Wednesday 18 September 2019, 7.30pm
John Tilbury / piano
Bertrand Gauguet / alto saxophone
John Tilbury and Bertrand Gauguet improvise a music of slowness, sometimes silent, sometimes tempestuous. Playing with the acoustic qualities of the place, are woven between the piano and the saxophone subtle games of harmonic textures, appearances of differential sounds, resonances and sometimes some more noisy sequences. A music to stretch the listening like a bow.
John Tilbury is renowned for his peerless interpretation of the piano music of Morton Feldman, John Cage, Christian Wolff and Howard Skempton. In addition to the performances and seminal recordings that he has made of these composers’ works, he has been an eloquent advocate of their music in his writing and speaking about them. The same is true of the attention he has paid to the music and ideas of Cornelius Cardew, the subject of his authoritative biography published in 2008, and with whom he played in the legendary improvisation groups the Scratch Orchestra and AMM. In the last ten years John Tilbury has performed a range of plays and prose pieces by Samuel Beckett.
Video by Helen Petts
Bertrand Gauguet plays alto saxophone in contexts of solo and group improvisation - many festivals in recent years in France and abroad - his approach to the saxophone is involved in research on technical areas of the instrument, whether acoustic or related to amplification - composes electronic music : works with film, dance, visual arts and radio - focuses on learning processes related to sound and music - music and non music - sound as support for meditation - breath - the very relationships that sound and music have with image and body - still learning to play shakuhashi after recent trip to Japan ... Collaborations with : Sophie Agnel & Andrea Neumann ; Franz Hautzinger & Thomas Lehn ; X Brane ; Rhodri Davies & Christoph Schiller ; Andy Guhl & Mike T. Bullock ; Martine Altenburger & Frédéric Blondy ; Xavier Charles ; Pascal Battus ; Insub Meta Orchestra. Meetings with : Tetuzi Akiyama, John Butcher, Eric La Casa, Michel Doneda, Axel Dörner, Isabelle Duthoit, Robin Hayward, Tomas Korber, Urs Leimgruber, Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetsu Saïtoh, Roger Turner and Michaël Vorfeld.
