[08.01.14] New Video Online

Really pleased to announce that my good friends over at the house of bedlam have uploaded Tom McKinney’s awesome performance of my piece bet maryam* from last October (New Music North West Festival, Manchester). I was absolutely gutted to have not been able to make this performance in person - and now I’ve seen this video I am even more so! Check it out!

[*the video caption screen says bet Maryam (with a capital). I don’t really know why…]

Tom was the third of (now) four guitarists to have wrestled with this piece. As will be familiar reading for regular visitors, the piece attempts to place the musical material and the physicality of guitar playing into a state of dialogue. Some passages are constructed to be as awkward as possible - bordering on what might be considered the impossible. In contrast, others are designed to ‘lie under the fingers well,’ or at least as well as a composer like me can make them. But the piece wasn’t just an experiment into what might be considered as essentially choreography. I was interested in the sonic characters such materials exhibit. The unidiomatic material, for example, often shuts down the the resonance of the instrument: notes don’t speak or ring clearly, the sound is choked/husky. In the contrasting material, designed in a sense to operate with the guitar as instrument, the resonance returns and, to me at least, the timbres become once again three-dimensional.

I cannot thank Tom enough for the astonishing work that he has put into learning this piece - for a 6 minute concert spot it requires an unbelievable amount of work. But I think his efforts show. A lot. I will seriously be forever in his debt. And if any of you get a chance to hear this guy play live, grab it - he’s amazing!

Enjoy the video!

Matthew

[25.03.14] 'Gleaming' and 'Highly-wrought'

As some of you will already know, last week the ever-illustrious ELISION Ensemble performed by piece ymrehanne krestos (2011-13) as part of the Sydney International Festival in Australia. I thought it might interest some of you to see/hear some of the fallout from my little interhemispheric offering.

The concert was recorded and broadcast by ABC Classic FM (Australia’s Radio 3) and can currently be listened to online by following this link. It’s an amazing programme of music, featuring works by Liza Lim, Richard Barrett, Timothy McCormack and Aaron Cassidy (alongside myself).

[n.B.: There is a slight error the ABC website, listing me as the composer of both ymrehanne and codex xii. Whilst I am flattered by the confusion, I should add that codex xii is actually written by the mighty Richard Barrett.]

The critics reacted favourably to the programme as well (although it’s difficult to appreciate how else they might respond to playing of this calibre!), online reviews from the Sydney Morning Herald and Limelight Magazine are available here and here, of which “gleaming” and “highly-wrought” are my favourite adjectives applied to my own music ;-)

Enjoy!

Matthew

[13.03.14] Upcoming performance in Huddersfield (on Monday)

Apologies for the short notice but I’m delighted to announce that my solo guitar piece bet maryam is being performed in Huddersfield on Monday 17th March by outstanding Chilean guitarist, Diego Castro. My ridiculously challenging short piece for solo guitar will be presented alongside works by Marc Codina, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Baldwin, Horatiu Radulescu, Aaron Einbond, Scott McLaughlin and Bryn Harrison.

The concert is at 7:30pm in St. Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield and is part of the University of Huddersfield‘s new music concert series. Further details can be found here.

Hope to see some of you there!

Matthew

[11.03.14] PhD Thesis Online

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Some of you may have heard - some of you may not have heard - some of you may now be bored to tears by the “news” - that I was awarded my PhD in composition from the University of Huddersfield at the end of last calendar year. The award was officially conferred on 22.11.13 after the successful completion of my viva voce, examined by Dr Aaron Cassidy (University of Huddersfield) and Prof. James Saunders (Bath Spa University).

The recent arrival of my PhD certificate (pictured above!) has prompted me to say something briefly about the whole experience on here (which I haven’t done before), including the (possibly temporary) posting of my thesis online for download by anybody who might be interested.

My project - entitled the churches of lalibela: erosion and encrustation as transformative musical processes - was financed by a scholarship/grant awarded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and was supervised by Dr. Bryn Harrison and Prof. Liza Lim. The project outlines/demonstrates new technical/aesthetical approaches adopted in my recent compositional practice, concerning re-considering acts of musical transformation in terms of erosion and encrustation. Here, erosion and encrustation are understood as classes of compositional processes defined by operations of erasure/removal and addition/accrual respectively.

I can say with absolute sincerity that undertaking this project has been one of most rewarding and thought-provoking steps my compositional work has taken thus far, largely due to the amazing help and support offered both by my supervisors and the awesome music department at Huddersfield as a whole: a very very exciting place to be. It’s going to take a long time to unpick and chew over all the ideas and issues that has thrown up in the aftermath of this project - and in that respect there is a hell of a lot of new work to be done - but that is a new process that I’m already really excited about and is already well underway!

If anybody is interested in reading more about the work I undertook for this project, my PhD thesis can be downloaded here.

And - on a more personal note - if anybody is thinking about embarking a PhD in composition in the near future, then I strongly advise considering the University of Huddersfield: it certainly was a life-changing experience for me.

Matthew

[11.02.14] Upcoming performance in Sydney, Australia

Whilst it’s great to be posting again after my winter break it’s even better to be able to announce that the awesome ELISION Ensemble will be giving the Australian premiere of my piece for brass and percussion, ymrehanne krestos (2012-13) on Tuesday 18th March 2014 at 8pm (UTC+10).

The concert, entitled And the Scream, Bacon’s Scream, will take place at Carriageworks, Sydney and, in addition to my piece, will feature music by Liza Lim, Timothy McCormack, Aaron Cassidy and Richard Barrett.

If you’re in the right hemisphere, you should go. If only for the other fascinating musical voices alongside my own.

I wrote ymrehanne krestos for ELISION during the winter months of 2012, the piece being premiered at the University of Singapore on 01.02.13, conducted by Tony Makarome. The same players (Tristram Williams, flugelhorn; Ben Marks, alto trombone; Peter Neville, percussion) brought the piece to Huddersfield for its UK premiere on 08.02.13, conducted by Aaron Cassidy and the same team is also taking the piece to Australia this March, this time conducted by Carl Rosman.

The piece is ridiculously problematic on so so many levels. I’m still ‘dealing with it’ myself: it’s probably just about the most ridiculous thing I’ve yet created. The music is hyper-virtuosic to say the least and, at times, pushes against and crosses the threshold of physical possibility on the instruments employed. In addition, the music runs almost entirely non-stop for nearly 13 minutes. Nobody gets a rest. At all. (One of the original players playfully described the piece to me as “like being stuck in a jet engine for 13 minutes.” That’s actually very fair. It is.)

Why? Well, the piece is an example of a way of working with material that I came to develop for myself whilst working on my PhD. I called the process ’re-coupling,’ which involves the unsympathetic collision of various separately composed layers or streams of musical information. In ymrehanne, these layers consisted of various physical dimensions of the instruments employed (valve combination, slide position, articulation, air pressure, air speed) as well as more abstract strata (bar length patterns, patterns of rhythmic compression, arbitrary repetition of bars of material). Add all that together and you get a fairly consistently hectic sonic surface. I’ve written more about the piece (alongside other related examples of my compositions) in a conference paper, which is freely available here.

The reality of all that composer-nonsense is a score that any sensible musician would look at and assume was some kind of sick joke. Thankfully, in the almost unfeasibly virtuosic hands, arms, lips and tongues of the ELISION musicians for whom it was written such a reaction did not occur and for that I will be for ever in awe and in debt.

Reminder: Performance in London tomorrow

Just a reminder that brilliant organist, Tom Bell, will be performing my piece five visions from the book of enoch (2009) at 3pm Tomorrow in Westmister Central Hall. I hope some of you might be able to pop along.

Matthew

[14.11.13] New video online

I’m really excited to be able to show you this short trailer for a project* I’m involved with (deliciously shot and edited by Angela Guyton). It’s only a couple of minutes - have a watch and see what you think.

The project itself is called m62 (yes, like the motorway). Here’s the official promo paragraph:

“Just as the M62 highway spans the North of England, connecting several of the major cultural centres of the region - Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds - m62 connects three extremely diverse compositional aesthetics from the same region - Emily Howard (Liverpool), Matthew Sergeant (Manchester) and Maurico Pauly (Leeds) with the virtuoso chamber ensemble scapegoat (Joshua Hyde - saxophone, Noam Bierstone - percussion). The composers and performers have been placed into a position of unusually close collaboration and through such collaboration three new works are emerging, each taking their composer on a new and unanticipated journey, (re-)discovering new sonic spaces and places along the way.”

Words such as space and place are particularly useful to the kind of rough ideas I’m working with for the new piece. I’ve ben reading a bit about the psycho-architectural notion of ‘place’ quite a lot recently. Place as distinct from space.

What’s occurring to me from my investigations is that 'space’ is an architectural substance, a substance from which a 'place’ is made. That is to say that a place is more than just a somehow distinctive point or zone in an architectural (or 'architectured’) world, a place becomes a place through the human experience that engulfs and intertwines with it. To put it another way: St. Paul’s Cathedral might be considered a place because of a multitude of experiential aspects of its presence - not just its’ looks’ (its distinctive façade, etc.), not just the possibly reverential 'atmosphere’ of its interior but also its location within the city (of London) and the means one can accesses it through the the various transport infrastructures (etc.). In short, it becomes a place through peoples’ un/shared experience  of the space it occupies.

And this got me a-thinking. What is a musical ’place’ as distinct from a musical ’space’? I.e. Can two different musical personalities (a musical personality assigned to, say, a saxophone and a different musical personality assigned to, say, a percussion-ist/instrument) be felt as occupying the same musical place, even though their own instrumental-cum-material personalities are completely distinct? Like witnessing two unrelated persons of contrasting temperaments explore St. Paul’s Cathedral simultaneously. Can a sense of St. Paul’s somehow emerge through relaying these two persons’ experience of such a place?

As regular readers might by now have presumed, this piece will form one of the final components of my cycle ’the eleven churches of lalibela’. This one - the work currently in progress for scapegoat via m62 - is called bete gabriel-rufa'el. As always, the title refers to one of the eleven(+) churches at the Unesco World Heritage site in Lalibela, Northern Ethiopia. This particular church is the only example within Lalibela dedicated to two icons simultaneously: the angels Gabriel and Rufael.

So, my questions for the new piece follow this line of enquiry. What is a musical space? How might it be occupied to form a sense of a musical place? And how might the occupiers remain as felt somehow distinct from that which is occupied?

That’s the idea anyway. I’ll let you know how it pans out…

Matthew