Sounds New -

Posted on: 21st Aug 2012

Here at Sounds New, we like to keep you up to date with how events are progressing, in the long, languishing months between one Festival and the next.

The International Composer Pyramid composers are busy working - it's going to be a great concert! So please book the date in your diaries for our final concert, December 8th 2012 at 3pm (in asociation with Edition Peters).

Another date to book is October 17th 2012 at 8pm, as Sounds New returns to opera this October with the world premiere of Ed Hughes' new work When the Flame Dies.

Presented by Sounds New in collaboration with the Canterbury Festival, the work will feature the New Music Players conducted by Carlos del Cueto, with video design by William Morris. Full details and booking information are available from our event page here. Tickets are out on sale as from this Monday!

And if you can't wait until then, here's the trailer...

When The Flame Dies Trailer from william reynolds on Vimeo.

For all the followers of our Veg-Box/Free-Range gigs, our next Sounds New event in the series is on November 8th 2012 at 8pm.

Further events and details are in development as I write, although these currently remain shrouded in secrecy; more details will follow. Keep up with all that's happening here on the blog, and on our Facebook page. And don't forget we're on Twitter as well.

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 16th May 2012

And so, this year’s Festival has concluded on a high with the King’s Singers at the Marlowe Theatre last night; with cheers and hoorahs from an ecstatic audience, a packed Marlowe foyer descended on the performers after the concert like pop stars scrambling for photos and autographs: amazing to behold such rampant enthusiasm…

The last notes have been struck and sung, the last words have died away, the final applause rung out, and the audiences have returned to their homes.

If you’ve been following over the past few weeks here on the blog, then a) thank you for your loyalty! and b) you’ve all heard or read my views on what’s unfolded over the course of the Festival. So now, Gentle Reader, it’s time for me to hang up my pen and give room to your thoughts and reflections on what’s occurred.

By all means leave your views and observations in the ‘Comments’ section below, and let us know your reactions; what you’ve enjoyed (or not!), what you looked forward to and whether it met your expectations (or exceeded them in some cases – I know mine have been), what positive experiences you had or what aspects you thought might be improved.

Thank you to all of you who’ve commented and tweeted over the past few weeks, who have followed the festival, and to all those whom we’ve met at the various events; there’s been a vibrant community buzz surrounding the Festival, and I’ve certainly come away with the sense that it’s been a welcoming and friendly environment in which to explore contemporary culture, and music in particular.

This isn’t the end of the blog though, by any means: we’ll be keeping you up to date with developing plans and ideas for next year once the dust has settled from this year’s events, with insights into what will be coming next year (if we’re allowed to say…).

Sounds New will be back. Keep in touch…

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 14th May 2012

Last week's premiere of John Croft's Les Malèdictions d'une Furie was attended by Ruth Duckworth and a couple of friends. Here is their story...

'Would you like to come to the opera at the Turner ?’ I said to two friends. They love the Turner. They have both lived in Margate for many years and feel it has really lifted the place. They have very much enjoyed the exhibitions there to date, which is why I thought they might be adventurous enough to join me. 'Adventurous' would not be the first word that springs to my mind if I were describing your average classical music fan! Still my friends wanted more detail. 'We don't really know much about opera.' I reassured them that it wouldn't really be much like opera. They had tried classical contemporary music before and were not really sure. 'This will be much better.' I said. They researched John Croft on-line and agreed to come, as long as we could go to the talk.

The talk was really useful for all of us. Paul Edlin did a great job of explaining any terms that might not be universally familiar and we all came away full of excitement about the premiere we were about to hear.
 
We were not disappointed. I was totally enraptured the whole time. My mind often wanders in concerts. Not so in this one. Fifty minutes that felt like five, sped by all too quickly. Lore Lixenberg's voice reminded me of spoken voices I have heard on the other side of valleys, when I could hear the trace of a melody amidst pure emotion. As a lapsed flautist I was fascinated by the sight and sound of the contra bass flute which was perfectly balanced by the percussion. The electronic treatments were all created by the composer which led to a lovely cohesion between the acoustic and the electronic.
 
After the concert one of us said that she enjoyed the feeling of not knowing what was going to happen next, on a moment by moment basis. Other than that we said very little. We were in a dream-like state. It was clear that something very special had been experienced.

Written by Ruth Duckworth as part of the 'Good Copy' project.

Posted on: 14th May 2012

As the Festival draws towards its conclusion, time for a penultimate post to highlight two extraordinary pieces at the lunchtime concert by Workers Union.

An eclectic programme included Two Elegies Framing A Shout for soprano sax and piano, delivered with astonishing accomplishment by saxophonist Ellie Steemson and pianist Edward Pick. A lyrical first elegy for unaccompanied sax, requiring sustained control of lengthy phrases, is followed by the Shout, in which spiky gestures are punctuated by periods of tense silence, before opening out into a real tour de force for the saxophonist over restless piano riffs. The second Elegy is familiar from Turnage’s epic Blood on the Floor, a beautiful, jazz-hued movement with weaving melodic lines over rich jazz-inflected harmonies. Saxophonist Ellie Steemson demonstrated superb control of her performance, delivered with conviction and commitment and consummate lyrical skill. The piece as a whole is a fine riposte to all those who claim that ‘modern music has no melodies;’ next time you hear it, point them gently in its direction...

The programme also included Benjamin Oliver’s Ripped Up, for the complete six-piece ensemble.  Delicate opening piano chords lead into a driving groove pitching four-against-three rhythms; an elegiac episode interrupts with a cluster-chord, and showed some careful textural writing in the creation of some effective woodwind and percussion sonorities.  A ticking shaker sees time fragmenting in its erratic utterances, whilst the piano picks out some gossamer-thread shapes above hushed, low saxophone trills; but the rhythmic impetus is not to be denied, and returns with driving momentum. The faltering ticker interrupts once more, accompanied by haunting mobiles from the xylophone that fall across the barline, before a hesitant conclusion sees the piece finishing with wide-eyed expectancy.

A fascinating programme, delivered with real accomplishment by youthful former members of the Guildhall School. Expect to hear more from them, and from Benjamin Oliver in the future.

(And for anyone who couldn't make the concert, here they are performing the piece in concert last year.)

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 13th May 2012

It’s been an epic few days across the Festival recently, ranging from intimate recitals to transcendental meditative states in Canterbury Cathedral.

Day seven on Thursday saw a lunchtime recital In Praise of Dreams with soprano Rhona McKail and pianist Yshani Perinpanayagam in their lunchtime recital, before the focus shifted out to the Turner Contemporary gallery at Margate for the world premiere of Les Malèdictions d’une Furie, a monodrama by John Croft performed by Loré Lixenberg. Prior to the performance, both Croft and Lixenberg appeared in conversation with Festival Director, Paul Edlin.

Friday’s lunchtime concert was a sonic exploration in the youthful company of the New Perspectives ensemble, in the chamber-ensemble-meets-electronics world of Jonathan Harvey’s Bhakti; young performers from the Royal College of Music, conducted by Timothy Lines, bathed the audience in the rich colours of Harvey’s unique and visionary soundworld. St Gregory’s was full to bursting for the concert, to the extent that festival assistants were having to put out extra chairs as audience members continued to arrive right up until the concert began.

The visionary nature of the day continued into the evening, as Canterbury Cathedral echoed to the sounds of John Tavener’s The Veil of the Temple, an large-scale meditative work for which the composer himself, in frail health, made the pilgrimage to Canterbury. Nigel Short led Tenebrae and members of the English Chamber Orchestra in Tavener’s epic, all-embracing pan-religious odyssey, which after its two-and-three-quarter-hour performance was greeted with rapturous applause. (The composer himself can be seen seated in the front row on the left in the photo below).

Yesterday’s events continued the journey into the stars, with Darrah Morgan Exploding Stars in works for violin and electronics, including the premiere of Jonty Harrisons’ Some of its Parts. Earlier in the morning, composer Frank Lyons ranged freely over an eclectic range of musical styles in a composition workshop. Top-brass came to the Festival in the evening, as the Grimethorpe Colliery Band (wryly observing on Twittter earlier in the day that they were en route to a ‘local gig’) came to the Cathedral with a programme including John McCabe’s Cloudcatcher Fells and an arrangements for brass of Holst’s The Planets, which, in its original incarnation as Paul Edlin observed, remains one of the previous century’s most influential works.

Against the backdrop of all this, the New Music in Britain conference unfolded in a series of papers and talks exploring aspects of the British contemporary musical landscape and papers focusing on key composers including Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies.

And it doesn’t stop there. There are still three days yet to come, with today’s celebration of Worldwide Mother’s Day in a feast of family events at the Gulbenkian, and a visit from legendary British jazz pianist Julian Joseph tonight.

Phew...

Images: Peter Cook

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 10th May 2012

An icy-blue glow and plethora of audio-visual equipment turned Augustine Hall into a shrine to electronica last night, a dimly-lit hall and an expectant hush for the start of the Powerplant concert. The waiting audience were greeted with a screen on which the heads of sightless dummies rotated in endless circles, back and forth, a metaphor perhaps for the often de-humanising isolation of modern life which was about to be exploded in vigorous fashion.

Striding purposefully onto the stage, percussionist Joby Burgess launched into Piece for Percussion by Nancarrow, a work bristling with the familiar complex poly-rhythms that characterise the Hermit of Mexico’s later pieces for player-piano. Projected onto the screen behind were a parade of still-photographs of horses, famous from zoetrope, each of which was triggered by Burgess into stages of movement; this almost detracted from the technical mastery Burgess displayed as he moved around the various pieces of percussion.

Matthew Fairclough’s The Boom and the Bap, a homage to a sixties drum-break for solo drum-kit and electronics, builds from small fragments in a series of samples and loops into full-on grooving with subtle warping bass-lines  – a kind of drum’n bass-meets-Radiohead collage, with Fairclough himself at the mixing-desk. This was followed by Fitkin’s Chain of Command, written for Burgess’ trademark instrument, the xylosynth, an electronic xylophone which triggers all manner of samples and effects; the piece builds a dense tapestry of sounds from speech samples à la Steve Reich, with snatches of speech from George Bush Jnr and Donald Rumsfeld; behind Burgess, uncomfortable images of barbed-wire and obscene graffiti blossomed piece by piece on the screen like drops of blood pooling on a surface, reflecting the menacing political overtones of the sampled speech about Guantanamo Bay, created by artist Kathy Hinde.

24 Lies Per Second by Max de Wardener brought the first half to a close, a trio of pieces ranging from shimmering and swooping electronics ( occasionally reminiscent of Mark Snow’s incidental music to ‘The X-Files’) to tinkling glockenspiel, a menacing child’s lullaby, into a breakdown of Schubert’s Im Dorfe, a Kagel-esque collage of percussive effects, piano samples and film, in which rapid jump-cuts between a pianist’s hands and a metronone reflected the changing textures. This last movement was almost Nancarrow-esque in its dizzying whirlwind of rapid piano figures and flashing syncopated stabbed chords, perhaps a nod to the piece with which the concert had begun.

By far the most interesting piece began the second half, Temazcal by Mexican composer, Javier Alvarez. This was a tour de force for maracas and electronics, in which Burgess turned playing the shakers into a real performance art. A rich sonic tapestry clothed his frantic playing, in which instrumental effects were morphed electronically into warping gestures and drum-beat samples drifted in and out of focus, accompanied by a haunting and lonely repeated figure. The piece slowly assembles into a Venezuelan folk-song, from which all the material previously heard is generated, a sudden, bizarre transition into a sunny folk-song greeted with amused laughter by the audience; the contrast is extreme, and the piece finishes in far sunnier climes than expected, the change into a guileless calypso-style a little head-scratching.

Gabriel Prokofiev’s Import/export; suite for global junk brought the evening to a close, a piece which is basically a ‘concerto for sound effects’ built from an oil-drum, plastic bags, bottles and a de-constructed packing-crate, all held together by self-sampling and looping. What the piece lacks in concision, it makes up for in the diverse range of sounds distilled from unorthodox materials, all consummately played, as the whole performance had been, by Burgess with real flair.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Images: Peter Cook

Posted on: 8th May 2012

Courtesy of CSR presenter (and brass-player) Josh Thorne, here's Festival Director Paul Max Edlin reflecting on the first few days of this year's festival, in conversation with Josh yesterday.

Paul looks back on various events which occured over the Bank Holiday weekend, the first weekend of this year's Sounds New Festival, including a gig from the BBC Big Band, a visit from the Kent Cultural Baton, live music in Whitefriars in the town centre, the Choral Day, and more.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 8th May 2012

Fresh from touring with Peter Gabriel, percussionist Joby Burgess comes to Canterbury tomorrow night with Powerplant, promising an audio-visual feast including music by Graham Fitkin and Gabriel Prokofiev.

Find out how Joby answered the 'Three Questions' about contemporary music and coming to Sounds New in an earlier post here, where you can also hear him performing some of the music appearing in the concert.

Details of the concert online here.

Where multi-media meets minimalism: don't miss it...

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 7th May 2012

Young artists from the Park Lane Group demonstrated talent far beyond their years in the lunchtime concert earlier today, Sprite!

Taking the concert's name from Patrick Nunn's puckish and mischievous piece for solo piccolo which appeared in the programme, flautist Rosanna Ter-Berg and pianist Leo Nicholson displayed a degree of technical mastery which was, if you'll forgive the pun, simply breathtaking in scope.

The programme opened with David Matthews' Duet Variations, a piece full of rich colours and lush textures that shows Matthews to have a foot equally in both the Romantic and modern traditions. The composer himself, present at the occasion, took to the stage afterwards to receive warm applause.

The première of Thomas Oehler's Prelude followed; inspired by Debussy's sets of piano preludes, the title of the piece was printed at the end of the programme, Les yeux du chat, à nuit (The eyes of the cat, at night) and was full of supple, lithe figures in both instruments, skirling passages full of feline grace and agility. Oehler himself was also at the concert, and was clearly pleased with the performers' realisation.

The first solo piece, Turnage's Tune for Toru for piano, is an elegiac miniature, dedicated to the great Japanese master who died in 1996, and was delivered by Nicholson with thoughtful control. In contrast, Jonathan Harvey's Nataraja which followed was a treasure-trove of extended woodwind techniques and a tapestry of sounds that reached far beyond that of the normal sound-spectrum typical of works for flute and piano. Ter-Berg delivered the full range of sounds with astonishing accomplishment.

Patrick Nunn's programme-titling piece is full of impish humour; written 1998 and dedicated to his then six-month old nephew, it bristles with waggish impudence, which was realised in Ter-Berg's spirited performance.

The most colourful piece, The Colour of Pomegranates by Julian Anderson, displayed Anderson's trademark rich, sumptuous harmonic palette (heard elsewhere, for instance, in his evocative choral epic, Heaven is Shy of Earth); shimmering textures shrouded the warm sound of the alto-flute, and in a marvellously unpredictable yet effective ending, the final sounds faded away into the sound of birdsong outside the venue, a wonderfully unintended moment of chance. Sky and Water by Emily Howard had one or two effective gestures in its impressionistic textural explorations, and was followed by the final piece, Flute Music with Accompaniment or Solo Flute, in which tiny segments of ideas are developed and extended by both the players, opening out into a broader final section before closing with a small, deft gesture.

The musicians were treated to warm and sustained applause from an enthusiastic full house at St Gregory's, an acknowledgement richly deserved as the listeners responded to two accomplished young performers, who will surely be ones to watch out for.

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 5th May 2012

This year’s Sounds New launched yesterday with a fistful of events.

The festival announced itself from the rooftop of Augustine Hall, with brass players performing several especially-written fanfares to herald the beginning of this year's celebration of 'Theme GB.' Following this heraldic display, renowned conductor Diego Masson took time before rehearsing later in the day with the London Sinfonietta, to appear in conversation with Artistic Director of the Festival, Paul Edlin.

In the afternoon, over 130 children thronged at St Peter's Methodist church in the town, where they participated in Merlin's Tale, written by John Perfect, an educational project that saw several local schools collaborating with the composer in an exploration of the classic tale of kingship and magic.

Augustine Hall was abuzz in the evening for the festival's opening concert, which featured Masson and the London Sinfonietta in a scintillating programme which explored composers ranging from bright young things to bastions of the British compositional landscape; new pieces by Benjamin Oliver and Edmund Finnis, participants in the International Composer Pyramid, rubbed musical shoulders with George Benjamin's ravishing At First Light, and works by Knussen, Bainbridge and Maxwell Davies. Four out of the six composers featured were present in the hall, including Maxwell Davies who had come all the way from the Orkney Islands to be present.

Introducing the concert, and the whole festival, Paul Edlin paid particular  tribute to Kent Music, the county's music provision service which that morning had received the terrific news that it had procured its arts hub funding; as Edlin observed, local music services (and those that have now morphed into arts hubs) are the core of music education, bringing music to children across the country, so crucial to building the musicians, performers, composers and listeners of tomorrow. Indeed, composer Benjamin Oliver is himself a product of both Kent Music and Sounds New: as a youthful flautist, Oliver performed at the very first Sounds New festival, an experience that inspired him to become a composer. (Congratulation to Kent Music, and to director Peter Bolton.)

After the last notes had died away, there was excited conversation, lengthy debate and fervent discussion as people responded to the concert, spilling out into the atrium and reflecting on the state of contemporary music. This, in part, is what the festival is all about: engaging audiences with music of our time and prompting reaction and reflection.

 An exciting start: and lots more to come...

Posted by Daniel Harding

Pictures by Peter Cook (c) Sounds New

Posted on: 2nd May 2012

The first day of May saw me talking with Peter Cook, the Education Project Manager for Sounds New, jazz saxophonist, teacher, and self-styled ‘Fleet Commander’ (you’ll have to listen to the interview for the explanation for that one!).

The educational aspect of Sounds New is a crucial part of the festival’s mission, to engage younger audiences with contemporary music, to find ways in which they can participate in and respond to it. ‘’That’s really the big vision of Sounds New,’’ Peter remarks later in the interview, ‘’to really engage young people now in the music of our time, and for them to be the performers and composers [of tomorrow].’’ As he goes on to explain, different projects encourage people to respond in different ways to Sounds New, through not just music but other art-forms, as part of a wider remit in getting them thinking about contemporary music.

There’s a huge range of projects taking place as part of Sounds New’s educational outreach, with events unfolding all year round, feeding into, and developing ideas associated with, the festival itself.

Here, Peter talks about why helping to bring contemporary music to young audiences is important both to Sounds New and to him, and looks ahead to some of the events occurring this year.

You can find out about the ‘All for One’ series of educational concerts, as well as details about Worldwide Mothers’ Day at the Gulbenkian Theatre, in a previous post here.

With thanks to Peter.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 1st May 2012

Internationally-renowned conductor, and a terrific champion of contemporary music, Diego Masson will be appearing In Conversation on Friday May 4^th at 11am at Augustine Hall.

Masson is recognised as one of the world’s leading exponents of contemporary music. In 1966, following a period of study with Pierre Boulez, he formed Musique Vivante which became famous for its regular concerts presenting important contemporary works. After considerable success as Music Director of the Marseille Opera in the 1970s, Masson went on to pursue an international conducting career which has taken him to the major musical centres of Europe, Scandinavia and the Antipodes.

A regular visitor to the UK, Masson has appeared with the Philharmonia, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Hallé Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, English Northern Philharmonic, Nash Ensemble, Opera Factory, Opera North and Scottish Opera.  His engagements in Europe have included appearances with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre de Radio France, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Avanti Chamber Orchestra in Helsinki, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic, and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic.

Masson has a long-standing relationship with the London Sinfonietta, as well as regularly appearing with the world’s leading contemporary ensembles including Ensemble Modern, Musik Fabrik, Ensemble Alternance, Klangforum Wien, Composers Ensemble and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

Later in the evening, Masson conducts the London Sinfonietta in a programme that includes George Benjamin’s At First Light, Peter Maxwell Davies’ A Mirror of Whitening Light and music by Oliver Knussen and Simon Bainbridge, as well as pieces by winners of the 2011 International Composer Pyramid: details online here.

To whet your appetite, here’s Masson conducting Xenakis with the Ensemble Asko Schoenberg.

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 29th Apr 2012

The three winners of the 2011 International Composer Pyramid will each be having their work performed at Sounds New starting next Friday.

The London Sinfonietta and Diego Masson will be performing Edmund Finnis’ Frame/Refrain and Benjamin Oliver’s Momentum in the opening concert at the Marlowe Theatre on Friday 4 May; the programme also features George Benjamin’s magical at First Light and Maxwell Davies’ A Mirror of Whitening Light.

London-based Finnis has previously studied with Julian Anderson, and has written for the London Sinfonietta, the Spitalfields Music Festival and the British Film Institute.

Born in Chatham, Benjamin Oliver completed a doctorate at the University of Sussex, and is a lecturer at Southampton University.

He will also be conducting the ensemble Workers Union in a lunchtime concert at the festival on Monday 14 May, in which his piece ‘Ripped Up’ will appear.

Those renowned champions of contemporary music, the Arditti Quartet, will perform Victor Ibarra’s Crossing Lines as part of a concert on Monday 7 May, alongside works by Brian Ferneyhough , Thomas Ades and Robert Saxton. Born in Mexico, Ibarra studied in both Mexico and Paris, and has been commissioned in Mexico, Latin American and Europe; Ibarra has recently completed a Masters at the National Conservatory of Lyon. Here’s an extract from Ibarra’s Alice:

The ICP  ‘Call for Scores’ is adjudicated each year by a number of professional composers, with the unenviable task of sorting through the plethora of scores received from Europe and beyond; previous jurors have included Robert Saxton, Edwin Roxburgh, Rolf Hind and Paul Patterson. This year, the ‘Call for Scores 2012’ has received over seven hundred scores; a monumental task lies ahead of this year’s panel...

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 28th Apr 2012

Ahead of their appearance at Sounds New on Sunday 6 May, I put three questions to  Marlene Dröge Nielsen and Matthew Jones of the Danish chamber ensemble, Ensemble MidtVest. The ensemble is renowned for its creative programming, pushing the boundaries of the traditional classical concert form through creativity and excellence. I asked them about the group and what lies ahead next week.

1 Tell us about yourself / your ensemble

We’re a chamber music group, founded in 2002, consisting of eleven outstanding musicians from all over the world, including former participants in the BBC Radio 3 Young Generation Artists and major prize-winners in international chamber music competitions such as the ARD Competition and the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition. We're especially renowned for our performances of chamber music repertoire, mainly from the classical and romantic period. Earlier this year, back in February, we made our debut at Carnegie Hall, New York.

We perform more than eighty concerts every year in Denmark and abroad, with more than 15 different programmes and productions, regularly incorporating other musical styles and art forms. In addition to classical chamber music, we also frequently work with improvisation, creating a sound and musical language, breaking down barriers between musical styles and genres. The world-renowned Danish jazz pianist Carsten Dahl was appointed our first Artistic Advisor in 2007.

In 2006, our recording of piano quartets by Mozart and Brahms was a prize-winning disc, the 'Best chamber music CD of the year' as voted for by the listeners of Danish Broadcasting Company!

2 What excites you about contemporary music?

The extraordinary variety within contemporary music and the limitless possibilities of the genre. The chance to introduce listeners to a work which is not known to them, and to present it in the most favourable light, is a wonderful challenge! To improvise to an audience takes it a step further...

3 What can we look forward to in your concert for Sounds New next month?

A mixture of the above! Three contrasting and seldom performed contemporary chamber works, along with a free improv performance. All performed with passion, exuberance and commitment.

Ensemble MidtVest's concert on 6 May at 8pm includes Per Nørgård's Virvelverden for wind quintet, as well as an improvisation session with the full complement of eleven players: details online here.

With thanks to Marlene and Matthew.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 27th Apr 2012

When asked what I’m looking forward to at Sounds New this year, I’ve found it really hard to choose a highlight from the Festival; with works by major composers strewn like confetti across the programmes, or major national and international performers and ensembles popping up around Canterbury like spring flowers, or pieces which are new to me which I feel I really must hear, condensing my Festival Favourites into a ‘Top Five’ list is difficult (and too alliterative as well, perhaps...!).

So, I’ve decided to ask you, Gentle Reader, for your nominations and your suggestions: what will YOU be going to at the festival ? Comment below with what you’re planning to see and hear, or with those events about which you’re excited.

(Did you see that buck deftly being passed ?! )

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 27th Apr 2012

Cornwall-born Graham Fitkin’s Chain of Command comes to Sounds New on Wednesday 9 May. Commissioned by Powerplant and toured by them in 2008, the percussionist uses a MIDI-marimba to trigger speech samples;

a technique Fitkin used with menacing political overtones in No Doubt, his concerto for MIDI-harp from 2010;

It’s a path well-trodden by Steve Reich, certainly, in pieces such as Different Trains and City Life, although for Fitkin, the speech samples are used less for their ability to generate particular pitch-sets than for their quasi-percussive texture; repetition heightens the sound of the sampled speech, treating it as an instrumental texture in its own right, although one not devoid of political syntax (both Chain of Command and No Doubt sample phrases from former American President George Bush).

Whether bristling with brash textures, bold rhythmic gestures, or with warm, lulling and hypnotic ostinati, Fitkin’s music refuses to fit into a neat pigeon-hole. There’s the exuberant vibrancy of Vent, for saxophone quartet, with its uplifting opening gesture; the piano-shop-gone-mad acrobatics of Sciosophy; the filigree harp textures of Skirting; Warm Area creates gentle pulsations, with melodic figures picked out in a delicate harp tapestry, in a piece occasionally reminiscent of the milder creations of Aphex Twin:

Here’s Fitkin at his punchy, rhythmic best in the soundtrack to a Uniqlo jeans advert:

Fitkin’s Cello Concerto, written for Yo-Yo Ma and premièred at the BBC Proms last year, has recently been nominated for a Royal Philharmonic Society Award, ‘for a large-scale work (scored for 16 or more players) receiving its first UK performance in 2011.’

Alongside Chain of Command in the Powerplant concert are works by the Hermit of Mexico, Conlon Nancarrow and a landmark collaboration with Gabriel Prokofiev, Import/Export: Suite for global junk.

Rich in textural contrasts, bursting with rhythmic verve and bright harmonies – the music of Graham Fitkin comes to Sounds New. Don’t miss it.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 26th Apr 2012

Gosh, Paul Patterson is a very busy man; catching up with Paul is something of a challenge, as he combines composing with a hectic schedule of teaching and travelling both around the country and abroad. I managed to do so yesterday when Paul was visiting Canterbury on one of his days teaching at Christ Church University, where he is Visiting Professor of Composition; the previous day, Paul had been teaching in Manchester; he recently attended a performance of his Magnificat in Paris, and on the day before the same piece is performed at Sounds New next month, he’ll be attending a performance in Swansea of his Little Red Riding Hood. A busy calendar...

Paul has been a significant figure on the British compositional landscape since the seventies, with a profusion of works ranging from a series of large-scale choral pieces to instrumental concerti, with youthful works such as the Sinfonia for Strings, with its bustling, energetic third movement full of rhythmic vitality;

His Mass for the Sea, written in 1983, combines movements from a traditional mass with reflections on the Biblical Flood from a variety of sources, and employs the bold structural device of replacing the usual ‘Credo’ with a meditation on the flood, full of high drama. Later works include Little Red Riding Hood for orchestra and narrator, the Cello Concerto, the Viola Concerto, and last year his String Quartet no.2; ‘Dances for Thaxted,’ using folk and dance melodies.

Formerly Head of Composition and Contemporary Music at the Royal Academy, Paul continues at the Academy as the Manson Professor of Composition, and is also the composer-in-residence with the National Youth Orchestra; as well as teaching at Christ Church, he is also Visiting Professor at the Royal Northern College of Music.

A rather rainy afternoon found us sitting in Paul’s office, where we talked about two of his compositions which are appearing at Sounds New this year; his Magnificat, which will be a part of the Choral Day on Sunday 6 May, and Timepiece, which the King’s Singers will be performing as part of the final concert in the festival, at the new Marlow Theatre on Tuesday 15 May. Commissioned by Sir David Wilcocks for the Bach Choir of London in 1993, the epic Magnificat is written for chorus, organ, brass and percussion and will be performed as part of a day-long celebration of British choral music, including amassed choirs from around the county. Timepiece, a commission from the King’s Singers in 1972, finds Adam getting into trouble when Eve sees him wearing a wristwatch, as Paul explains ...

To whet your appetites, here is the evocative ‘Sanctus and Benedictus’ from Paul’s 1983 Mass of the Sea.

I’m very grateful to Paul for finding the time to be interviewed, and for being such a pleasure to talk with: find out more about his pieces at Sounds New here (Magnificat) and here (Timepiece).

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 26th Apr 2012

This Saturday, two works by Jonathan Harvey will be on BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now; his Song Offerings, a setting of poems from Tagore’s ‘Gitanjali’ sung by Claire Booth with the Nash Ensemble, and Summer Clouds Awakening, for choir, flute, cello and electronics.

Harvey’s music appears at Sounds New this year on several occasions: more details in the recent feature devoted to the composer on this blog: click here to read more.

The Hear and Now programme will then be available online for a week – neatly over-lapping with the start of Sounds New itself…!

To get you in the mood, here’s Harvey’s mesmerising Tranquil Abiding.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 25th Apr 2012

Ahead of their concert in the new Marlowe Theatre on Tuesday 15 May, which will bring this year’s Sounds New Festival to a close, I put three questions to Jonathan Howard, bass with the group, who describes himself as  ‘’twenty-five, six-foot five, brown hair, likes travelling and sushi, dislikes peanut butter,’’ about why the group is so excited about coming to Canterbury…

Tell us about your ensemble

The King's Singers have been around for over 44 years. There are just six of us - two counter-tenors, a tenor, a baritone and a bass - and we perform almost exclusively a cappella: that's right, no accompaniment, just the six of us on stage, and almost always with no amplification. Over the course of the 130 concerts in our 2011/2012 season, we've been all over the world, in venues including the Sydney Opera House, Carnegie Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie and the Beijing National Concert Hall. Our repertoire is incredibly diverse - the group performs Renaissance polyphony and pop songs in equal measure - and contemporary music takes a prominent place in lots of our programmes. It's an honour to perform at the Sounds New Contemporary Music Festival in Canterbury next month, and to be able to share what we believe are some of the most exciting contemporary pieces in our repertoire.

What excites you about contemporary music?

Contemporary music is so exciting to us for a number of reasons. For a start, it often makes us question our established beliefs about music: as is so often the case in contemporary music, the harmonies and rhythms used are so out of sync with Western musical conventions, that we really have to think about what the piece is trying to say, and how it is trying to respond to its musical antecedents.  Then there's the fact that many of the contemporary pieces that we sing were commissioned by the group for the group. It means that the voice parts in each piece tend to fit the voice parts within The King's Singers brilliantly, and the pieces themselves have really been designed to suit our ensemble. Finally, there's the fact that contemporary music is often pretty tricky - it's great for us to have music that we really have to sink our teeth into.

What can we look forward to in your concert for Sounds New next month ?

Well, it's a programme composed almost entirely of pieces that were commissioned for The King's Singers, by some of the great composers of the 20th century: Peter Maxwell Davies, John McCabe, Paul Patterson and former tenor in The King's Singers, Bob Chilcott. (We admit that Britten's ‘Choral Dances’ from Gloriana were not written for us....) And, following a first half of pieces that have been in our repertoire for a number of years, we'd like to present a piece that's new to us this year, to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of HRH Queen Elizabeth II. A Rough Guide to the Royal Succession by Paul Drayton is a witty enumeration of the kings and queens of England, warts and all, right through from the seventh century to the present day, and it's an absolute delight to perform. We hope you enjoy it, as well as the rest of the concert, as much as we do, and we look forward to seeing you all in Canterbury on May 15th. We might even throw in a few contemporary pop songs, to make sure we're really sticking to the theme...."

Here’s the group in Chilcott’s lulling and beautiful arrangement of ‘Steal Away,’ in which the sumptuous added-note harmonies are matched by the group’s spot-on intonation and unity of ensemble:

To whet your appetite further still, here’s the group in John McCabe’s evocative and purple-hued Scenes in America Deserta, which is part of the all-British programme for their Sounds New concert.

More details about the concert at the new Marlowe Theatre on Tuesday 15 May here.

With thanks to Jonathan.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 24th Apr 2012

Responsible for some of the most important contributions to contemporary music through their commissioning of new works, the Arditti Quartet continues its trail-blazing trajectory as it comes to Sounds New on May 7^th.

Since its foundation in 1974, the Quartet has commissioned pieces from a veritable Who’s Who of giants of contemporary music, including Stockhausen, Ligetti, Britten, Andriessen, to name but a few. In an interview back in 1999, first violinist and founder member Irvine Arditti reflects on the impact the Quartet has had since its inception:

''I often quote the statement that Boulez made, I think, in the Seventies: 'The string quartet is dead.' Later he rescinded this comment. And I like to think that was largely because we have inspired so many composers to write for the string quartet.''

Stockhausen’s notorious Helicopter String Quartet was premièred by the Arditti in Holland in 1995; here’s the composer talking about his philosophy, or rather his having ‘no philosophy,’ and in rehearsal with the Quartet.

The Arditti are also champions of educational projects, with members of the group acting as instrumental tutors on the legendary Darmstadt Summer School across the 1980’s and early 90’s.

Their concert for Sounds New on Monday 7 May, which will be recorded for later broadcast by BBC Radio 3,  includes music by Ferneyhough, the première of Paul Max Edlin’s Frida Sketches, and Thomas Ades’ Arcadiana, a seven-movement piece commissioned by the Endellion String Quartet and first performed in 1994. ‘O Albion,’ the sixth movement, is a beautiful, sonorous, hymn-like section which nods in wistful fondness to Elgar.

O Albion from 'Arcadiana': Thomas Adès by Faber Music: MusicforNow

Here is the Arditti Quartet in the sinuous weaving lines which open Ligeti’s first String Quartet:

More details about their concert online here.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 24th Apr 2012

Artistic Director of the Festival, Paul Max Edlin, and Festival Manager Michelle Castelletti, were interviewed on CSR, Canterbury Community and Student Radio, on Saturday, where they introduced the ideas behind this year’s Sounds New Festival and some of the events to look forward to this year, and in particular jazz at the festival: the BBC Big Band and the Julian Joseph Trio (and sneakily pay tribute to Michelle’s astonishing string of academic qualifications!).

As Paul observes, Sounds New is all about what’s happening now; it tells us about today and informs tomorrow; and contemporary music is exciting, too!

Here they are in conversation with presenter of the Evening Jazz Show, Josh Thorne: listen for yourself and find out what Sounds New is bringing to Canterbury, starting on Friday 4 May.

Sounds new interview by Joshthorne

With thanks to Josh Thorne for providing the interview recording.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 23rd Apr 2012

Sprite, by locally-born composer Patrick Nunn, appears at Sounds New in a lunchtime concert on Monday 7 May, performed by flautist Rosanna Ter-Berg.

Of the piece, Nunn himself writes: ‘Sprite was completed in November 1998 and is dedicated to my then six-month-old nephew. The piece portrays the playful and agile nature of a mythical sprite - qualities that I then associated with my wonderfully animated nephew. ‘

Here's Nunn's 21 Century Junkie, written for six pianos and tape; a whirlwind evocation of the frantic, information-consumption-driven pace of today’s lifestyle, a tapestry of samples drawn from everyday life is superimposed on a backdrop of minimalist-style piano textures. The piece was commissioned, and is here performed, by Piano Circus.

‘Earth,’ one of the movements from Music of the Spheres, combines skeletal piano textures with sounds collected by Voyager I and Voyager II distilled into sonic form: you can listen to it on YouTube here.

Shortlisted for the British Composers Awards in 2009, Nunn’s Prism is a lively, colourful piece for basset clarinet in A and piano, written in 2008 for (and here performed by) clarinettist Mark Simpson:

The concert at Sounds New next month, in which Sprite will be performed, also includes works by Jonathan Harvey, Emily Howard and Mark-Anthony Turnage; thanks to the Cavatina Ticket Scheme, the concert is free to those aged 25 and under (tickets on the door, subject to availability): a fantastic opportunity.

Details about the event online here.

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 23rd Apr 2012

Raising the curtain on the start of this year’s Sounds New Festival next week before it all gets into full swing, a performance of music and dance at Canterbury College features amongst a varied programme a new work by Philip Neil Martin, An Outburst of Time next Monday, 30 April.

Also to be performed by the Arditti Quartet at their concert the following week, on this occasion the piece is to be presented with dance and film projection.

Performers include dancers from Christ Church University, Simon Langton Girls Grammar School, Canterbury College, Dance Warehouse and St Stephen’s Junior School plus.

The event is at 2pm at Canterbury College’s Lanfrac Theatre.

For more details, please e-mail Peter Cook.

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 20th Apr 2012

Just announced, this season’s Proms series is probably one of the most exciting I’ve seen, with a plethora of world and UK premières and a feast of contemporary music.

The festival gets off to a bang with Mark-Anthony Turnage at the opening night, Canon Fever, première, also Sir Michael Tippett’s Suite for the Birthday of Prince Charles, which includes a movement employing the wonderful melody ‘Angelus ad virginem.’

John Adams conducts Prom 4 which includes his City Noir and Prom 74, a performance of his Nixon in China.

Prom 5 has a mouth-watering Finnish flavour, with the UK première of Kaija Saariaho’s Laterna magica alongside Strauss’ definitley non-Finnish Four Last Songs and Sibelius’ majestic Symphony no.7.

Saturday Matinee 3: two UK premières, Piano Concerto no.2 by Michael Finnissey and Birtwistle’s Gigue Machine, and the world première of Electra Mourns by Brian Elias. And Saturday Matinee 4 features Goehr, Knussen and Bainbridge, the latter’s première of A Garden of Earthly Delights.

There’s an intriguing series of concerts from Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (the first time an orchestra has been resident at the Proms) sandwiching Boulez between symphonies of Beethoven as they perform the whole cycle; in Prom no 9 Boulez’s Derive 2 sits between Beethoven’s first two symphonies; Prom 10, the Dialogue de l'ombre double comes in between symphonies 4 and 3. Boulez himself takes up the baton in a performance of his Le marteau sans maître in Prom 17.

Prom 14 has the Kronos Quartet in Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 4.

Proms 29 looks particularly exciting, with the National Youth Orchestra in Varese, a première from Nico Muhly, Anna Meredith’s Olympic piece HandsFree, and Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony.

Prom 31 includes the premières of James Macmillan’s Olympic Fanfare, and Thea Musgrave’s Loch Ness: a postcard from Scotland. There’s a second Macmillan première featured in Prom 33, Credo.  Prom 35 presents the UK première of Per Norgard’s Symphony no.7, whilst Prom 40 sees Bryars and Benjamin from the National Youth Wind Orchestra and the National Youth Brass Band.

Prom 44 sees the London Sinfonietta in Ligetti, Berio, Xenakis, Andriessen, and Harvey’s electroacoustic classic, Mortuos plango, vivos voco.

As it’s the Cage centenary year, Prom 47, under the curatorship of that champion of modern music, Ilan Volkov, is given over to a special celebration of the range of Cage’s creations, and includes Cage exponent John Tilbury performing the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra.

Prom 54 sees the London première of Symphony no.9  from Maxwell Davies.

Proms Chamber Music 2 includes the première of Julian Philips’ Sorrowfull Songs and a selection of Steve Martland’s Street Songs.

Conducted by choral composer Eric Whitacre, Prom 62 features works by Whitacre himself, including a première, Higher, Faster, Stronger, and a première also from Imogen Heap, The Listening Chair.

Here’s the BBC’s introductory video to this year’s season, with Director of the Proms, Roger Wright, talking to Katie Derham.

Tickets go on sale on the 12 May. We've got all of June to recover from the excitement of this year’s Sounds New festival before the Proms begin. Explore the season for yourself online here: much to look forward to, it promises to be a summer to remember...

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 19th Apr 2012

Ahead of their concert at Sounds New on Monday 14 May, saxophonist and group-member, Ellie Steemson answers three questions about the youthful and vibrant ensemble, Workers Union.

Tell us about your ensemble 

Workers Union Ensemble initially came together for a performance of Louis Andriessen's epic work of the same name whilst its members were studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Since it formed in 2008, the group has evolved into its unusual six-piece line-up consisting of sax, oboe, piano, double bass and two percussionists, under the direction of conductor Ben Oliver.

What excites you about contemporary music?

Close collaboration with composers is central to our work. We are gradually building up a set of works commissioned specifically for the ensemble with the addition of one or two new pieces at each performance. Working in this way has led to the development of a process of interaction between us and composers which gives a great sense of energy and excitement. 

What can we look forward to in your concert on May 14 ?

Workers Union are very excited to be performing at Sounds New on May 14th. We will be presenting a brand new work by Ryan Latimer as well as works previously written for the ensemble by associated composers Matthew Kaner and Ben Oliver, and two works by British stalwarts Michael Finnissy and Mark-Anthony Turnage. 

Here is Workers Union in concert in July last year, performing one of the pieces featuring in their Sounds New concert, Gaugin Sketches by Matthew Kaner.

And, from the same concert, another of the pieces coming to Canterbury, Ben Oliver’s brash, groove-inflected Ripped Up.

Also included in their concert is Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Two Elegies Framing a Shout, for soprano sax and piano. More details about the concert online here.

As one of this year's 'International Composer Pyramid' winners, Benjamin Oliver's piece Momentum is being performed at the London Sinfonietta concert at Augistine Hall on the opening night of Sounds New, Friday 4 May.

With thanks to Ellie.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 19th Apr 2012

Music from some of the composers featuring at Sounds New next month coming up on Radio 3: three new pieces, commissioned as part of the New Music 20x12 for the Cultural Olympiad, and others can be heard on Radio 3’s Hear and Now this Saturday.

Anna Meredith’s HandsFree will be performed by the National Youth Orchestra, whilst Sally Beamish’s Spinal Chords, with actress Juliet Stevenson as narrator, is played by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment . The Manchester Chorale and Black Dyke Mills Band perform Luke Carver Goss’ Pure Gold: a 4X4 Relay Race, with the inimitable tones of Ian Macmillan (he of The Verb fame) narrating.

Also in the programme: Harrison Birtwistle and Colin Matthews.

At Sounds New next month, Sally Beamish’s Kyle: song for solo piano can be heard in a lunchtime concert on Thursday 10 May, whilst Harrison Birtwistle’s Grimethorpe Aria is performed by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band in Canterbury Cathedral on Saturday 12 May.

Here’s Sally Beamish talking about the inspiration behind Spinal Chords.

The Hear and Now programme will then be available on iPlayer for a week.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 18th Apr 2012

This year, the education arm of Sounds New presents ‘All for One,’ a series of three concerts at St Peter’s Methodist Church, Canterbury, which brings new music to children and families, along with fun and a few surprises!

The series kicks off on May 4 with Merlin’s Tale, a brand new work for seated audience by composer John Perfect. Groups will prepare short passages of music to be performed on the day together with the composer and Peter Cook, Sounds New’s education project leader. Both performers and audience take part, acting as music-makers and listeners all together, in what promises to be an interesting occasion!

The second concert on May 8 is a load of junk – literally! – as it involves instruments made from junk and ‘idiophones,’ instruments which vibrate. Performers involved in this event will also receive free tickets to the Joby Burgess concert with Powerplant, an exciting event in which master-percussionist Joby will be performing on similar instruments himself.

The third and final concert, part of the Sounds New Roadshow on Thursday 10 May, features Christchurch University students performing pieces with extended techniques by contemporary composers. This will be an entertaining look at how instruments are ingeniously used by composers and performers with new tricks to fantastic effect: prepare to be amazed!

Later there's a day of creative mayhem on Sunday 13 May, as Sounds New celebrates worldwide Mother's Day at the Gulbenkian Theatre with music, drama, art and more: details about that event to follow.

Sounds New offers opportunities for people of any age, background or ability to explore music through performance, listening and composition, and this is your opportunity to take part!  These three concerts are aimed at younger people but we also encourage friends, family and the general public to come too and enjoy new music. And costing only £1 per person, this is a terrific opportunity to find out how new music can be exciting, fun, and a wonderful chance to participate.

See all the educational and outreach events at Sounds New online here.

For more details, or to take part, contact Peter Cook at petercook@soundsnew.org.uk and see how children and families can be excited by new music too...

Posted on: 17th Apr 2012

Coming to Sounds New on 9 May, Powerplant, led by percussionist Joby Burgess, represents a kaleidoscope of percussion, electronics and multi-media.

I first came across Powerplant in the form of the novel twist Burgess provided on Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint. Originally written for jazz-guitarist Pat Metheny, with Metheny playing against pre-recorded multi-tracks of guitar and bass guitar lines to create Reich’s trademark tapestry of interlocking sounds, I approached a percussive incarnation of the piece with some trepidation; but played on Burgess’ trademark ‘xylosynth,’ it remains true to the spirit of Reich’s vision whilst providing an interesting sonic and visual alternative take on Reich’s pulsating work:

Burgess recently gave the premiere of Gabriel Profiev’s Concerto for Bass Drum:

I caught up with Joby ahead of his imminent tour with Peter Gabriel (a busy performing calendar means Joby is fitting the concert for Sounds New in between gigs in Germany and Poland!), and put a few questions to him.

Tell us about Powerplant

I formed Powerplant in 2005 to perform and develop music using live electronics and live looping, although a percussionist I have always been a bit of a studio rat, needing to find the latest toy, box or noise. The group generally tours as a trio with myself playing a mixture of drums, percussion, found objects and a xylosynth, alongside Matthew Fairclough handling the sound design and Kathy Hinde creating film and live visuals, to create a truly multimedia experience.  Powerplant has recorded two studio albums Electric Counterpoint - the music of Steve Reich and Kraftwerk (2008) and Import/Export - Gabriel Prokofiev's suite for global junk (2010), Powerplant has performed extensively throughout the UK and given performances in Europe and the USA.

What excites you about contemporary music ?

 I am lucky to spend nearly all of my time working with composers, song-writers and improvisers in creating and bringing to the world at large new music and performances.  I am not interested in the label it might be given, as long as the music is good and has honest intentions.  Over the past two years, I have spent much time working with a range of artists including Peter Gabriel, Gabriel Prokofiev, Graham Fitkin, Adrian Utley and Will Gregory.

Tell us about your concert for Sounds New next month

 For Sounds New Powerplant will present recently developed music for the group including Conlon Nancarrow's Piece for Tape - an early pre-pianola experiment arranged for drums and blocks by composer Dominic Murcott, Matthew Fairclough's The Boom and The Bap - a piece for drum set and and live electronics exploring the world of break beats and Max de Wardener's 2011 commission 24 Lies Per Second - a suite of pieces inspired by the films and words of Austrian director Michael Haneke, including a particularly special mash-up of Schubert's Im Dorfe from the Piano Teacher. Alongside these Powerplant plays its two major commissions from late 2008, Graham Fitkin's Chain of Command and Gabriel Prokofiev's suite for global junk Import/Export.

Find out more about the concert for Sounds New online here.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 15th Apr 2012

I was reminded of the title of Bruce Weber’s documentary on the life of Chet Baker when reading John Terauds' feature on Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach on his vibrant blog, ‘Musical Toronto’ recently. The Glass-Wilson libretto-less opera is being given its Canadian première in June this year, and Terauds asks if the work’s success is in part due to the fact that, as an audience, there is nothing that we have to understand in the work: as Wilson himself has apparently said, it’s ‘a work where you can go and get lost.’

As Terauds observes, ''I wonder how many people who buy tickets for a new piece of music or theatre, or who buy a novel from a first-time author — any situation where one can’t see beyond the curtain or the cover until the act of engaging with the creator(s) has begun — are able to commit such a leap of faith?''

In an age of high consumerism, where buyers demand value for money, contemporary art and contemporary music in particular can be a risky venture; putting on contemporary works and premières, launching new commissions, and performing new repertoire does seem to ask potential audiences to trust that they will be experiencing something worthwhile, something valuable which will widen their cultural horizons. There’s perhaps a feeling that, if consumers don’t know what they will be getting, then they’ll be unwilling to risk investing in a ticket for a concert when they aren’t familiar with the actual product beforehand. There is a certain sense in this: as purchasers, we don’t want to waste our money on something if we are unsure what it will provide; instead, we turn to those products with which we are already familiar, safe in the knowledge that we know what we’re in for, and that we like it.

But being uncertain about a concert, about a new piece, or about a new composer, can also be terrifically exciting. Instead of hearing the same old warhorse from the Austro-Germanic  symphonic tradition that you’ve heard before, and instead of knowing in advance the range of emotional highs and lows that you customarily experience during a piece, your emotional spectrum is now a blank canvas, waiting to receive a new work and be led through a previously unchartered  emotional landscape. With familiar works, you know that you’ll cry at that phrase, or start getting excited at that point where the brass come in, or that a particular chord or harmonic passage will make your heart stop; but with a new work, you don’t know where the music will take you.

Sometimes, you listen to pieces with which you are familiar because you want that emotional experience you know that piece provides. For me, it’s a particular phrase in Gabriel Jackson’s gloriously colourful motet O sacrum con vivium, for instance, that occurs four times, growing louder with each repetition until I find it overwhelming; the slow and stately opening to the final movement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, with hypnotic piano chords and that yearning violin;

Or there’s the open horn-chord and urgent strings ostinato that kick-starts Walton’s First Symphony, or the ‘Infernal Dance’ in Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite that thrums with the menace of deep-throbbing strings and timpani, both of which immediately set the pulse racing. I turn to these pieces when I feel ready to experience the emotional odyssey they offer.

But there’s a sense of excitement in the new as well. In return for surrendering your certainty, there’s the potential for undergoing a new emotional experience, the chance to revel in a new sound-world and be taken both aurally and emotionally across a new, unchartered landscape. It may well require, as Terauds puts it, a ‘leap of faith;’ but the rewards can be worth it.

Come to Sounds New next month, or indeed to any music festival or concert offering the chance to hear new work; surrender your certainty, and be prepared for a new experience. You won’t be disappointed.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 13th Apr 2012

Wild, punchy and exhilarating, I first came across the music of Tansy Davies when she unleashed her Wild Card at the Proms in 2010, when a brooding bass clarinet skulked around the back of the texture in her brilliant orchestral piece. The work represents a journey through a deck of Tarot cards, and the opening ‘Devil’ card is full of implied menace as the bass clarinet looms and lurks underneath the orchestra.

Her music combines a brash and vibrant sound with strong jazz/funk-inflected rhythms in a manner reminiscent of her compatriot and 'Bad Boy' of British music, Mark-Anthony Turnage. Her spectrum of influences is huge, ranging from the chameleon of pop, Prince, to Ligetti, a vast deck contributing to an eclectic style which revels in its steadfast refusal to sit in a neat pigeon-hole.

Written for the Composers Ensemble, and first performed not a million miles away from Canterbury at the Dockyard Church, Chatham, her piece Neon is a lively, funky piece with that lurking bass clarinet again shadowing a punchy rhythmic feel, skirling Eastern-sounding woodwind lines and bristling with spiky electronic textures, like an updating of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, all combining to create a compulsive listening experience something akin to that of the devilish Chamber Symphony by John Adams.

Here’s an interview with the composer herself at the launch of her album ‘Troubairitz’ on the Nonclassical label in March last year.

Tansy’s piece Feather and Groove comes to Sounds New at the lunchtime concert with the COMA London Ensemble on Sunday 6 May, in a programme also including works by Michael Nyman and Jonathan Harvey: details online here.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 12th Apr 2012

George Benjamin’s At First Light comes to Sounds New on Friday 4 May, with the London Sinfonietta conducted by Diego Masson.

Written in 1982 for a fourteen-piece chamber orchestra, the work was inspired by JMW Turner’s painting Norham Castle: Sunrise. The piece was a commission from the London Sinfonietta, received the day after he had made his compositional Proms debut with a performance of Ringed by the Flat Horizon in 1980 at the tender age of twenty, making him the youngest-ever composer to be performed at the Proms.

An evocation of the emergence of the dawn, the piece is as richly-hued in both instrumental texture and timbral gesture as Turner’s painting is in colour-bound effects. The beautiful tone-colours at the beginning of the following excerpt (the last seven minutes) are ravishing in the extreme, almost impressionistic in their voluptuous, sensuous colouristic feel (mute trumpets and added-note minor chords make it sound almost Gil Evans-like at one point), building towards the climactic brass, piccolo and tam-tam cry towards the end, before a filigree-textured repeated gesture bursts into a shimmering, brash cry from brass and strings to bring an astonishing piece to its conclusion.

Ivan Hewitt, writing in the Telegraph at Benjamin’s fiftieth-birthday celebration concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall two years ago, observed that ‘Benjamin is a composer who keeps growing. We haven't heard the best of him yet.’ Surely an exciting prospect.

The concert at Sounds new on 4 May also features Maxwell Davies’ Mirror of Whitening Light and works by Oliver Knussen, Simon Bainbridge and others. Time to get very excited indeed.

See details of the complete concert online here.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 11th Apr 2012

One of the composers featuring in the Powerplant concert at Sounds New next month on Wednesday 9 May, composer Max de Wardener can be heard on Late Junction on Radio 3 tomorrow night.

A bass-player, composer, and graduate of the University of York and the Guildhall, de Wardener has written for film and television, and builds his own percussion instruments. Commissions have included works for the Elysian String Quartet and the London Symphony Orchestra, and he was one of four composers to be commissioned to write a new work in celebration of the 150^th anniversary of the National Portrait Gallery.

Featuring cellist Oliver Coates in compositions using modified instruments, de Wardener can be heard in a session recorded exclusively for Late Junction.  He has previously appeared on Radio 3 on the former series Mixing It, back in 2005.

The broadcast will then be available on iPlayer for a week. Read more about de Wardener in a profile from the King’s Place website here.

De Wardener and Powerplant will be at Sounds New on 9 May: find out more here.

Posted by Daniel Harding

Posted on: 10th Apr 2012

Sunday Mass at Canterbury Cathedral on 6 May features music by Jonathan Dove and Gabriel Jackson, both of whom have become stalwarts of contemporary British choral composition.

Dove’s musical language is at once vibrantly new and yet instantly accessible in a way that doesn’t compromise its individuality or descend into the saccharine. At home whether writing for the opera-house, community music projects or church services (his sublime Three Kings was commissioned for the 2000 Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s), compositions such as And The Day manage to sound at once modern and yet ageless. His Passing of the Year has become a popular addition to repertoire for large chorus, with its scintillating tonal colours, vibrant rhythms and lucid word-painting unfolding in a song-cycle depicting the changing seasons.

Amongst Dove’s choral works, his Seek  Him That Maketh the Seven Stars is a highly dramatic piece, with a dancing ostinato figure, which arranges a pentatonic chord into a sequence of rising fourths, in the organ depicting the shining stars, and an urgently repeating figure at the words ‘Seek Him’ from the choir. The piece exploits the tonal ambiguity inherent in a pentatonic set; initially organised to suggest A minor, by the end the set is re-aligned to create a tonal centre of C major, a brighter sonority reflecting the text as it turns ‘the shadow of Death into morning.’

A former chorister at Canterbury Cathedral himself, Gabriel Jackson has been composer-in-residence with the BBC Singers, for whom he has written such luminous pieces as the vivacious To Music and the quixotic Aeroplane Cantata for chorus and player-piano, an ode to the development of flight from Icarus to the aeroplane that, in its blistering, crazed player-piano accompaniment, is reminiscent of the music of Conlon Nancarrow.  Jackson’s exquisite setting of O Sacrum con vivium, which is being performed at the event, is a masterclass in the slow unfolding of text, clothed with a beautifully sustained tonal language.

Jackson’s musical language is instantly recognisable, and his evocative harmonic palette has contributed to his rising star in the world of choral composition. His Edinburgh Mass, commissioned by St Mary’s Cathedral, combines plainsong-style monody with Scotch-snap inflections, rich harmonic colours and deft gestural writing.

The opportunity to hear pieces by both composers next month, in the majestic setting of Canterbury Cathedral, promises to be a memorable occasion.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 7th Apr 2012

There’s a very moving Guardian interview with Jonathan Harvey, whose music was the subject of a  ‘Total Immersion’ celebration at the Barbican back in January, in which the composer reflects on his opera, Wagner Dream, written in 2007. He talks about the twin poles of his musical and spiritual selves: Wagner and the philosophy of Buddhism.

"I love Wagner's music. …When I was a teenager, that was what obsessed me, to discover how Wagner created these other places, these visions, in his music, to find where that power came from."

The concept of other places and visions is a thread that has run through Harvey’s compositional life, from his early days with Messiaen, his work at IRCAM, and to the most recent works which seem to look beyond this life to the promise of a transcendent afterlife.

Following an invitation from Boulez to work at IRCAM, Harvey has worked with electronics and live sound; his experiments with electro-acoustic music at IRCAM led to Mortuos plango, vivos voco, in which the sampled sounds of a boy treble (Harvey’s own son) and the tenor bell at Winchester Cathedral are subjected to a series of electronic transformations, such that the treble whizzes around and eventually becomes a part of the bell-sound; the entire pitch-set of the piece being derived from the thirty-three partials in the bell spectrum (Harvey writes about the piece here):

and a swathe of works in which electronic manipulation of live sounds becomes an additional sonic tapestry to the music (he is often cited by Spectralist composers, for whom sound is the pre-eminent aspect of composition, as a composer whose work hovers on the brink of spectral music). Harvey’s ravishing orchestra-meets-electronics soundworld is apparent in pieces such as the Madonna of Winter and Spring.

Harvey’s profound interest in Buddhism and eastern thought has inspired pieces such as Tranquil Abiding, which is especially beautiful, with the strings articulating a falling, two-chord gesture at the beginning that seems as though the ensemble is breathing (rather like the opening of Britten's Nocturne) in a meditative fashion:

Written in 2007 and first performed in Berlin in 2008, and given its UK première in Huddersfield only last year, Harvey’s Messages turns the entire chorus into angels; from the very opening gesture, in which a dulcimer appears to draw aside a veil into another world, the piece is a  mesmerising voyage through a litany of angels’ names for chorus and orchestra.

Speakings, also melding orchestra with live eletronics, was written whilst Harvey was composer-in-association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and depicts the evolution of speech through the sound of orchestral timbres, as though the ensemble itself is learning to communicate:

Harvey’s Nataraja for flute and piano appears as part of a concert at Sounds New on Monday 7^th May.

Bhakti, an exploration of hymns of the Rig Veda for ensemble and tape, also comes to Sounds New on Friday 11 May. Immerse yourself in Harvey's evocative visions of other places next month.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 4th Apr 2012

With exactly one month until Sounds New bursts into life in Canterbury, we’ll be marking the countdown to the beginning of the festival with a series profiling performers, composers and pieces appearing throughout the season, beginning with Sir John Tavener.

John Tavener regards The Veil of the Temple ‘as the supreme achievement of my life and the most important work that I have ever composed.’ Huge in concept, and in its original form lasting for seven hours, the piece is in eight sections, or ‘circles,’ like a gigantic prayer wheel with each cycle ascending in pitch, such that the entire work represents a tonal ascent beginning and ending in C.

Since his arrival on the musical scene in the late 60’s, with his oratorio The Whale launching the birth of the London Sinfonietta, Tavener has managed to achieve the difficult task of writing modern music that has a popular appeal, as choral pieces such as Song for Athene and The Lamb attest, as well as The Protecting Veil for cello and orchestra.

Tavener’s music exists in a kind of transcendent tonal landscape, which, like the music of his deeply religious compatriot, Jonathan Harvey, seems to be hovering on the verge of revelation, of opening the door to a nether-realm towards which the music constantly yearns.

Tavener’s deeply religious convictions saw him wanting to write a pan-theological work that moves beyond one single belief to include eastern ideas; as Tavener remarks,  ‘the music was deeply influenced by orthodox vigil services, but I wanted to go beyond Christianity and embrace Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism and the religion of the American Indians.’

Tavener’s vision for the entire piece is profoundly all-embracing:

''By the act of writing The Veil I understood that no single religion could be exclusive. The Veil has become light – there is no longer any veil. This tearing away of the Veil shows that all religions are in the transcendent way inwardly united beneath their outward form.''

Scored for soloists, large orchestra and a variety of exotic instruments including temple bowls and tam-tam, the version coming to Canterbury is the version the composer made to make it more readily able to be performed.

It’s become somewhat fashionable to deride Tavener’s music (perhaps, in part, a side-effect of his music’s popular appeal) as a sort of ‘Holy Minimalism,’ a glibly dismissive term which conveniently overlooks the profound convictions that have shaped Tavener’s writing and given them an unshakeable integrity. Tavener’s musical language may have a simplicity, almost a naivety, compared to the more complicated tonality of other modern composers,  or indeed since his own more avant-garde works from the 1970s, but that should in no way detract from the wonderful translucency of his harmonic language. His music is capable both of an almost diaphanous delicacy as well as impassioned outpouring, each an aspect of his musical vision.

The performance of this epic work in the reverential surroundings of Canterbury Cathedral on Friday 11 May will surely be a memorable occasion; the composer himself will be present.

To whet your appetite for Tenebrae’s performance at the Cathedral, here’s the choir performing Tavener’s intimate and timeless motet, The Lamb.

*citations from the composer’s own website here.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 2nd Apr 2012

We’re delighted to reveal that Sounds New has been shortlisted in two categories for the 2012 Canterbury Culture Awards.

Set up in 2011, the awards are a way of celebrating the vast spectrum of cultural activities, talent, organisations and individuals working in the east Kent area, and recognising the array of events that makes Kent an exciting cultural centre.

The awards ceremony last year brought together artists, local businesses, philanthropists and arts supporters, in celebrating the cultural diversity at the heart of the area.

This year, we’ve been shortlisted for two awards; the East Kent People’s Award

For a cultural organisation in East Kent which demonstrates engagement with its local community, popularity across the region and continuing efforts in developing existing and new audiences.

and also for the Destination Canterbury Award

For an organisation, group or individual who has done most in the last twelve months to raise the profile of the District’s cultural offering regionally, nationally and internationally.

Manager of the Sounds New Festival, Michelle Castelletti, is very excited about the nominations, in particular for the way it recognises this part of the country’s status as a hotbed of contemporary culture.

‘’Situated in the beautiful city of Canterbury, ‘’ observes Michelle, ‘’Sounds New occupies a unique place in the promotion of contemporary classical music in the south-east of England. To have such a hub of contemporary music available in east Kent, under an hour’s train from London, has certainly proved Canterbury’s status as a centre for music and culture.’’

Looking at the array of organisations and individuals with whom Sounds New is rubbing shoulders on the list, it’s clear that we are a part of a large and vibrant artistic community; the new Marlowe Thatre, the Turner Contemporary at Margate, two concrete and tangible manifestations of Kent’s widening cultural and economic presence.  

Here’s the Chair for Canterbury Culture, Tim LeLean, talking about the ethos behind the cultural awards.

Voting for the awards will take place on the Culture Awards website on Thursday 12 April, with the awards ceremony taking place on 21 June. Luck to everyone who has been nominated: come back and vote on April 12!

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 28th Mar 2012

Coming to Sounds New this season on Wednesday 9 May in the Powerplant concert, Graham Fitkin is also one of the composers associated with this year’s London Olympic Games and the New Music 20x12 project. 

His piece Track to Track: the Athlon premièred at the Cadogan Hall last Thursday, performed by the Fitkin Band and the London Chamber Orchestra, setting words by the poet Glyn Maxwell. The piece was written to be broadcast on the 'Javelin' train, as it travels between King's Cross and the Olympic arena.

The New Music 20×12 project has commissioned a twelve-minute piece from each of twenty British composers, including Jason Yarde, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Sally Beamish and Howard Skempton, with the latter’s Five Rings Triples launching the project when it rang out over the rooftops of Kingston-upon-Thames in Surrey on New Year’s Eve. 

Fitkin’s music is full of vibrant energy, bright textural writing and a punchy rhythmic sense that drives the music onwards in an exciting, exuberant  fashion, whether it's the robust quartet-writing of Vent, the orchestral shimmying of Bebeto, the percussion power-play that is Hook or the multi-piano texture of Loud:

There’ll be more about Graham Fitkin on the blog here later, in a preview of the Powerplant concert in which his Chain of Command will be performed: in the meantime, here’s the composer talking about his Olympic piece:

Track to Track will be pulling in to St Pancras on June 27. Don’t miss Chain of Command on May 9 at Sounds New.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 26th Mar 2012

The Barbican’s 2012-13 season, announced several weeks ago, has an exciting crop of premières, contemporary works and ‘Total Immersion’ series on the horizon.

There’s an intriguing mixed bag this October in an eclectic-looking individual concert that includes American wunderkind Nico Muhly, wide-ranging pianist Joanna Macgregor, British saxophonist Andy Sheppard, and a première from Scotland’s James Macmillan.

Also appearing at Sounds New this May, Mark-Anthony Turnage will be taking up a residency at the Barbican in February next year; expect his dynamic mix of shrieking textures, in-your-face gestures and vibrant rhythms.

The ‘Total Immersion’ series of festivals, which has recently featured Jonathan Harvey, Brett Dean, and will be featuring Arvo Pärt soon, continues;  one event looks to the East with an evocative-looking concert including works by Toru Takemitsu, Dai Fujikura and Toshio Hosokawa; another set of events will focus on Oliver Knussen at 60, and there’s also New from the North with Nørgård and others.

Tippett’s symphonic vision of old age, mixing orchestra with the sampled sound of breathing, the Symphony no.4, will be realised under the baton of Andrew Davis, and there’s also a new piece from David Sawer.

The ‘LSO Futures Week’ will focus on the music of Tansy Davies, also appearing at Sounds New this year, whose excellent Wild Card revelled in some devilish textures and skulking bass-clarinet gestures when it appeared at the Proms in 2010; the same Week also features Jason Yarde in a programme which also includes John Adams’ brash  Chamber Symphony, and Stravinsky’s Cubist Symphonies of Wind Instruments, and there’s also a new work by Colin Matthews alongside Boulez’s Notations.

There’s plenty more to get excited about as well: see all the events in the season here.

Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 24th Mar 2012

There's an exciting programme of modern works and premières at this year's Edinburgh International Festival, for which tickets have gone on sale today.

An intriguing series of programmes from the London Symphony Orchestra and Gergiev sees pairings of Szymanowski and Brahms; the Cleveland Orchestra under Wesler-Möst in Lutoslawksi's Concerto for Orchestra; and there's a première from James Macmillan; the European Youth Orchestra perform Debussy's evocative Nocturnes alongside a new work by Richard Causton; and the CBSO bring Sofia Gubaidulina's Violin Concerto.

There's a handful of contemporary opera as well, with Macmillan's Clemency, a double-bill of Huw Watkins and Stuart Macrae with two short one-act operas; and film composer Craig Armstrong's The Lady from the Sea.

Full details of all the music and operatic events are on-line here.

It promises to be an exciting time: good luck to our counterparts north of the Wall for this year!

 Posted by Daniel Harding.

Posted on: 22nd Mar 2012

There was an expectant audience and an eager buzz at last night’s gathering to launch this year’s Sounds New Festival. The majestic atrium of Augustine House was abuzz with visitors and distinguished guests leafing through this year’s new brochure, hunting for favourite composers, major works or big-name performers coming to Canterbury this May.

The welcome address from Ian Odgers, Chairman of the Board of Directors, reflected on the importance of Sounds New as a means of enhancing the status of Canterbury and east Kent as a cultural mecca, and its contribution to boosting the region’s economic performance. Together with the Deal and Canterbury Festivals, the three events form a complementary alliance that makes this part of the country a vibrant cultural attraction.

Artistic Director, Paul Max Edlin (pictured) followed in his own inimitable fashion by highlighting the fact that, as well as presenting cutting-edge music and high-profile performers, the Festival is also about having fun, with its enhanced educational projects and outreach events; as he wryly observed, it’s that rare thing, ‘contemporary music with a sense of humour.’ He also reminded the guests that Sounds New is also about nurturing the music of the future, about helping up-and-coming composers and performers to establish themselves; ‘after all,’ he observed dryly, ‘musicians also need to eat.’

After the Sheriff of Canterbury had also welcomed the launch, and having duly refreshed their glasses, the assembled crowd was then ushered into Augustine Hall, which had been transformed into the dimly-lit atmosphere of a night-club, with a hushed audience seated around tables by flickering candlelight, for the festival’s first major performance: Death’s Cabaret, with cellist Matthew Sharp and the Sacconi Quartet.

A cultural mélange of drama, music, monologue, song and movement, the piece represents a tour de force for the solo cellist, who is obliged to be raconteur, instrumentalist, actor, singer and all-round dramatic performer. Ranging from a concerto grosso-style dialogue with the string quartet to folk-singer and actor, Matthew Sharp proved himself an extraordinary performer, rising to the challenge of delivering across the range of disciplines required.

As the story of a successful performer who loses his confidence after being criticised for his ‘lack of connection’ with the music, and who subsequently descends into a personal nightmare cycle of sex and death, the piece comes across as a cross between an instrumental concerto and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. But the aspect of connecting with audiences, with the music, is itself a reflection of exactly what Sounds New is all about: connecting listeners with music of today, of now, and widening the audiences who are connecting with contemporary music through performances, education projects, even through the BBC (through its partnership with the BBC, who record and broadcast events from the Festival, Sounds New reaches over a million listeners). As a dramatic realisation of Sounds New’s mission, Death’s Cabaret was the ideal vehicle with which to launch this year’s programme.

Posted by Daniel Harding

Photos © Peter Cook / Sounds New

Posted on: 21st Mar 2012

Many people are put off of classical music because of the apparent anachronism in the very label used to define it, believing it to refer largely to that body of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. In this light, classical music can appear to have no contemporary relevance; it has no meaning to today's cultural consumers, and is interesting only as a museum piece, or something that advertisers and marketing companies can employ as shorthand to imply a product or service has value or a sense of historic worth.

In a society where the twin pincers of advertising and fashion are prodding consumers to be au courant with the latest trends, and doing their very best to make us feel out of touch and falling behind if we aren't, then under such values, classical music will of course feel hopelessly anachronistic.

 But classical music has actually always been about keeping up with the newest trends. When English composers were first confronted with the latest compositional styles coming out of Italy in 1588, in the publication Musica Transalpina, there was a whole-scale adoption of the new Italianate styles as English composers fought to bring themselves dramatically up to speed. Bach travelled to Lübeck in order to hear Buxtehude, Handel travelled to Florence, Mozart to Rome; composers wanted to make sure they were in touch with contemporary compositional styles. Part of the reason for the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cultural odyssey known as the ‘Grand Tour’ was not only to widen one's cultural horizons and learn aspects of European art and languages; it was also to experience some of the latest music emerging on the Continent, to make aspiringly worldly citizens informed about contemporary culture and able to be entertaining at dinner-parties and in conversation.

Composition has always been about forging a unique and personal language, about charting new landscapes; Stravinsky's Rite of Spring wasn't about regurgitating received musical forms. And even when music has concerned itself with previous styles, as neo-Classicism sought to deploy the clarity of language and formal organisation from the Classical era as a means of revivifying a music reeling from its own destructiveness in the post- World War One era, it still sought to present those ideas in a way which informed contemporaneous musical developments, which could clarify them; it wasn't simply seeking refuge in models inherited from the past.

What remains exciting about classical music is its continual desire to address contemporary issues with a contemporary language, as with John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer.

Fighting to escape the hide-bound strictures beloved of music historians and commentators with their neat pigeon-holes, classical composition has been dealt a poor hand, one which has not only confused people but also driven them away, into the waiting, eager yet unfaithful arms of pop music which rejects yesterday in favour of tomorrow. Pop music, by its very essence, thrives on the up-to-date, the 'popular'' to the extent that it has little concern for fidelity amongst its consumers, casting aside artists in its desperation to make money from the latest trend before its marketability expires.

Like that other musical genre that is all about invention, creativity, and the quest for something new - jazz - contemporary classical music searches for the point at which new ideas meet a new expressive means. Both contemporary classical and jazz music revel in the white-heat of creativity, the explosive interaction between concepts and narratives waiting to be articulated and the innovative language used to do so. Perhaps we simply need to find another term for it, one which captures this excitement, this desire for innovation and the drive to create something new.

Modern music may be challenging and demanding. But it’s always about what’s new, what’s happening now, as this year’s Sounds News programme of events so amply demonstrates. Don't forget to be excited by contemporary music too.

Posted by Daniel Harding.