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Sunday 19 November 3.00-11.00pm
Piano Circus - multi-media

The Round Chapel, Hackney  £12/£8 concessions

Piano Circus 6 keyboards
plus: David Stevens, live Sound sampling and sound refraction;
Lawrence Ball & Dave Snowdon, harmonic colour computer graphics & projection

Programme

3.00 pm (and periodically, throughout the event)
David Stevens, sound sources/sampling, computer

Piano Circus performances

4.00 pm-4.45 pm
Regimentas Petronis Reminiscences

5.30 pm-6.00 pm
Steve Reich Six Pianos

7.30 pm-9.15 pm
Lawrence Ball Gong Piano no.8*
Erkki Sven-Tuur Transmission***
Martyn Harry New Work*S;
Nancarrow Player Piano Study no.5 (arr.David Appleton, for 6 keyboards)***
Patrick Nunn 21st Century Junkie (festival commission)*
Interval
Terry Riley Keyboard Studies no.2 (arr. Richard Harris)

9.30 pm-10.45 pm
Jean Catoire Symphony no.41, op.280 (arr.Richard Harris)*

* World premiere
*** London premiere

Food and refreshments will be available throughout this event

Performers

Piano Circus was formed in 1989 to bring high quality, dynamic new music performance to a wide audience. The group performs either on six acoustic grands or six digital pianos, together with specially designed lighting, live MIDI, video and amplification. Piano Circus combines the dynamism of the best rock and electronica with the precision of the contemporary classical tradition in a performance with wide appeal.
Piano Circus began with a performance of Steve Reich's classic Six Pianos, and has since created a varied repertoire of over 60 pieces, including works by leading composers such as Brian Eno, Terry Riley, Kevin Volans, Julia Wolfe, Louis Andriessen, Erkki-Sven Tuur, Nikki Yeoh and Future Sound Of London. Piano Circus has recorded seven CDs for Decca/ARGO, including a performance of Les Noces (Stravinsky) conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy; last year the group released the first CD on its own label.
The group performs throughout the UK and internationally, including appearances at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Bath International Festival, the Enchanted Garden Festival, the Hong Kong and Singapore Festivals, NYYD festival (Estonia), Musica Ficta Festival (Lithuania), the CREA Festival and 38eme Rugissants Festival (France) and in Canada, the USA, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Events this season have included appearances at Sadlers Wells with Pete Townshend, at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan, a British Council tour of Indonesia and as part of the first BMIC "Cutting Edge" series in London. Following a successful tour of Scotland in March Piano Circus appeared at the Istanbul Festival, the Stoke Newington Festival and at Dartington International Summer School.
In summer 2000 Piano Circus will release the second CD in its own label series; co-produced by the ensemble, the CD includes a stunning selection of the best work written for the ensemble over the past five years. Later in the year the group will be collaborating on a piece commissioned from the renowned music/theatre director Heiner Goebbels.
Piano Circus has made numerous radio and TV appearances including BBC's The Score, What's that noise?, The Late Show, Radio 3 In Tune, Mixing it, Radio 4 Kaleidoscope, World Service International Recital and Meridian, as well as appearances on Classic FM and numerous stations worldwide. Features on Piano Circus have appeared in The Independent, The Guardian, Time Out, BBC Music Magazine, The Wire, Scotland on Sunday, Classical Music.
Piano Circus has a strong commitment to music education and has developed a range of new approaches to the teaching of composition and performance techniques using the latest MIDI and computing technology. The programme has recently included regular sessions for local school and community groups in Hackney, events for the Stoke Newington and Vale of Glamorgan Festivals, workshops for university students in Indonesia, composition and technology sessions with adult amateur musicians and workshops for London music colleges.
Piano Circus has a studio base in Hackney, east London, with recording, rehearsal and workshop facilities. Piano Circus is supported financially by the London Arts Board. In 1997 the company received a National Lottery capital award for the purchase of a portable studio.

'If you are cynical about modern music, go along and be amazed.'
The Scotsman, 20.03.00

Dave Snowdon Dave Snowdon is a research at Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble, France. He obtained his Ph.D. from Manchester University in the field of multi-user virtual reality (VR). His research focusses on human-computer interaction, novel user interfaces, large scale multi-user virtual environments and visualising abstract information. Since 1996 he has also explored the artistic possibilties of 3D graphics and virtual environments and was involved in two public performances using VR technology in Nottingham in 1996 and 1997. He has also a strong interest in music and plays the guitar. This is his first public collaboration with Lawrence Ball.

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 will intersperse concert music by Piano Circus with sets of created background soundscapes that will immerse everyone before and after each set of performed music in a field of resonant circles of natural and processed sounds.

Composers

Regimentas Petronis

Steve Reich

Patrick Nunnsee links below

Lawrence Ball is a composer, improviser and audio-visual artist, and has written for dance, film, orchestra and choir as well as electronic and computer music. He has written over 130 scores and recorded over 1500 improvisations. He addresses primarily meditative state-of-mind and healing presence in creating music having had strong realisations and breakthroughs in the 1970s, steering him in a very different direction from most other composers at that time. His is one of the broadest scopes of any composer.

Martyn Harry see links below

Erkki-Sven Tuur (b.1959) is one of the most talented of his generation of Estonian composers. His unique style is, in part, an expression of his unusual route to composition. He began his career as a chamber rock musician in the group he himself formed called In Spe, later training to be a composer. A musical polymath who not only composes but also sings and plays percussion, piano and flute, Tuur attended the Tallinn Conservatoire, where he developed an interest in both American minimalism and the post-serialists.
It is possible to find many influences in his music - reflections of early polyphony as well as modern linear counterpoint, improvisatory passages and strictly controlled texture, elements of serial techniques and microtonality. His works reflect this diversity. Tuur has developed an original technique; he opposes diatonic with chromatic sound blocks, 'fixed' versus 'racing' time, and indeed, the hallmark of his music is the confrontation between different elements where the attempted synthesis remains suffused with tension. Transmission was commissioned by the Vale of Glamorgan Festival for performance by Piano Circus.

Conlon Nancarrow was born in Arkansas in the USA, studying with Walter Piston and Roger Sessions. His early professional years were spent as a jazz trumpeter before his relocation to Mexico City in 1940 and relative isolation as a musician. Troubled by the shortcomings of human performers, Nancarrow's largest body of work consists of several dozen 'studies' written for pianola or 'player piano'.

Terry Riley

Jean Catoire is a reclusive prolific composer of a unique kind of sacred music whose full importance has yet to be recognised. Born in Paris in 1923 and nephew of the Russian composer Georges Catoire (1861-1926), Catoire was a student of Olivier Messiaen and the conductor Leon Barzin. The composer eventually rejected the aesthetics of Messiaen in favour of those of Bartok and Hindemith. From this point on he marginalised himself within the fashionable French musical circles. He found himself drawn to an altogether different sacred mysticism from Messiaen's and between 1948 and 1955 wrote more than 30 choral religious works. By the late 1950s his music was becoming increasingly stripped of embellishment to the point where it was anticipating the minimalist music of the late 1960s. Thus his first creative period (102 works of which 24 were destroyed) closed followed by two years of silence (1959-60). The second creative period (1961+) consists of 502 opuses for every standard instrumental and vocal combination plus works for synthesizer and Tibetan bowls. The volume is even greater when one considers that most of the works are over 30 minutes long, many lasting much longer (a few could continue up to 12 hours). Because he had to devote himself to much teaching and because of the labour and energy it took to write down what he calls his "auditive visions" (the works are seen, not heard), he had no time left to promote performances of his music. He realised too that musicians would be reluctant to play music that seemingly left no room for ordinary expressiveness. If one had to identify his sacred phenomenon of sound world with that of an established composer, it would be the music of Arvo Part. Suffering from ill health, he remains in Paris, doing some teaching and preparing his voluminous essays on the phenomenon of sound and other esoteric subjects for future publication.
Catoire, who does not claim the title of "composer" but rather "transcriber", has stated that his works "......were realised with the objective of revealing sound in its pure state before it has passed through the filter of musical conception. The works are a juxtaposition of sounds characterised by a synthesis of structure and regular rhythmical values in a dynamic continuum, thereby creating elemental forms which represent the anterior, pre-sound values before their integration into any kind of musical conception or mould. This phenomenon of sound gives birth to a different sense of time and duration; it also lends to the structural elements a value and dimension beyond anything one finds in 'music' so-called."

Notes

Reminiscences (1996)
I. viderunt omnes
II. notum fecit dominus
III. salutare sum
Reminiscences was originally written for Steve Reich in 1994, and was then arranged for Piano Circus following his recomeendation of the ensemble. It is a three movement piece inspired by and based on the 12th century work viderunt omnes by Perotin. viderunt omnes is one of the earliest examples of musical polyphony - some say the earliest - and Reminiscences attempts to capture the essence of both the harmony and contrapuntal texture of this formative piece by using the resonant capabilities of six pianos. The piece is dedicated to my friends Piano Circus.
Regimentas Petronis

Music for Six Pianos:

Gong Piano no.8 (1977/1994): This piece was adapted for Piano Circus from its 1977 version (no.1) when it was for piano sounds and tape splicing. The same 16 chord progression is heard at progressive faster speeds in higher and higher octaves. The final climax fills the audio spectrum with a firmament of harmonious implosions.
Martyn Harry:New Work:

Transmission (1996):"In this piece I paid much attention to consistently changing texture and sound. The beginning concentrates on one sound (C4), then the focus shifts to a gradual filling of the sound-space within the full scope of the tessitura. Descension to the lower register follows; a brisk and intense rhythm appears, then transmission to a 12-tone material, to be followed by another super-intensive exposition of C. That could be the story of Transmission." Erkki-Sven Tuur

Player Piano Study no.5: The early studies of 1949 belie the fact that Nancarrow's musical inspiration came not only from Igor Stravinsky but Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. Study No.5 is in an altogether more abstract style than the other 'jazz-blues' studies of the late 1940's. The study consists of thirteen layers of ostinati: chords, octaves, arpeggios and (quasi) glissandi. The study was arranged during Summer 1999 and was given a first performance at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival in September of that year.

21st Century Junkie:

Keyboard Studies no.2:

Symphony no.41 (op.280):