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Thursday 2 November 7.30pm
Lawrence Ball - Improvisation

Burgh House  £10/£6 concessions

Lawrence Ball, piano; David Stevens, sound sources, live sampling and refraction of sound

Programme

Prior to the concert on audience arrival, and during the interval: performance by David Stevens of "Altered States" ambient sound fields.
Lawrence Ball will perform 2 sets of improvisations. This being improvisation in the complete sense where nothing formal is prepared. These will be 35-50 minutes each, punctuated by an interval.

Performers

Lawrence Ball is a versatile and innovative composer who has a multiple focus as a composer,improviser and audio-visual creator. He has collaborated with healers, therapists and counsellors as well as writing for dance, film, orchestra,and choir and is as much at home writing a score as creating electronic or computer music. He has developed techniques to deeply integrate audio and visual images with quantum physicist Michael Tusch; worked with healer/counsellor Isobel McGilvray in shaping harmonic tonescapes to aid relaxation, and has worked with choreographers/dancers (ex-Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet) Sheila Styles and (ex-Ballet Rambert) Rebecca Ham on several dance projects. Lawrence Ball has written for the pianist Yonty Solomon (2 Suites),for The Smith (string) Quartet, the Electric Symphony Orchestra, the pianist Tim Ravenscroft, the female vocal quartet Rosy Voices, and 6 pieces for the violist Robin Ireland (of the Lindsay Quartet). He has recorded over 1500 piano improvisations as well as performing many live. Ball's creating in acoustic and electronic media, in composed and improvised methods is one of the broadest of any composer. He has performed in Canada, the US, France and Germany as well as at home. He has accompanied the international painting group Collective Phenomena who work 'more than one to a canvas' with marathon keyboard improvisations, at John Calder's La Fonderie in Paris and The Blackie in Liverpool, as well as a Planet Tree appearance. Ball is a pioneer in music, having addressed meditative and healing presence and state-of-mind, primarily, for over 20 years. In 1996 he founded the Planet Tree Music Festival, which he also directs. He is also a highly sought after private tutor in mathematics, computer programming, physics and music theory. He lives in Hampstead, London.

David Stevens is one of a new breed of composers who work with sound as a material much as traditional composers work with notes. He uses acoustic source sounds which are then processed, circulated, echoed, transformed and generally leavened. The result can be, by turns, deeply entrancing, texturally awe-inspiring, or just plain highly intriguing. He has performed at various locations in Colourscape in the UK. He will intersperse concert music by Lawrence Ball with sets of created background soundscapes that will immerse everyone, before and between the piano improvisations, in a field of resonant circles of natural and processed sounds.

Notes

Improvisation Ball has improvised at the piano over 3 decades. He regards it as a means to directly and gently stir the deeper levels of consciousness, giving rise to both compositional ideas and the experience of fulsome and harmonious musical presence. He has made various discoveries through this field of exploration, one of which is that when the pulse is slowed to 10 or so beats per minute (more like a wave than a pulse) that an unusually strong atmosphere of peace is accessible. Another discovery is that when one listens with complete attention to the piano's sound it is possible to create, more from hearing the piano as a giant body of resonating strings, rather than simply as a means to create one or more parallel sequences of notes and chords. This change of attention gives rise to a music of intense dialogue between resonating and resonated pitches.