Sunday 29 October 2023, 7.30pm
Plus-Minus Ensemble presents a programme of three new compositions that explore interdisciplinary interactions between music and new digital technologies. The works are commissioned by Zubin Kanga as part of Cyborg Soloists (UKRI funded project hosted at Royal Holloway, University of London), which is connecting composers, performers and sound artists with researchers and industry partners to develop artistic and technological innovations.
Plus-Minus will also present a realization of Anthony Braxton’s “Ghost Trance Music” - a ritualistic meta-composition in which his entire musical universe comes together.
Programme
New works by Seán Clancy, Francesca Fargion, Jessie Marino
Anthony Braxton "Ghost Trance Music"
Plus-Minus Ensemble
- Mira Benjamin, violin
- Roderick Chadwick, piano
- Primož Sukič, e-guitar
- Tamaki Sugimoto, cello
- Vicky Wright, clarinets
- Mark Knoop, keyboard/conductor
Jessie Marino is a Berlin-based composer, performer, and media artist. Her compositions and solo performances abstract ideas drawn from all stripes of popular culture and political discourse, girded by a definitively humanistic sensibility rife with equal doses of wit and pathos. Marino’s pieces score out sound, video, story, lighting, and staging, treating each of these elements as expandable musical materials. She transcends the conventional materials of composition to help audiences locate music in the most commonplace activities and relations.
Dublin born composer Seán Clancy’s (b. 1984) music has been described as ‘equal part sacred, seductive and superficial’ (Tempo), and as ‘exploring the tensions between found and original material, narrative and rupture, elite and vernacular values, and between innovation and intervention’ (Journal of Music). His work deals translation and examining minimal amounts of material over extended periods of time (sometimes with projected text). Recently he has been exploring this process by performing on synthesizers, often collaborating with other soloists and ensembles.
Francesca is a composer/performer currently doing a PhD at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, funded by Midlands4Cities. She studied the piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, before doing a Masters in Creative Practice at Goldsmiths University. She works with song form, naivety, humour and aesthetics of failure. In addition to her solo work, she writes for her sibling duo collaboration, The Fargions, who have also recently begun curating an experimental performance event series, Good Company. She also collaborates and performs with several dance and theatre practitioners, for example, with Burrows&Fargion on their project 52 Portraits, and ongoing series Music For Lectures.
The Chicago-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton is recognized as one of the most important musicians, educators, and creative thinkers of the past 50 years. He is highly esteemed in the experimental music community for the revolutionary quality of his work and for the mentorship and inspiration he has provided to generations of younger musicians. His work, both as a saxophonist and a composer, has broken new conceptual and technical ground in the trans-African and trans-European (a.k.a. “jazz” and “American Experimental”) musical traditions in North America as defined by master improvisers such as Warne Marsh, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and he and his own peers in the historic Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM, founded in Chicago in the late '60s); and by composers such as Charles Ives, Harry Partch, and John Cage. He has further worked his own extensions of instrumental technique, timbre, meter and rhythm, voicing and ensemble make-up, harmony and melody, and improvisation and notation into a personal synthesis of those traditions with 20th-century European art music as defined by Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Varese and others.
