and CeReNeM postgraduate James Bradbury. The Yorkshire Sound Women Network also hosted two workshops as part of Electric Spring, providing a space for female-identifying, non-binary and gender non-conforming people. The workshops focused on Haptics, Vibrotactile Feedback & Touch led by Lauren Sarah Hayes and Granular Synthesis led by Electric Indigo, and were supported by CeReNeM, the Creative Coding Lab and the Centre for Music, Culture, and Identity (CMCI). The festival also saw the launch of a new Professional Development Programme for female composers of electronic music, developed in partnership between CeReNeM and hcmf//.

The Huddersfield Immersive Sound System (HISS) celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, and several HISS@10 concerts recognise the ongoing influence the integrated sound diffusion system has on the creative outcomes at the University of Huddersfield. In November, as part of hcmf//, three concerts across two venues presented work composed for or premiered on the HISS over its history, including work by CeReNeM staff Monty Adkins, Alex Harker, Michael Clarke, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, and Aaron Cassidy, post-docs Owen Green and Gerard Roma, and former students Susie Green and Elias Merino. Two more concerts took place in February, at the University of York and City University, London, featuring performances from PA Tremblay, Tadej Droljc, Paulina Sundin, Olivier Pasquet, Michael Clarke, and more.

The FluCoMa team have presented their work thus far at a number of venues over the past few months, including the Orpheus Institute, RNCM, University of Leeds, Université de Montréal, Conservatorio Statale de Musica “Guiseppe Verdi” di Torino, and the Hochschule für Musik, Musik-Academie der Stadt Basel. Their paper “Interdisciplinary Research as Musical Experimentation: A case study in musicianly approaches to sound corpora” from the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network last year is available now as a part of the EMS2018 Proceedings. Most recently, friend of CeReNeM Angela Guyton created the official logo and bumper for the FluCoMa project.

IRiMaS is now well underway with the full team in place, including the three PhD students Maria Donohue, Cristina Ghirardini, and Laurens van der Wee, who started their research in October. Weekly seminars have been organised for discussion of a range of topics related to musicology, music analysis, and how to make aural approaches and interactivity fully integrated into the academic study of any kind of music. The team is preparing several contributions to international conferences, and has recently had papers accepted for the Spectralisms conference (Ircam, Paris, June 2019) and the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC, New York, June 2019).

In November, Huddersfield Contemporary Records released the 19th album in its growing catalogue, Bozzini+. Bozzini+ is a 2CD record of a multi-year collaborative project showcasing new pieces by Dr Bryn Harrison, Dr Mary Bellamy, and Prof Monty Adkins written for Quatour Bozzini, Prof Philip Thomas, and Sarah-Jane Summers. Bozzini+ was included in Christian Carey’s (Sequenza 21) Top Instrumental and Recital CDs of 2018:

Bryn Harrison’s Piano Quintet revels in juxtaposing irregularly repeating piano filigrees with with whorls of glissandos from the quartet. Bellamy’s beneath an ocean of air crafts high-lying, tenuous sounds interrupted by occasional submersive thrusts. Still Juniper Snow, by Adkins, emphasizes sustain, with long drones held against folk-inspired melodies, creating a slow paced, sumptuous surface. (Christian Carey, Sequenza 21) 

In related news, Phantom Images, released by HCR earlier in the year, was included in Simon Cumming’s (5:4) Top 20 Albums of 2018. The release highlights the ongoing ties between CeReNeM, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University.

…don’t let the beige artwork and that moody title mislead you: there are shitstorms brewing on this disc, and when they unleash, there’s no stopping them. This is play on the very cusp of chaos. (Simon Cummings, 5:4)

Finally, we were delighted to receive the news that the University of Huddersfield was recently listed among the top 25 institutions in the world for Performing Arts in the 2019 QS World University subject rankings. It is an honour that is shared across the Department of Music and Drama, acknowledging the excellent teaching and research of CeReNeM and our colleagues in the Centre for Music, Culture and Identity (CMCI) and the Research Centre for Performance Practices (ReCePP).

Staff Publications and Research Activity

Prof Aaron Cassidy’s new percussion trio A republic of spaces for Line Upon Line was premiered in Austin, Texas, in concerts on 28, 29, & 30 September 2018. The concerts also featured Aaron’s electronic work I, for example, …, and he joined the trio as a performer on live electronics for Richard Barrett’s Codex XIV. The visit to Austin also included a guest lecture at the University of Texas. I, for example, … was also presented as part of the HISS@10 celebrations at hcmf// in November. In late October, Daryl Buckley and Kathryn Schulmeister of the ELISION Ensemble presented the lap steel and double bass solos from The wreck of former boundaries at Festival Vértice in Mexico City, with a further performance of the lap steel solo by Buckley at City Recital Hall in Sydney, Australia, in August, and a further performance of the double bass solo by Schulmeister at UCSD in the USA in February. In January, Aaron contributed to two events at the SoundState Festival at London’s Southbank Centre, first helping to convene a panel discussion on the future of music education, and later in the week hosting a post-concert interview with composer Rebecca Saunders. Aaron is currently working on a pair of companion quartets for ELISION and Ensemble Musikfabrik, respectively, based on two dramatically different Gerhard Richter self-portraits. The ELISION quartet will be premiered in the USA in April, with follow-up performances in Taipei in May. The work for Musikfabrik kicked off with a creative development residency in March in Cologne, Germany, along with Monty Adkins and Mary Bellamy, who are writing new works for the ensemble’s unique collection of Partch instruments.

Monty Adkins and Mary Bellamy with instrument builder Thomas Meixner and the Partch ‘Cloud Chamber Bowls’

Prof Liza Lim has had several big concert showcases over the last few months. In September The Table of Knowledge (2017), was performed by double bassist Florentin Ginot as part of the staged ‘Not here project‘, Teatro alle Tese, Biennale de Venezia. In October, the University of Melbourne New Music Studio and the Arcko Ensemble, conducted by Tim Phillips, presented a portrait concert of her work, including The Alchemical Wedding (1996), Amulet (1993), Philtre (1997), Veil (1999), and Winding Bodies (3 knots) (2013) at Melba Hall, Melbourne. In November, Lim’s new work Pharmakon (2018), for 2 trombones, was premiered by Rage Thormbones (Matt Barbier & Weston Olencki) at Bludenzer Tage Zeitgemäßer Musik in Austria. In February, Lim presented a paper at the Music and Materialisms conference at Kingston University. She has been invited to teach on the faculty of the annual ‘Ensemble Evolution’ summer school at Banff in Canada.

Prof Robert Adlington has continued to develop his project on music and democracy. This has involved international collaborations with the Darmstadt International Summer Course in Germany, the Transit New Music Festival in Leuven, Belgium, and the Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg, and with scholars, composers and performers from the United States, Australia, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. In September he gave the keynote Peter Le Huray lecture at the Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association, on audience participation in contemporary music. He also coordinated an event on music and democracy for Kirklees Local Democracy Week, which took place at Huddersfield’s Vinyl Tap record store and involved Huddersfield colleagues Liz Dobson and Toby Martin. As well as developing his book project Musical Models of Democracy, he has published articles on British music theatre and musical citizenship in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and his chapter on musical modernism has appeared in The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music (Routledge, 2018). He is currently seeing his new edited volume, New Music Theatre in Europe: Transformations between 1955-1975, through to press.

Prof Pierre Alexandre Tremblay spent November in the USA, holding a pre-concert talk and composition seminar at NYU ahead of a concert of his work in the university’s new multichannel listening room. In December he gave a talk at St Laurent, a workshop at Université de Montréal, and a production workshop at the Torino Conservatoire. Three of his works were performed at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, including asinglewordisnotenough 4, performed by Heather Roche and Eva Zöllner, Broken and Bucolic as part of the HISS@10 concerts, and un fil rouge, performed by the United Instruments of Lucilin, co-comissioned by the United Instruments of Lucilin, Philharmonie Luxembourg and hcmf//. 

Prof Monty Adkins‘ eight-hour soundtrack to Andy Warhol’s film Empire was released (in a 52-minute version) on the LINE label in November and was included in the top 30 ambient albums of 2018 by Low Light Mixes. His work for Quatuor Bozzini and Scottish fiddle player Sarah-Jane Summers ‘Still Juniper Snow’ was released by Huddersfield Contemporary Records in November. Meanwhile, his 48-minute radiophonic work Waters Edge, commissioned by Czech Radio, was broadcast in December and features text by Deborah Templeton, and performances by Sarah-Jane Summers, Seth Parker Woods (cello) and Quatuor Bozzini. Recently, Monty was in residence for a week in February at Dartmouth College in the USA, giving guest lectures and working on a new project with CeReNeM alumnus and Dartmouth Lecturer Seth Parker Woods.

Prof Philip Thomas has performed extensively over the past six months, including concerts with Apartment House at the London Contemporary Music Festival and Cafe Oto. Most recently he presented his work on the Cage Concert for Piano and Orchestra at the 5^th Performance Studies Network Conference in Oslo on 6th July in a presentation entitled ‘Documentary and digital approaches to performing John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra’. 

Dr Bryn Harrison visited Wesleyan University, Brooklyn College CUNY, Columbia University, and Harvard University to discuss his work ahead of the launch of his new book Being Time, cowritten with Richard Glover and Jennie Gottschalk, published by Bloomsbury. Being Time invites a deep consideration of the personal experience of temporality in music, focusing on the perceptual role of the listener. Through individual case studies, this book centres on musical works that deal with time in radical ways, including pieces by Morton Feldman, James Saunders, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Ryoji Ikeda, Toshiya Tsunoda, Laurie Spiegel and André O. Möller. Additionally, Bryn’s new work First Light, for De 2de Adem as part of the MATRIX project, was premiered at the Transit Festival in Leuven, Belgium, in October.

Dr Hyunkook Lee has been awarded a fellowship from the Audio Engineering Society for achievements in research, the advancement of audio science and technology, and contributions in the Society’s Technical Committees. This prestigious award comes in part from Lee’s groundbreaking research in the perception of height in sound, a vital part in creating a sense of space and ambience in recording and in ongoing developments in audio technology for VR.

Prof Steven Jan was a part of the programme committee for the Computer Simulation of Music Creativity conference 2018 at the University of Dublin. He presentated a paper entitled The theory and analysis of computer-generated music: A case-study of Colossus.

A new, short video documentary covering Dr Ben Spatz‘s AHRC-funded Judaica project is now online and featured on the AHRC blog, and the first video essay was published in Global Performance Studies. 

CeReNeM @ hcmf//

CeReNeM staff, students, and alumni are presented in several events at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

CeReNeM’s work in electronic music is featured particularly prominently, including three concerts celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Huddersfield Immersive Sound System (HISS) on Wednesday, 21 November. The three concerts, spread across two venues, present work composed for or premiered on the HISS over its history, including work by CeReNeM staff Monty Adkins, Alex Harker, Michael Clarke, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, and Aaron Cassidy, post-docs Owen Green and Gerard Roma, and former students Susie Green and Elias Merino. Additionally, the 25.4-channel SPIRAL studio will be showcased in an installation event presented across the festival’s first weekend and across the hcmf// shorts concerts on Monday, 19 November. The installation includes multichannel and multimedia work by Monty Adkins, post-doc Kristina Wolfe, and current/former students Jorge Boehringer, Paulina Sundin, Sebastien Lavoie, and Sam Gillies.

The annual free shorts concerts will include performances by several CeReNeM postgraduate performers, including Kathryn Williams, DriftEnsemble (Colin Frank, Pablo Galaz Salamanca, Irine Røsnes, and Cristian Morales Ossio), and a performance of Samuel Beckett’s QUAD, led by Sophie Fetokaki.

Prof Philip Thomas performs senza misura by Christopher Fox, spread across five performances from 19–23 November, and also participates in the world premiere of hcmf// composer-in-residence Christian Marclay’s Investigations for 20 pianos, which also includes current/former postgrads Maria Donohue and Kate Ledger as performers. On 23 November the Ligeti Quartet presents post-doc Stef Conner’s Singing Strings.

Prof Pierre Alexandre Tremblay sees three works presented during the festival. In addition to the HISS@10 concert, his work will also be performed by Luxembourg’s United Instruments of Lucilin on 20 November and by Eva Zöllner with CeReNeM alumna Heather Roche on 19 November. Roche herself will also perform with Swedish ensemble Mimitabu, and will contribute to the festival’s roundtable discussion about the Keychange initiative. Other notable alumni performances include composer Scott McLaughlin, whose work will be premiered in Zubin Kanga’s Wikipiano concert on 17 November, Cassandra Miller, whose For Mira will be performed on 19 November, and Eleanor Cully, who has developed a new work for massed guitars, which will be premiered by local school children and community music groups on 20 November.

Finally, we are delighted that the University of Huddersfield will award composer Rebecca Saunders an honorary doctorate on Wednesday, 14 November. Saunders’ work will then be featured in two performances at hcmf// by CeReNeM friends Musikfabrik, including the UK premiere of Yes, an 80-minute installation work presented in the opening concert of the festival on Friday, 16 November.

CeReNeM Newsletter, July 2018

In the second term of the academic year, CeReNeM welcomed a number of international guests including Chaya Czernowin (Harvard University), Amnon Wolman (Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance), and Jamie Currie (University at Buffalo, SUNY) and hosted performances by Richard Haynes (Australia/Switzerland), Teodoro Anzellotti (Germany), Francesco Dillon (Italy), and Joshua Hyde (Australia/France) who presented concerts of student and staff compositions alongside pieces by Jonathan Harvey, Rebecca Saunders, Timothy McCormack, and more. Meanwhile, the Creative Coding Lab welcomed Prof Simon Emmerson (De Montfort University) for a presentation of his work for performers and electronics, as well as CCL Visiting Research Professor Prof Miller Puckette (University of California, San Diego) for his second visit, where he oversaw a workshop of student coding projects and presented his recent collaborative project for LEAP controllers with Dr Kerry Hagan (University of Limmerick), Who Was That Timbre I Saw You With?

The annual Electric Spring festival in February featured performances from Freida Abtan (Canada), Brian Crabtree/Rodrigo Constanzo/Angela Guyton (USA/UK), Owen Green (UK), Philip Thomas (UK) and Colin Frank (Canada), a multimedia installation from Poulomi Desai, and the annual Creative Coding Lab Symposium, with presentations by Brian Crabtree (USA), John Bowers (University of Newcastle), Sebastian Lexer (University of Glasgow) and Rodrigo Constanzo (Royal Northern College of Music).

Running parallel to Electric Spring, Prof Monty Adkins, Dr Simon Cummings, Dr Kristina Wolfe, and Prof Rupert Till organised the Ambient@40 conference. Taking Brian Eno’s Music For Airports as a jumping-off point, the two-day conference appraised the concept and aesthetics of ambient music in relation to the 40th anniversary of Eno’s milestone release. The conference featured 44 delegates, with 18 speakers from the USA, Germany, Austria, Norway, Ireland and the UK. The conference closed with a concert of works from Robert Mackay, Simon Cummings, Rupert Till, Kristina Wolfe, Szafranski duo, and Tim Howle, presented as part of Electric Spring. The conference proceedings are scheduled for publication via Huddersfield University Press, while a book of theoretical papers on ambient music, edited by Prof Adkins and Dr Cummings, is also forthcoming, featuring interviews with ~20 ambient artists from around the globe and a major new piece of writing from conference keynote speaker Prof David Toop (University of the Arts London). 

Huddersfield Contemporary Records released two new records in the first half of the year, both with a special focus on electronic music. HCR received some high praise as a label and for these two recent releases in a glowing review from 5:4:

Perhaps the most consistently and fearlessly challenging of UK new music labels is Huddersfield Contemporary Records. As such, they’re not exactly a label needing to up their game, but with their latest couple of albums they’ve done just that, releasing some of the most unforgettable stuff I’ve heard this year. (Simon Cummings, 5:4)

Phantom Images (HCR17) celebrates the intertwining of improvisation and electronics through new works by Chris Mercer, Katherine Young, Sam Pluta & Charmaine Lee, and Prof Aaron Cassidy in the first formal publication resulting from CeReNeM’s Speculations in Sound international research network, here focusing on exchanges and collaborations with the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.

Beyond Pythagoras (HCR18) is the result of a five-year collaborative project between composers Paulina Sundin and Prof Monty Adkins, exploring a new method for developing harmony in electroacoustic music inspired by the writings and techniques of William A. Sethares. This recording features Adkins and Sundin on live electronics along with two of Sweden’s greatest proponents of new music, percussionist Jonny Axelsson and the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet.

HCR will release its 19th album in November, in conjunction with hcmf//, a 2CD package that documents Bozzini+, a multi-year collaborative project resulting in new pieces by Dr Bryn Harrison, Dr Mary Bellamy, and Prof Monty Adkins written for Quatour Bozzini, Prof Philip Thomas, and Sarah-Jane Summers.

Staff Publications and Research Activity

Prof Liza Lim has had an extraordinary three months of activity, including the premieres of three new large-scale works: Atlas of the Sky (2018), a 75-minute stage work for soprano, three percussionists and ‘crowd’ of 20 community participants, was premiered by Jessica Aszodi and Speak Percussion in June at the Melbourne Recital Centre, with a second performance at the Darmstadt summer courses in July; the 40-minute ensemble work Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2017) was performed by Klangforum Wien at the Wittenertage für neue Kammermusik and repeated at the Konzerthaus in Vienna; and her 18-minute double bass solo Table of Knowledge (2017) was premiered at Acht Brücken, Cologne, by Florentin Ginot of Ensemble Musikfabrik. In addition, her opera Tree of Codes (2016) had the distinction of receiving a brand new and rather spectacular production at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. For a more complete report on each project with links to interviews, reviews, as well as many photos, please see Liza’s website. 

Prof Aaron Cassidy’s The wreck of former boundaries had a fourth outing by ELISION, this time at the Metropolis New Music Festival in Melbourne and integrating two new performers (Marco Blaauw, trumpet, and Kathryn Schulmeister, double bass). The Melbourne trip also included new studio recordings of the double bass and electric lap steel guitar solos from the wreck collection of pieces, creative development sessions with several ELISION players for a new work to be premiered in Taiwan in spring 2019, and some improv sets as part of the ensemble’s Brunswick Green concert series. Elsewhere, Joshua Hyde gave the premiere of the saxophone and live electronics solo from The wreck of former boundaries; Carlos Cordieiro gave the USA premiere of the wreck clarinet solo at the Florida Contemporary Music Festival in February, where Prof Cassidy was the featured composer, with a follow-up performance at the Longy School of Music (Boston) in May; and Daryl Buckley performed the wreck lap steel guitar solo at Redland Performing Arts Centre Concert Hall, Queensland, in May. HCR’s 17th release, Phantom Images, including Prof Cassidy’s I, for example, … was released in April. The work had its world premiere at the Florida Contemporary Music Festival in February, with further performances at Spectrum in New York, the Electric Spring festival in Huddersfield, and at the Forum Wallis Ars Electronica in Leuk, Switzerland. Finally, Cassidy’s I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips (2006) continues to be performed widely, now with 33 performances by 11 different performers. The work was performed in Stuttgart and Esslingen by Frank Wörner in December and February, by Nina Dante in Santa Cruz, California, in March, and twice by Adam Zahller (113 Collective) in St Paul, Minnesota, in June.

The past six months have seen the culmination of Prof Robert Adlington‘s book project New Music Theatre in Europe: Transformations between 1955 and 1975. Twelve experts from around Europe have contributed substantial chapters on different aspects of this still under-researched topic, addressing new music theatre’s relation to dramatic theory, politics, audio-visual technology, venues and environments, the idea of the performer, and the challenges presented to music analysis. Contributing authors discuss canonical works by composers such as Berio, Birtwistle, Henze, Kagel, Ligeti, Nono and Zimmermann, but also expand the field to figures and artistic developments not regularly represented in existing music histories. The resulting volume, co-edited by Dörte Schmidt (Universität der Künste, Berlin), will be published by Routledge early in 2019.

Prof Adlington’s Music and Democracy project has also given rise to other new publications, including a substantial review-article on music and democratic communities for the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and a chapter evaluating modernism as ‘the people’s music’ for the forthcoming Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music. He is also coordinating a number of events that bring the project to new audiences. This year’s Darmstadt International Summer Course will include a one-day symposium co-produced by CeReNeM, ‘Finding Democracy in Music’, which involves Prof Liza Lim, two guest academics (Georgina Born (Oxford University) and Noriko Manabe (Princeton University), and three further leading new music practitioners (David Helbich, Barbara Lüneberg and Cathy Milliken), with the goal of assessing the relation of contemporary music-making to democratic principles. And in October, the TRANSIT New Music Festival in Leuven will include three events relating to the theme of democracy: two talks led by Prof Adlington assessing the relevance of democracy to composition and ensemble practice, and a new work by Dr Bryn Harrison, written collaboratively with the Belgian new music choir De 2de Adem, resulting from an initial workshop for this work in June, which involved the choir members in co-creating material for the piece alongside Prof Adlington and Dr Harrison. The workshop process sought to capture the singers’ personal preferences and explored ‘democratic’ themes such as the expression of difference, and the role of deliberation in shaping a collective project. 

The FluCoMa team have had a busy summer of activities, with Prof Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, Dr Owen Green, and Dr Gerard Roma presenting their ongoing research at the European Research Music Conference, the Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference, the 4th International Conference on Latent Variable Analysis and Signal Separation, and have had their work published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (twice: links here and here) and the proceedings of the 2018 NIME conference.

Dr Green performed his original composition Neither the Time nor the Energy (2018) for bowed cardboard box and electronics at the 2018 Electric Spring festival, and was joined later in the semester by John Bowers in the university’s SPIRAL studio to construct All the Noises (2018), an original multichannel composition/installation for multiple machine listeners. Dr Green’s performance with Raw Green Rust from this year’s Sonorities festival in Belfast was recently featured on BBC Radio3’s Hear & Now. Meanwhile, Prof Tremblay’s new work Un fil rouge (2018) received its world premiere by Luculin in May at the Philharmonie Luxembourg. Dr Roma premiered his new participatory music piece No merge conflicts (2018), for audience mobiles and autonomous agent, as part of a HISS concert in the European Research Music Conference, Barcelona. No merge conflicts explores audience participation in an algorithmic audiovisual ecology, whereby the audience is invited to interact with an artificial agent through a web-based synthesizer that runs on their phones. The agent has its own moody strategies for merging the audience sounds and responding to them. The consequences are unpredictable.

The IRiMaS team of Prof Michael Clarke, Dr Frédéric Dufeu and Dr Keitaro Takahashi presented their paper entitled ‘Music analysis as interactive aural play’ and demonstrated their software for interactive aural analysis at the European Research Music Conference in Barcelona in June, and at the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network conference in Florence that same month, Dr Dufeu presented a paper cowritten with Prof Clarke and Peter Manning entitled ‘Integrating creative, technical, historical and analytical aspects of electroacoustic music in research and pedagogy: a perspective from the TaCEM project’. Prof Clarke and Dr Dufeu will discuss applying interactive aural analysis to acoustic repertoire from the TaCEM and IRiMaS projects at the RMA conference in Bristol this September.

Dr Bryn Harrison has had a busy six months, with a number of performances and several new creative projects, as well as putting the final touches on the upcoming book Being Time: Case studies in musical temporality, co-authored with Jennie Gottschalk and Richard Glover, which will be published by Bloomsbury in late 2018. Bryn’s new 35-minute work To Shadow—for the rather unusual line-up of three cellos (Tre Voci), church organ (Kit Downes) and members of the Southbank Gamelan Players—was premiered in early February at Union Chapel, London. This was followed a week later by a repeat performance of Receiving the Approaching Memory by Aisha Orazbayeva and Mark Knoop during the Principal Sound festival at St John Smith’s Square, London. In April, Harrison’s piece Quietly Rising was performed as part of the Phonemes festival in Reyjavik, Iceland, accompanied by a guest lecture at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in association with the festival. Also in April, Six Symmetries was performed by the ensemble An Assembly at St John’s, Waterloo, London, and was subsequently broadcast on Radio 3’s Hear and Now programme in June. 

Prof Monty Adkins has released a new 22-minute composition entitled Moeror on the Cronica label. Prof Adkins also recently completed a soundtrack to Andy Warhol’s Empire as part of the Yorkshire Silent Film Festival; he is currently editing the 8-hour soundtrack down for a release later this year on the San Francisco-based LINE label. His ongoing work on the music of Roberto Gerhard continues as well, having just completed the digitisation of 20 additional tapes of Gerhard’s work for the Cambridge University Library. Music for IOU’s Rear View, co-composed with Susie Green, continues to tour and has now had 84 performances. Prof Adkins is on sabbatical leave from July to December 2018, with exciting new projects and residencies in Germany, New Zealand, and the USA.

Prof Philip Thomas is featured on a new recording of John Cage’s Two2 for two pianos alongside Mark Knoop. Released on Another Timbre, the recording has received praise from critics Brian Olewnick (Just Outside), Ben Harper (Boring Like A Drill), Marc Medwin (Fanfare), Rob Haskins (The International Journal of Music and Music Performance), and Michael Rosenstein (Point of Departure). Prof Thomas also toured Morton Feldman’s Crippled Symmetry alongside Richard Craig, flute, and Damien Harron, percussion, at the University of Huddersfield, Birmingham Conservatoire, and the University of Sheffield. Meanwhile, work from Prof Thomas’s AHRC-funded project John Cage and the Concert for Piano and Orchestra was presented at the Music Encoding Conference (University of Maryland), the International Conducting Studies Conference (University of Oxford), Improvisation and Musical Composition: beyond the opposition between notation and action (IRCAM), and the Performance Studies Network (Norwegian Academy of Music).

Since March, Dr Julio D’Escriván has been writing music for a contemporary dance show with MDV Danza, choregraphed by Mikel Del Valle called Agate Deuna. It deals with an exploration of feminine archetypes based on the life story of the Sicilian martyr Santa Agueda. First performance will be in September 2018, In Vitoria, Basque Country, Spain, in short form. Later, in February 2019, the full version of the show will be premiered at the main concert hall in Bilbao, Teatro Arriaga. Julio was signed as a composer for the film trailer music and bespoke film music and sound design publisher Sencit, based in Los Angeles, in late June. He has recently been writing a number of cues for their latest release, which goes to music supervisors and film trailer advertising companies in Hollywood from 6th August 2018. Additionally, the installation piece The Dreaming of Trees, a collaboration with voice artist and poet Deborah Middleton, will be available for visitors at the WILD WITHIN exhibition, curated by La Wayaka Current, at Sunbury House in London from 21st July to 8th August 2018. It will also be published by Leonora Press, London. 

Dr Ben Spatz is in the process of wrapping up his AHRC Leadership project Judaica: An Embodied Laboratory for Songwork (2016-2018). Most recently he held a concluding event for the project AVBODY: Symposium on the Audiovisual Body (9–12 June 2018) bringing together practitioner-researchers working with digital media, dance tech, screendance, screen studies, experimental performance, performer training, visual anthropology, and other fields to examine relations between audiovisuality and embodiment across a range of workshops and presentations. The conference hosted 32 delegates and featured 20 presentations, four keynotes, and three performances, with presenters hailing from ten countries, including the USA, Germany, Spain, Norway, and Singapore. More recently, Dr Spatz’s Journal of Embodied Research has released its first three peer-reviewed video articles, featuring contributions from staff at Lasalle College of the Arts (Singapore), the University of Melbourne, the New University of Lisbon, and University of Geneva. Originating from a diverse array of disciplines, these videos take a very different approaches to the video form and the audiovisual body. A fourth video is in press, created by a site-specific durational practitioner and pioneer of artistic research in Finland. 

Earlier this year Dr Hyunkook Lee released a 3D Blu-Ray album for the Siglo de Oro choir entitled Hieronymus Praetorius: Missa Tulerunt Dominum Meum. This 3D recording contains a remarkable representation of the renowned acoustics of Merton College Chapel, released for the Auro 3D 9.0 and Dolby Atmos formats as well as the conventional 5ch and 2ch. Hyunkook also presented four international talks and a number of papers and tutorials relating to the psychoacoustics of 3D sound recording at Mikroforum (Germany), MARL (New York University), the 144th AES convention (Milan), and Sounds in Space (University of Derby, UK). His paper ‘The Frequency and Loudspeaker-Azimuth Dependencies of Vertical Interchannel Decorrelation on the Vertical Spread of an Auditory Image’ has been accepted for publication by the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. More recently, a new collaborative project has been started with New York University focusing on building an extensive library of urban soundscapes around the world using 3D mics and cameras in various acoustic environments. Additionally, Hyunkook’s new VST plugin VHAP (Virtual Hemispherical Amplitude Panning) is set to be released soon. The plugin utilises an efficient 3D panning method exploiting the phantom image elevation effect, and has been discussed in Hyunkook’s publication here.

CeReNeM Newsletter, December 2017

It has been a busy start to the 2017–18 academic year for the Centre for Research in New Music, with extensive activity from both staff and students. In the first term we’ve welcomed several international guests including Clara Iannotta, the artistic director of Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik (Austria), Prof Lyn Goeringer from Michigan State University, composer Christopher Trapani as part of hcmf//, and the New York ensemble loadbang, who presented a concert of original student compositions alongside pieces by Martin Iddon, Evan Johnson, Paula Matthusen, and Taylor Brook. Meanwhile, the Creative Coding Lab welcomed Prof Hans Tutschku from Harvard University to its seminar series, where he presented a lecture entitled ‘Technology: The expressive extension of my artistic sensibility’. CeReNeM also helped organise and host an hcmf// Composition Masterclass for emerging, female-identifying composers with Hilda Paredes as part of CeReNeM’s larger commitment towards addressing issues of gender, inclusivity, and equity of opportunity in new music.

Huddersfield Contemporary Records (HCR) has released three albums since June. Former CeReNeM Professor Peter Ablinger‘s Verkündigung was released in September, followed by two double-CD releases in November by Apartment House: Patterns of Connection, the first major survey of the music of British experimental composer Michael Parsons, and CC, a product of Apartment House’s long and rich engagement with the music of John Cage and Christian Wolff. Patterns of Connection and CC have received several positive reviews in outlets including The Guardian and The Wire. And 2018 is shaping up to be another exciting schedule of releases for the label, with upcoming recordings featuring performances by Sam Pluta (University of Chicago), Chris Mercer (Northwestern University), Katherine Young, the Bozzini Quartet, Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, and more!

Staff Publications and other Research Activity

In September, Bryn Harrison, Mary Bellamy and Philip Thomas completed a successful tour of Canada with the Bozzini Quartet as part of CeReNeM’s Bozzini+ project. Bryn Harrison’s Piano Quintet received its first performance in Montreal, Quebec, on 18th September 2017, and has been subsequently performed in Toronto (19.09.17) and at hcmf// (21.11.17). Mary Bellamy’s quintet Beneath an ocean of air was premiered in Montreal (25.09.17), with a follow-up performance at hcmf// (21.11.17). Both pieces are scheduled for release on HCR in 2018, along with a new work by Prof Monty Adkins pairing the Bozzini Quartet with Scottish fiddler Sarah-Jane Summers.

In June the Cage Concert for Piano and Orchestra project (AHRC 2015–18), led by Prof Philip Thomas, hosted the Performing Indeterminacy conference. The conference saw 87 attendees, drawn from across the UK and (in no particular order) Ireland, USA, Belgium, Australia, Norway, Canada, Spain, Austria, Netherlands, and Germany. Keynote presentations were delivered by Catherine Laws (University of York), Benjamin Piekut (Cornell University) and Christian Wolff (Dartmouth College), as well as a presentation from Laura Kuhn from the John Cage Trust. The conference included an evening concert, with Apartment House performing Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra and the world premiere of Christian Wolff’s Resistance, a new work specifically commissioned for this programme.

In addition, Philip performed with the Bozzini Quartet, Edges Ensemble, and Ensemble Grizzana at hcmf// in November, and with Apartment House at the London Contemporary Music Festival in December, performing works across those events by Robert Ashley, Jürg Frey, Magnus Granberg, Galina Ustvolskaya, Michael Parsons, and Chris Newman, amongst others.

Dr Bryn Harrison was an artist in residence at Sound Scotland, Aberdeen, as British mentor for the Composer’s Kitchen with the Bozzini String Quartet from 23–27 October. This project was undertaken in collaboration with Sound and Music and Sound Scotland. Bryn is currently completing work on a multi-authored book, together with Jennie Gottschalk and CeReNeM alumnus Richard Glover, for Bloomsbury on musical temporality, set to be published in 2018.

The fourth edition of TCPM (Tracking the Creative Process in Music) was held in Huddersfield in September, coordinated by Prof Michael Clarke and Dr Frédéric Dufeu. This relatively new conference focuses on an area of growing importance in music research, the study not just of completed works but also of the creative processes by which they are generated. Keynote lectures were given by Laudan Nooshin from City University, London and Gianmario Borio from the University of Pavia, Italy. Evening workshops highlighted the range of music research at Huddersfield, including one by Prof John Bryan and the Rose Consort of Viols, and another by Huddersfield performance and composition PhD students Linda Jankowska and Pablo Vergara. The conference was attended by approximately 100 delegates from 20 countries.

Prof Aaron Cassidy’s piece The wreck of former boundaries, which received its UK premiere by the ELISION ensemble at hcmf// in 2016, was a finalist for the 2017 British Composer Awards in the Chamber Ensemble category. Meanwhile, Cassidy’s The Pleats of Matter, for electric guitar and electronics, was given its Chilean premiere at the XXVII Festival de Música Contemporánea, Instituto de Música, Santiago, in late November by CeReNeM alumnus Diego Castro, with a follow-up performance at the Relincha Festival in Valdivia. In October, he was in Austin, Texas, for a weeklong residency with the Line Upon Line percussion trio working towards a new work to be premiered in 2019, and a guest lecture at Southwestern University. The Austin visit coincided with concerts by ELISION in their Texas debut, in which Ben Marks performed Aaron’s two trombone solos, Because they mark the zone where the force is in the process of striking and songs only as sad as their listener, and Richard Haynes performed Prof Liza Lim’s Sonorous Body for solo clarinet. Aaron joined the ensemble on electronics in a performance of Codex IV by Richard Barrett. In February, Cassidy will be one of the featured composers (along with CeReNeM friend Robert Normandeau) at the Florida Contemporary Music Festival in Gainesville, giving several lectures and masterclasses, and culminating with a portrait concert of six works for clarinet (Carlos Cordeiro), trombone (Weston Olencki), and electronics.

Prof Robert Adlington hosted the two-day Finding Democracy in Music symposiumin September. 19 speakers representing eight different countries delivered papers addressing a wide array of musical practices, including keynote papers from Prof Georgina Born (University of Oxford) and Prof Tina Ramnarine (Royal Holloway, University of London) and contributions from fellow CeReNeM researchers Prof Philip Thomas and Dr Ben Spatz. Work is now underway on an edited volume arising from the conference, to be co-edited with Prof Esteban Buch (EHESS, Paris). Robert is also writing a new monograph, provisionally entitled Musical Models of Democracy, work from which has been presented at the Performing Indeterminacy conference at University of Leeds (30.06–02.07.17), the Music Since 1900 Conference at University of Surrey (12–15.09.17) and the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Rochester, New York (9–12.11.17). In September 2018, Robert will deliver a keynote paper on this topic at the annual conference of the Royal Musical Association Conference, University of Bristol.

Prof Liza Lim has given a number of high-profile keynotes this academic year including at the Women in the Creative Arts Conference at the Australian National University in Canberra and a talk for the Best Practice in Artistic Research event at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She was invited to ‘Sound & Story’ at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, where she presented on the subject of ‘time, possession and ventriloquism’ in her operas. She was a featured composer at the Shanghai New Music Week in September, with concerts and lectures focused on her music. Other performances of note include How Forests Think at New York’s Lincoln Center by the International Contemporary Ensemble with Wu Wei, conducted by Baldur Brönnimann; performances by Ensemble Musikfabrik of solo works at the Berlinerfestspiele and of the large song cycle Tongue of the Invisible at the Philharmonie Essen; a reprise of a very early string quartet Hell (1992) by the Arditti String Quartet at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; and cellist Séverine Ballon playing An ocean beyond earth at the Venice Biennale, in San Francisco and in Bludenz. She is currently working on a large-scale work for Klangforum Wien, which will be premiered at the Wittenertage für neue Kammermusik and Vienna Konzerthaus (Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus), and a work commissioned by Speak Percussion supported by the Australia Council for the Arts and Creative Victoria (Atlas of the Sky) that will premiere next June in Melbourne.

Prof Pierre Alexandre Tremblay and Dr Alex Harker were also in Shanghai this autumn as part of the 2017 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), where Prof Tremblay’s Bucolic & Broken was performed as part of the conferences concert series, and where Dr Harker presented a paper on his current software development project, entitled ‘FrameLib: Audio DSP using Frame of Arbitrary Length and Timing’.

Prof Tremblay has completed a one-hour commission for Czech Radio entitled Attempts at Stillness, which was written in PA’s studio between April and November 2017 and features the voices of Pavel Klusak, Édouard Levasseur, and Maxime Levasseur. Attempts at Stillness can be heard here.

In addition, a number of funded PhD studentships have been announced for Prof Tremblay’s €2m Fluid Corpus Manipulation project (FluCoMa), Prof Michael Clarke’s €2.5m Interactive Research in Music as Sound project (IRiMaS), and an open call in New Music Studies with Prof Robert Adlington. These calls will see five new PhD candidates join the music department’s team of postgraduate researchers from 2018-2022.

Prof Monty Adkins has released two full-length LPs in the past few months: A Year At Usher’s Hill was released on Eilean Records (France), and Shadows and Reflections was released on Cronica (Portugal). Both have been broadcast widely across Europe and beyond, receiving positive reviews and mentions in UK publications 5:4 (5against4) and The Wire, and in European publications such as Rockerilla, BlowUp, Ambient Blog, and The Domain of the Gods. A Year At Usher’s Hill was also featured in its entirety by Bérangère Maximin on the Territories of Sound radio program. 

Several of Monty’s compositions have been performed internationally over the second half of this year. Glass Feathers for taragato and electronics was premiered by Nicole Canham at the Anzac Memorial Centre in Canberra on 26th October. Winter Tendrils for cello and electronics was performed by CeReNeM alumnus Seth Parker Woods in Chicago on the 23rd June, in Washington on 22nd of October and Seattle on 9th December as part of the Non-Sequitur Series. Rear View, co-composed with CeReNeM MA composer Susie Green for the experimental theatre company IOU, received over 80 performances over the summer at the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, Festival of Thrift (Redcar), Out There Festival (Norfolk), Batley Festival (West Yorkshire), Festival of Transport (Blackpool), and the Norwich and Norfolk Festival. Shadow World | Freud’s House, an installation produced in collaboration with Brass Art, was exhibited at the Museum Nacional de Arte Contemporanea, Porto from 5th–7th July. 

The 2nd edition of the Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music went to print in December. Edited by CeReNeM’s Dr Julio d’Escrivan and Dr Nick Collins (University of Durham), the latest edition features a new chapter by Prof Monty Adkins, entitled ‘Extending the instrumental sound world using electronics’, alongside contributions from Natasha Barrett, Karlheinz Essl, Ge Wang, and artist statements by Laurie Spiegel, Pauline Oliveros, George Lewis, and John Oswald, amongst others.

Dr Hyunkook Lee‘s Applied Psychoacoustics Lab (APL) released an app at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) convention in New York in October. The app, called MARRS (Microphone Array Recording and Reproduction Simulator), is an interactive and intelligent tool for sound source localisation prediction in recording. It can interactively visualise the predicted perceived position of each sound object for any microphone array configuration, and can also recommend the correct microphone array configuration for a desired stereo width in recording. Useful for recording engineers and students, the app can be downloaded freely from iOS and Android app stores. APL also released an open-access library of microphone array impulse responses (IRs), called MAIR (Microphone Array Impulse Responses), including over 2000 IRs captured in Huddersfield’s St. Paul’s Hall for 13 loudspeaker positions with 39 different microphone configurations from 2-channel stereo to 9-channel 3D audio. The library comes with a convenient Max-based convolution renderer so the user can easily compare and mix different microphone techniques and create virtual ensemble recordings in 3D.

In addition to these major software releases, Hyunkook has published three journal papers (in Applied Sciences, and the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society) and three conference papers since July. In September he recorded the London-based choir Siglo de Oro in 3D at Merton College Chapel, in collaboration with Delphian Records. The album will be released in Pure-Audio Blu-ray formats that will include 9.1 Dolby Atmos and Auro-3D versions of the recording, as well as 5.1 surround and 2.0 stereo. The recording was made using his own 3D microphone technique called PCMA-3D.

In September and October, Dr Ben Spatz and the research team of the project Judaica: Embodied Laboratory in Songwork (AHRC 2016-2018) shared their work at more than twenty venues across three countries. Ben kicked off the series of presentations by analyzing power dynamics in collaborative embodied research at Prof Adlington’s Finding Democracy in Music conference. Along with Nazlıhan Eda Erçin and Agnieszka Mendel, they then traveled to Poland and the USA, where they presented at major universities, performing arts venues, and Jewish cultural centres. A complete calendar of these events can be found here. Further events for the development and presentation of this work will follow in venues across the UK and Europe over the course of 2018. 

Further enquiries: Sam Gillies, CeReNeM Manager, cerenem@hud.ac.uk

CeReNeM Newsletter, June 2017

We have many wonderful achievements to celebrate at CeReNeM as we come to the end of this academic year, including major research grant success, publications, premieres, conferences and a programme of exceptional visiting artists and researchers. The end of the 2016-17 academic year also marks the end of my time as Director of CeReNeM. These past 9 years have been a time of remarkable transformation and internationalisation for the Centre at Huddersfield and I’ve been privileged to work with so many inspiring and visionary colleagues and students. I’m pleased to announce that Prof. Aaron Cassidy takes over as Director of CeReNeM as of the end of August 2017. I will continue at Huddersfield in a part-time visiting role. (Liza Lim)

Prof. Michael Clarke, Major ERC Grant Success

Our warmest congratulations go to Prof. Michael Clarke who has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for c.€2 million to lead a five year project entitled “Interactive Research in Music as Sound (IRiMaS): Transforming Digital Musicology”. The project is based at Huddersfield and begins in January 2018. Prof Robert Adlington will be one of the lead experts also involved in the project. More information here.

Announcing CeReNeM Scholarships for 2017-18

We are excited to announce the recipients of our 2017 PhD Scholarship call. The Jonathan Harvey Scholarship in Composition will be held by Hakan Ulus, a German-Turkish composer who comes to us following studies at the Mozarteum University Salzburg, the HMT Leipzig, and the HfMDK Frankfurt. Hakan’s work has been performed by many of the leading international ensembles for contemporary music, including ensemble recherche, Ensemble SurPlus, Ensemble Aventure, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and the Talea Ensemble. 

The Denis Smalley Scholarship in Electronic Music will be held by James Bradbury, who has recently completed Master of Music studies at the University of Western Australia in Perth. James has previously been awarded the Callaway Medal and the Edith Cowan Prize, and was the 2016 Schenberg Fellow. In addition to his affiliation with CeReNeM, James’s research will also be supported by the activities of the Creative Coding Lab (CCL).

The Duncan Druce Scholarship in Performance will be held by Sophie Fetokaki, an interdisciplinary performer whose work incorporates singing, acting, dance, literature, composition, and the music of oral traditions. Sophie comes to Huddersfield following studies at the Conservatoire of Amsterdam, City University London, University of Amsterdam, City Literary Institute, and Trinity Laban Conservatoire, and her PhD research will be supported by affiliations with both CeReNeM and the Huddersfield Centre for Performance Research (HuCPeR).

These three were selected from a record-setting applicant pool. Across all music disciplines, we received 85 applications for MA and PhD places, the vast majority of which were from overseas applicants. CeReNeM’s incoming postgraduate class for autumn 2017 represents an exceptionally diverse collection of talented composers, performers, programmers, improvisers, and interdisciplinary artists, extending the tradition of CeReNeM’s vibrant postgraduate research culture.

Publications and other Research Activity

Huddersfield Contemporary Records (HCR) has put out its 13th release with The wreck of former boundaries. Officially released on May 19, the CD is distributed by NMC Recordings.  This album presents two major new works by Liza Lim and Aaron Cassidy, commissioned to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the ELISION Ensemble. The works foreground the virtuosic, innovative talents of the musicians of ELISION, integrating the ensemble’s expertise in improvisation alongside novel instrumental techniques developed in collaboration with these performers.

Regular CeReNeM collaborator, Angela Guyton has made a wonderfully dynamic video about Prof. Aaron Cassidy’s The wreck of former boundaries. Cassidy describes the work as ‘a double trumpet concerto conceived for the unique talents of Tristram Williams and Peter Evans. Its wild, visceral virtuosity liquidates geometric, architectural, and latticed structures in favour of sinuous, sculptural, and shape-shifting instability.’

 

In the meantime HCR are preparing two new CDs which will be released in Autumn 2017 featuring the work of Peter Ablinger (Verkündigung, “Annunciation”, HCR14CD) and the music of Michael Parsons performed by Apartment House and Philip Thomas (HCR15CD).

In December 2015, a musical moment was captured when touring artists Marilyn Crispell (piano) and Raymond MacDonald (saxophones) were joined by Prof. Pierre Alexandre Tremblay (bass guitar, laptop) in St. Paul’s concert hall. A real treat for improvised music aficionados, the gig’s magic was captured in high fidelity, mixed by Tremblay, and was released in December last year on the esteemed British improvisation label Bruce’s Fingers.

Prof. Tremblay was also the guest composer at BEAST FEaST 2017, having been commissioned to write a new work for the prestigious Birmingham-based loudspeaker orchestra. Tremblay is no stranger to large multichannel speaker configurations, and this project allowed him to explore first-hand his proposed solutions to the aesthetic, pragmatic and technical issues that present in such multichannel setups. Since then, Tremblay is back in the studio to mix a duet opus with Tom Challenger slated to be released at Frome Festival in July, as well as recording Light.box’s second album for release in Autumn.

Dr Bryn Harrison was the British mentor for the 2017 edition of the Composer’s Kitchen. Between April 18-25 Bryn worked with composers Lawrence Dunn, Sarah Lianne Lewis, Rebecca Bruton and Jason Doell and members of the Bozzini Quartet at Concordia University in Montreal, participating in workshops, discussions and rehearsals culminating in a public performance on April 25.

Prof. Monty Adkins’ new commission for the Bozzini Quartet – Water’s Edge (2017) – was premiered in Montreal, Canada in April. An evening length work, comprising nine movements, Water’s Edge was designed as a concert piece for Sarah Jane Summers and the Bozzini Quartet, with Monty Adkins performing electronics. Adkins’ work is the first of three new pieces by CeReNeM staff to be performed by the quartet as part of the Bozzini+ Project, with works by Dr Bryn Harrison and Dr Mary Bellamy due to follow in September.

Visiting Research Prof. Miller Puckette made his first visit to the University of Huddersfield as part of his association with CeReNeM’s Creative Coding Lab (CCL), coordinated by Dr Alex Harker. As part of his visit Miller presented two talks discussing the possibilities of electronic music instrument design and the role of scores in electronic music. Miller’s visit follows on from CCL’s other Visiting Research Professor Sam Pluta (University of Chicago) late last year.

Philip Thomas and Mark Knoop performing John Cage’s Two2 at the Tate Britain

Prof. Philip Thomas and Mark Knoop performed John Cage’s late work for two pianos, Two2 at the Universities of Durham and Huddersfield back in March, and more recently at Tate Britain, launching the exhibition of Cerith Wyn Evans’ ‘Forms in Space’. These performances of Cage’s work provide a strong upbeat to the Performing Indeterminacy conference (June 30 until July 2) where Thomas and Apartment House will also be premiering a major new work by Christian Wolff, ‘Resistance’ for piano and ensemble. Forming a part of Thomas’s AHRC-funded project, ‘John Cage and the Concert for Piano and Orchestra’, the conference addresses the performance of indeterminate and experimental musics as its central theme, and is intended as a forum for the exchange of perspectives from musicologists, performers, composers, and a wider audience.

Prof. Robert Adlington will be presenting new work at the Performing Indeterminacy Conference with a paper entitled ‘How democratic is indeterminate music?’ Prof. Adlington convenes a two-day symposium (4-5 Sept) at Huddersfield entitled ‘Finding Democracy in Music’. This will bring together researchers from eight countries to explore different ways in which musical practice may be related to democratic values and processes. Further details on the programme and registration process may be found here: https://democracyinmusic.org/.

Prof. Liza Lim’s composition Ronda – The Spinning World (2016) was premiered by Ensemble Modern at Frankfurt’s Alte Oper and at the Berlinerfestspielhaus earlier this year. Commissioned by Ensemble Modern and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin, and supported by numerous German and Brazilian partners, this was part of ‘Re-Inventing Smetak’, the first project of scale related to the composer, instrument builder, and philosopher Walter Smetak with a rich programme of concerts, conference and exhibition events. The product of a residency in Salvador da Bahia in July 2016, Ronda – The Spinning World explores a Brazilian epistemology of sound and a poetics of listening expressed in its spatial ensemble dynamics.

A further three performances will take place in July as part of Ensemble Modern‘s tour of Brazil. Other international concerts include a programme of works performed by the Cikada Ensemble at National Sawdust, New York, and the US premiere of How Forests Think at the Lincoln Centre’s Mostly Mozart Festival performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble with Wu Wei.

Further enquiries: Sam Gillies, CeReNeM Manager, cerenem@hud.ac.uk

CeReNeM Newsletter, December 2016

This December witnesses the end of another extremely busy period at the Centre for Research in New Music, with extensive activity from both staff and students. Such activity has not gone unnoticed, with Tim Rutherford-Johnson declaring in a recent article in his much-read new music blog, The Rambler, that Huddersfield ‘is surely now the powerhouse for new music in UK academe’.

Such a declaration is particularly well-timed, given that this is CeReNeM’s 10th anniversary year. CeReNeM was founded in 2006 at a launch event at HCMF, so it was fitting that the anniversary was formally marked with a mirror event at this year’s festival. To mark the occasion, Dr Matthew Sergeant curated an exhibition of CeReNeM’s archive, which was displayed in the Creative Arts Building atrium throughout the HCMF period. The exhibition featured examples from our extensive collection of staff and student scores, photos, video materials and artefacts (including the promotional bookmark distributed to all attendees of the original launch event in 2006!) and attracted a lot of public attention throughout its installation.

CeReNeM 10th Anniversary Exhibit at //HCMF2016

Staff research activity has been typically productive this term.

Prof. Pierre Alexandre Tremblay has celebrated major grant success this term, receiving approximately €2million of funding from the European Research Council to activate his FluCoMa (Fluid Corpus Manipulation) project. This is a huge achievement for Prof. Tremblay and we offer him our largest possible congratulations as the project goes forward into actualisation. You can read a more substantial blog post about his project online here.

CeReNeM director, Prof. Liza Lim, has had a particularly busy season, as a host of internationally acclaimed orchestras and ensembles collectively mark an important birthday year. The September to December period has been occupied with over forty performances of her work, occurring in more than ten different countries spread over five continents (a complete list is available here). A comprehensive cross section of her music has been presented, many examples of which were composed during her time as Professor of Composition here at Huddersfield University. Invisibility (2009, for solo cello with two bows) alone has received five performances this season, and the representation of her work expands all the way up (in both time of creation and scale) to her latest opera Tree of Codes (2013-15, produced by MusikFabrik and Oper Köln), performed in Dresden in October, and a broadcast of her 2008 opera The Navigator on Australian radio.]

Both Prof. Liza Lim and Prof. Aaron Cassidy have received major premieres this season with the ELISION Ensemble. Lim’s How Forests Think and Cassidy’s The wreck of former boundaries are substantial 35 minutes works and were first presented at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) in Australia before touring to the Tage für neue Musik Zürich and HCMF2016. Both works are due to be released on HCR (Huddersfield Contemporary Records, CeReNeM’s CD label) in the new year.

Liza Lim’s How Forests Think in rehearsal (Sept 2016)

Prof. Philip Thomas’s ongoing research project Cage and the Concert for Piano and Orchestra (in partnership with the University of Leeds) has continued to make substantial progress this term. The research team have spent time at key archives this year, including the John Cage Collection (Northwestern University), the John Cage manuscripts collection at the New York Public Library, and the John Cage Trust. They have presented on their work at the Fourth Biennial Performance Studies Network conference and at Northwestern University. Next year the team hosts an international conference ‘Performing Indeterminacy’, which includes Thomas playing with Apartment House in John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra and the world premiere of a new work for piano and ensemble by Christian Wolff.

Bozzini+, CeReNeM’s ongoing research project with the internationally acclaimed Bozzini Quartet has entered its final stages this term. In early November, Prof. Monty Adkins major new work Water’s Edge was premiered by the Bozzinis with folk-violinist Sarah-Jane Summers at the Sound Festival (Aberdeen). Dr Bryn Harrison and Dr Mary Bellamy are finalising their scores written for the quartet and CeReNeM’s own Philip Thomas ready for a set of performances in the UK and Canada next year, as well as recordings to be released on our record label, HCR.

CeReNeM’s newly-launched Creative Coding Lab (CCL) began its first year of operation this term under the direction of Dr Alex Harker. The lab welcomed its PhD scholar Oliver Larkin into its programme of research, alongside the first visit of Dr Sam Pluta (University of Chicago) as its new visiting research fellow.

Dr Sam Pluta, CCL Visiting Research Fellow

CeReNeM is delighted to have been accepted as the host institution of the 2017 edition of the prestigious ‘Tracking the Creative Process in Music’ (TCPM) conference. Previous editions of the conference were hosted by IRCAM in Paris and Université de Montréal, and  planning for our own edition is now well underway, led by Prof. Michael Clarke and Dr Frédéric Dufeu. The new conference website, which includes details of the conference as they are announced, is available here.

Our record label, HCR, has continued to grow and develop during this autumn/winter period. Our latest release, Caerulean, from world-renowned clarinettist and CeReNeM PhD student Carl Rosman, was released at a launch event in HCMF2016. Ten years in the making, the disk documents work written for and in collaboration with Rosman, including world premiere recordings from composers Rebecca Saunders and Richard Barrett alongside work by CeReNeM Professor of Composition Aaron Cassidy and PhD student Chikako Morishita.

Prof. Philip Thomas’s June release on HCR – Beat Generation Ballads – has also attracted a large amount of critical attention, being awarded a 4-star review in the Guardian and being included in The Wire magazines ‘top ten contemporary classical releases of 2016.’

As is evident, there is much to report from CeReNeM this term. We pass on our thanks and congratulations to all of our staff and wish everybody a happy holiday period and a refreshed and rejuvenated new year.

Enquiries: Dr Matthew Sergeant [m.sergeant@hud.ac.uk]

FluCoMa: Major Grant Success, December 2016

CeReNeM is delighted to offer huge congratulations to Prof. Pierre Alexandre Tremblay (Studio Director and CeReNeM Professor of Improvisation) on a successful grant from the European Research Council (ERC) worth approximately €2million.

Prof. Tremblay’s project, FluCoMa – Fluid Corpus Manipulation: Creative Research in Musical Mining of Large Sound/Gesture Datasets through Foundational Access to the Latest Advances of Signal Decomposition – instigates new musical ways of exploiting ever-growing banks of sound and gestures within the digital composition process. The project will bring breakthroughs in signal decomposition DSP to the toolset of techno-fluent computer composers for the first time.

To expand further, Prof. Tremblay explains

“Cutting-edge musical composition has always been dependent on, critical and subversive of the latest advances of technology. Unfortunately, there is a contemporary challenge inherent to aesthetic research in computer composition: an ever-expanding gap between DSP advances and their availability to musical investigators.

One such advance is signal decomposition: a sound can now be separated into its transient, pitched, and residual constituents. These potent algorithms are partially available in closed software, or in laboratories, but not at a suitable level of modularity within the coding environments used by the creative researchers (Max and SuperCollider) to allow groundbreaking sonic research into a rich unexploited area: the manipulation of large sound corpora. Indeed, with access to, genesis of, and storage of large sound banks now commonplace, novel ways of abstracting and manipulating them are needed to mine their inherent potential.

FluCoMa proposes to tackle this issue by bridging this gap, empowering techno-fluent aesthetic researchers with a toolset for signal decomposition within their mastered software environments, in order to experiment with new sound and gesture design untapped in large corpora. The three degrees of manipulations to be explored are (1) expressive browsing and descriptor-based taxonomy, (2) remixing, component replacement, and hybridisation by concatenation, and (3) pattern recognition at component level, with interpolating and variation making potential. These novel manipulations will yield new sounds, new musical ideas, and new approaches to large corpora. At present, no library exists allowing such cutting-edge research on creative fluid corpus manipulations to be done.”

CeReNeM is extremely proud of Prof. Tremblay’s significant achievement and looks forward to co-hosting his project alongside the university’s HISS (Huddersfield Immersive Sound System) and CLL (Creative Coding Lab) ventures.

Read the official ERC press release here.

  

Summer Updates, July 2016

The early summer has been an extremely productive time at the Centre for Research in New Music, with exciting news emanating from both our staff and students.

In late June, Prof. Philip Thomas released a new recording of piano music by composer Michael Finnissy. The disc, entitled Beat Generation Ballads and published on CeReNeM’s record label HCR (distributed by NMC Recordings), has already attracted impressive critical acclaim. Writing in The Guardian, Andrew Clements described the disc as “thoughtful and superbly played – ★★★★”, whereas Philip Clarke described Thomas’s performance in Gramophone as “kept on the tightest structural leash.”

More recently still, the Another Timbre label has released a new portrait disc of Dr Bryn Harrison’s work. The disc takes its title from Harrison’s forty-minute composition Receiving the Approaching Memory for violin and piano (which occupies the disc’s entire duration), performed by Aisha Orazbayeva (violin) and Mark Knoop (piano). The release has already been highly praised in the national press, described by Kate Molleson in the Guardian as “economical and fantastical […] fine-grained, shimmering material – ★★★★.”

Prof. Pierre-Alexandre Tremblay has begun development of his new audio-visual performance project, codenamed BlackBox. Collaborating with artists, Rodrigo Constanzo, Sylvain Pohu and Patrick Saint-Denis, the project recently entered its first creative development phase via a residency involving all participants, beautifully documented in this short trailer by filmmaker Angela Guyton.

Our students have been equally busy.

PhD student Lawrence Dunn has been taking part in a Sound and Music (SAM) embedded scheme, working with Sounding Motion (specifically members Stephen Upshaw and Imogen Bland) to produce music for movement and viola. Lawrence undertook a substantial interview with SAM for their Sampler magazine, which is available to read here.

Violinist and improvisor Mira Benjamin, who is approaching her final year of PhD studies within the centre, has been awarded the prestigious Virginia Parker Prize by the Canadian Arts Council. The prize is awarded annually to a young Canadian classical musician who demonstrates outstanding talent, musicianship and artistic excellence, and who makes a valuable contribution to the artistic life in Canada and internationally. The official announcement is available on the Canadian Arts Council homepage, here. Our wholehearted congratulations to Mira on this fantastic achievement.

Congratulations and huge thanks to all CeReNeM members to all their hard work over this summer period so far. More news coming soon!

Dr Bryn Harrison in Focus, June 2016

Bryn Harrison has recently returned from a short residency in New York following the successful premiere of a new work, a form in search of itself, scored for soprano voice, five instrumentalists, and live electronics. The piece was commissioned especially for the core players of Wet Ink ensemble, a highly regarded New York-based new music ensemble now in their 17th concert season. The piece is one of an on-going series that outlines similar approaches to form; that of moving gradually from fleeting, ephemeral moments that seem to constantly elude the listener, to a point of immersion, through which events become subjected to greater and greater degrees of repetition. Unusually for Harrison, the score is presented in mobile form through which the players choose their own circuitous routes through the lines of music provided. The result is a dense, contrapuntal texture in which time seems at once both in motion and yet strangely arrested. Harrison has spoken of this process as being both playful and invigorating, noting that it has led to musical results that always contain an element of surprise.

Another new work, Things have never been as much like they are now ever before will be premiered at this year’s summer course at Darmstadt in August. The piece was commissioned by the Norwegian ensemble Asamisimasa – with whom the composer has built up a close working relationship over the last few years – and works on a similar premise, through which material cycles on continually shorter loops. The materials, however, are quite different here; swells of chords from the five-piece ensemble (including wah-wah guitar, electric bass and organ) are juxtaposed and overlaid like plates of glass. The harmonies are continually revisited but in different guises, providing both points of orientation and disorientation for the listener. The composer presents material that at first seems out of reach, but it gradually comes into focus as the piece unfolds over its 35 minute duration.

Bryn Harrison – Piano Quintet (2016, in progress)

Currently, Harrison is working on an ambitious hour-long piano quintet for pianist Philip Thomas and the Bozzini Quartet, part of CeReNeM’s successful URF research bid.  The piece will receive its premiere early next year, and will subsequently be recorded for release on the HCR label next year. In the meantime, June has seen the release of two works on CD: Five Miniatures in Three Parts, performed by Ensemble Offspring and receiving the approaching memory, Harrison’s second portrait disc on the another timbre label.

 

Speculations 2, May 2016

Speculations 2, the second edition of Speculations in Sound (a weekend discussion event gathering members from CeReNeM’s Speculations in Sound International Research Network) took place at Queen’s University Belfast on May 7 and 8, 2016. Jointly organised by Michael Clarke (CeReNeM, Huddersfield) and Michael Alcorn (Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), QUB) with the support of Matthew Sergeant and Frédéric Dufeu from CeReNeM and Matilde Meireles, Craig Jackson, David Bird, Hannah Casey, and Pearl Young from SARC,these two days of intensive discussions on the three-dimensional spatialisation of sound were associated to the Sonorities festival, including a series of 3D audio concerts in the Sonic Lab at SARC.

The event was a significant gathering of leading international figures in sound spatialisation, representing many of the major institutions working in this field. These included Natasha Barrett (University of Oslo), Ludger Brümmer (ZKM, Karlsruhe), Bill Brunson (KMH, Stockholm), Gary Kendall (formerly at QUB), Fernando Lopez-Lezcano (Stanford University), Eric Lyon (Virginia Tech), Markus Noisternig (Ircam, Paris), Robert Normandeau (Université de Montréal), David Pirrò (IEM, Graz), Jøran Rudi and Notto Thelle (NoTAM, Oslo), Barry Truax (Simon Fraser University), and Hans Tutschku (Harvard University) in addition to those working in this field at SARC (Trevor Agus, Michael Alcorn and Pedro Rebelo) and at CeReNeM (Michael Clarke, Frédéric Dufeu, Alex Harker and Hyunkook Lee).

Prior to the event, participants were asked to provide two ‘challenges’ to be printed on postcards – problems or issues they would like to see resolved and requiring different fields of expertise from their own. On the basis of these individual challenges, the participants could exchange, react, and speculate on varied topics such as the compositional practice involving 3D sound, the aesthetic and technical perspectives and limitations of currently developed systems, parameters, abstractions and representations for sound in space, system portability, psychoacoustic studies, and the impact of 3D composition to the audience.

The distinctive format of the event, with participants sharing questions, problems and aspirations, rather than bringing completed research outcomes, was very positively received by those attending and further follow up meetings in some of the other international centres represented are planned. Speculations 2 was videoed and it is intended that these be transcribed and re-worked with additional material for a publication. The Speculations in Sound website will also be extended as a repository for research materials in this increasingly important area of music technology, and funding for continuing research in this field is to be sought.

[Report by Michael Clarke and Frédéric Defeu. With thanks to Fernando Lopez-Lecano for the use of his photographs.]