duoDorT commissioned 6 composers who work in different fields including spoken word, sonic manipulation, vocal performance and improvisation, and extended techniques, with the connection of an interest in experimenting with the piano and it's voice in different contexts. We began with a Residency and performance at Aldeburgh in November 2011, followed by a series of performances combining all the new works with workshops, to create further new work with student composers. Supported by Arts Council England, Aldeburgh Music and PRS for Music Foundation.
Contact kate@duodort.com for further information.
KERRY ANDREW
"a delicate piece exploring the potential of her voice in combination with piano, loop station and the two pedals of the piano."
Kerry Andrew is a freelance composer/performer and music educator based in London. She specialises in contemporary vocal music and music-theatre with a twist of pop, jazz, folk, world music and everything in between.She is a published choral composer with two large-scale choral releases on Boreas Music. Choral and experimental work has been heard on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, 6Music and Classic FM and on national news channels. She won a British Composer Award in 2010 and is this year’s Handel House Composer in Residence.
She performs with the experimental vocal trio, chamber-jazz/classical/rock collective, prog-jazz crew.
Kerry has a PhD in Composition fom the University of York. Her music has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Classic FM and internationally and has been heard at LSO St Luke’s, the Royal Academy of Art, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, York Minster, Westminster Cathedral, Wigmore Hall and the South Bank. Her vocal trio The Song of Doves ended the national memorial service to commemorate the victims of London’s July 7th 2005 bombings and was broadcast live on the BBC. Choral works this year have included a large-scale work for City Chorus, a piece for the National Youth Choir to celebrate the ABCD’s 25th anniversary and a piece for Making Music choirs commissioned by the Music Publisher’s Association. Performers of her work include the Hilliard Ensemble, Australia’s leading chamber ensemble Halcyon, Nicholas Clapton, Psappha, Black Hair, Joyful Company of Singers and Jane Manning. Her music has been performed in Europe, the US, Australia, and Japan.
In 2009 she wrote and directed an ambitious music-story-theatre work for children with disabilities in a project with Drake Music, performed at the V&A Museum of Childhood; she has also worked as a composer/sound designer with Art on the Underground, children’s theatre company Kazzum and with the Authentic Artist Collective.
Kerry is passionate about music education and outreach and has led projects for Wigmore Hall, Trinity College of Music, Sound and Music, Live Music Now, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival Education and Sing Up. She teaches composition and musicianship at Junior Trinity, is a Key Tutor on the Sound and Music Summer School and has taught in many academic institutions in the UK.
www.kerryandrew.netCHRISTINE ABDELNOUR
"To "listen" is to be on the watch.
Knowing that everything can arrive in a visible and quantifiable geometry.
I would like to create a composition which allows to analyze the emergence of a sound and its end and purpose, its laws of movement and the creation of a shape. Do we create the shape or is it her who creates us? Why what I am making now is going to change everything and how it is going to dictate to me the continuation ? How every sound has a secret tendency for the whole without ever being able to create the totality?"
Born in 1978, Christine is french saxophonist with Lebanese origins. It is with the discovery of free improvised music in 1997 that she decided to start her own autodidact study of sound experimentation on the alto saxophone.
She develops a very personal language on her instrument, acoustics that often sound like electronics. A short stop aside narrative or dramatic music, her music deals with the relation between the concepts of listening and its perception, time and space. She masters precise extended techniques and complex patterns, exploring the microtonal aspects of the saxophone as well as the high-pitched tone. She produces nifty tonguing tricks, unpitched breaths, spittle-flecked growls, biting, slicing notes or breathy echoey sounds from the bell of her horn.
Her main musical partners include Sharif Sehnaoui, Michel Waisvisz, Stéphane Rives, Mazen Kerbaj, Michael Zerang, Mathias Forge, Olivier Toulemonde, Pascal Battus, Sven Ake Johannsson among many many others.
She has also worked with dance ( Buto and contemporary dance) and theatre projects and undertakes an ongoing research on musical pedagogy (concerts for children, intervention in schools).
Since the year 2000, she contibutes to develop impovisation in her country of origin, Lebanon, where she co-organizes the annual festival of experimental music called « Irtijal ».She periodically works with an independent DVD label of experimental cinema (LOWAVE), whose objective is to discover and promote contemporary film and video art. Recently, she has released two DVDs called "Résistance(s)", compilations of Arab experimental videos.
www.christineabdelnoursehnaoui.jimdo.com
www.myspace.com/christinesehnaouiAILÍS NÍ RÍAIN
"I have created a new instrument. The Pianvoglass = a combination of two pianos, two voices and numerous glasses"
Born in Cork in the Irish Republic, Ailís Ní Ríain combines her interests as a Composer and Writer to produce works which challenge, provoke and engage. She is particularly interested in cross-discipline collaboration, sound installation, opera, music-theatre and presenting contemporary music in diverse spaces. She is represented by the Contemporary Music Centre of Ireland and Casarotto Ramsay, London and lives in the small Pennine town of Todmorden in Northern England. Her Southbank debut took place in 2007 and her Carnegie Hall debut in 2008. Ailis studied Composition at the University of York, the University of Manchester and the Royal Northern College of Music where she was also the college’s first Junior Fellow in Education. Her compositions have been performed all over Europe, on Irish, Greek, German radio and on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4. She has attended numerous composition residencies in the UK (Dartington, Aldeburgh New Media and Genesis Opera Residences) and Europe (Interact2006 in Denmark, Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic, Acanthes in France, Apeldoorn in Holland) and has taken masterclasses with Louis Andreiessen, Salvatorre Sciarrino, Luca Francesconi, Toshio Hosokawa and James McMillan. Recent projects include TAKEN, a sound installation for Clitheroe Castle; DOWN, a collaboration with Visual Artist Nicola Dale for METAL/Liverpool Biennale, Reinventions, based on Bach's keyboard preludes for Danish Trio TTAATTOO and Sawn-off opera, a collection of short operas set in hotel rooms.
www.ailis.infoHELENA GOUGH
"The hidden, mechanical substances of the piano will be explored and recorded. Sounds will be allowed to linger, intricate details given space. These improvised materials will form a starting point for further exploration and magnification within the digital realm. The outcome remains open, as the compositional approach is fundamentally 'materialistic' rather than conceptual."
Helena Gough is an English sound artist currently living in Berlin. Her work initially focused upon the collection and manipulation of 'real-world' sound material and the exploration of its abstract properties. Occasional deviations into synthetic and instrumental sources are now developing into more prominent ingredients. Each new sound-space is created by taking everything possible from the tiniest element, working to make something from nearly nothing. This reduction in means yields a density and richness of results.
As a solo (laptop) player she presents her music live on a regular basis, and is also a member of various improvising electro-acoustic ensembles involving musicians such as Lee Patterson, Andrea Neumann and Rhodri Davies. Her live sets are intended for dark spaces and involve multi-layering and improvisation with her sound materials in order to create a unique environment for each new performance. Studio collaborations are currently underway with Dutch composer Esther Venrooy and Swiss sound artist Zimoun. Her debut solo album was released at the beginning of 2007 by the London based label Entr’acte, followed by a second album is June 2010.
www.helenagough.netYUKO OHARA
"I am writing a piece with the idea of Morse code for duoDort. A series of on-off tones, light or clicks can be understand by skilled listeners or observers without special equipment.I will translate some dialogue from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare to Morse code by using a “Morse Code and Phonetic Alphabets” web-site. Then I will create a piece with the rhythms from the codes. Harmonics techniques will be used for the short codes and normal piano playing for the codes." ©Yuko Ohara
Yuko Ohara was one of the short listed composers for SPNM (Sound and Music) in 2007 and received a commission by SPNM for a project during 2007/08 season as part of the Soundwaves Festival 2008. Her piece, Psychederic Mirage for oboe and electronics, was premiered by Christopher Redgate and Paul Archbold. She is currently studying for a PhD in Performing Arts Research at Brunel University, West London, under the supervision of Christopher Fox.
Yuko studied musicology and composition at Ferris University in Japan, where she completed a Masters Degree and was awarded a distinction in composition and musicology. In 2003, she received a grant to study abroad at the Royal College of Music, London. She completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Composition with Distinction, and won the United Music Publishers Prize for Composition in 2006.
Yuko was one of finalists for the Takefu Composition Award at the Takefu International Music Festival, the Young Composers Workshop at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2006 and the University of Aberdeen Music Prize 2009 with the piece, Shade ?? Light, for clarinet quintet at the Sound Festival. The piece was premiered by member of BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
Her pieces have been performed worldwide and also selected for conferences, which are the International Double Reed Society 38th Annual Conference in 2009 (Birmingham, UK) and the International Conference on Contemporary Music in 2010 (La Coruna, Spain).
Yuko has been collaborating with several ensemble groups and orchestras including Ferris University Chamber Orchestra, Tokyo Universal Philharmonic Orchestra and London Contemporary Orchestra. She has studied composition with Haruna Miyake, David Sawer and Richard Barrett and attended composition master classes including ones by Toshio Hosokawa and Brian Ferneyhough.
www.web.me.com/yuko.ohara/composer/welcome.htmlELO MASING
"I started work on the piece by asking two questions:
What is the actual “voice” of the piano?
What will happen if instead of trying to control and master the instrument one just lets it react naturally to the impulses one gives it?
The piece attempts to answer these questions by exploring the opposites “complexity-simplicity”,“subtlety-coarseness”, “surface-bottom” through the use of a variety of sustaining possibilities on the piano."
Elo Masing is a young Estonian composer/free improviser currently based in London, UK. Elo's music has been performed at several festivals throughout Europe, most recently at the Estonian Young Composers' Festival in Tartu; Spitalfields Festival, Ether Festival and Birtwistle Festival in London, and in Germany at Donaueschinger Musiktage. Her works have been played by ensembles such as the Tallinn-based Una Corda, Manson Ensemble, members of the London Sinfonietta, European Union Chamber Orchestra, and the ICP Ensemble.
After obtaining a master's degree in composition from the Royal Academy of Music in London, she is now continuing her studies on the doctoral programme at the same institution, where she is exploring composer-performer-audience relationships in chamber music with special focus on collaboration, free improvisation and creating a holistic concert experience. She is mentored by Prof. Simon Bainbridge, and with support from the Royal Academy of Music, receives private tuition from Rebecca Saunders.
Her current and future projects include commissions from duoDorT, Kreutzer Quartet and quartertone flute specialist Carla Rees, as well as long-term collaborations with bass clarinet- live electronics duo Sarah Watts-Patrick Nunn and pianist Zubin Kanga. As a free improviser, Elo participates in weekly workshops led by Eddie Prévost at the Welsh Chapel in Southwark, curates a series of improvisation concerts called Uncharted Soundscapes, and occasionally appears in concert with free improvisers from the UK and abroad.
Elo has always been interested in collaboration between different fields of creativity, having worked with visual artists, choreographers and animators. At the moment she is particularly fascinated by the connection between music and dance and is working together with Korean choreographer Jean Lee. She is also becoming increasingly interested in finding an innovative approach to using music in theatre after having participated in the workshop Theatre of Illusion led by Sir Harrison Birtwistle at the Dartington International Summer School 2010.
www.vihmavarjutus.planet.ee
Quantulum: a note by the performers
A small quantity is sometimes referred to as a quantulum. Here we explore the musical influence of its existence in opposing proportions from small to great: 'quantity is a property which exists as magnitude or multitude'. We felt there was something very appealing within these descriptions which could influence the music we wanted to create and explore, relating to change, opposites (such as heavy/light, long/short, broad/narrow, much/little) and that a quantity (used as a scientific term) is a fundamental term, with the quantulum being present at all times but in a state of mutability.
