Monday 7 October 2024, 7.30pm
Plus-Minus presents two works by London-based experimental composers Fargion and Parkinson. Fargion’s witty and playful 8 Songs are joyfully observant of everyday scenarios. Parkinson’s Piano Trio receives its first live performance after being released as a recording in 2022.
Piano Trio (violin, cello, piano) in 25 movements. Run straight through the doors into the space. The shape in the air between where the sound used to be. Part of the walls now, covered in ivy and moss. What unknown rooms. Pas de deux or film scene. Salon or tea dance. Retreating from recent presence. A tool or toy without current use. User Not Found. What remains. What happens when the instruments invoke their collective sound. The imprint of a tale told of past soundings. Broken bits of memory images. If you had a ghost as a pet what would you feed it. What if you told me so and so, this and that. Familiar shapes, misrecalled, perhaps in the wrong order. If these are the old clothes let's dress up and pretend. Still check notifications and messages though. Take a wrong turning. Or pause a moment to move blocks around on a screen. Then was it this way or that? Apply the filter; Sepia or Modern or 8 bit or Paris or Seaside. A place at the heart now old and distant. The texture of a no-longer-narrative or description. Stumbling through a field of ploughed mud, the surface, brittle, mashed up and folded bits of dried crusted pulp. That as state of mind. Over there an ordered space, the grid with 100 objects, how do they do. Or over there shiny rigid bright structures of transparent plastic, after the handmade and organic. Let it come down, like the foam that killed the wasp nest. Cut to zoom out on the landfill under the grassy hillock, a slice of the timefill, and being here now at the end of it on the way to be buried again like Pompeii.
Programme:
Francesca Fargion — 8 Songs
Tim Parkinson — Piano Trio 2020
Plus-Minus Ensemble with Francesca Fargion
- Mira Benjamin, violin
- Vicky Wright, clarinets
- Alice Purton, cello
- Mark Knoop, piano
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.
Plus-Minus Ensemble is a UK based ensemble committed to commissioning new work and placing it alongside recent and landmark modern repertoire. Formed in 2003, Plus-Minus is distinguished by its interest in performative, electroacoustic and conceptual pieces, and experimental open works such as Stockhausen’s 1963 classic, from which the group takes its name. Plus-Minus is directed by Matthew Shlomowitz, Vicky Wright and Mark Knoop.
