Listen to This is a series of music concerts curated by composers. Micromusic, the second in the series, is a concert of where music is sampled, transcribed, saturated, over-amplified and held under the microscope.
Curated by Joanna Bailie and exploring how contemporary composers transform techniques borrowed from the worlds of rock and pop, the evening features three major pieces for chamber ensemble and electronics performed by Apartment House.
American composer Phill Niblock’s 5 More String Quartets features four amplified live musicians playing over a stack of overdubbed string quartet recordings. The music gradually moves towards a single note, but the volume and closeness of the sounds mean that as listeners, mysterious things begin happening in our musical imagination. Johannes Kreidler's in hyper intervals smashes expectations of remix culture, creating a rebellious union of the acoustic and electronic. Juxtaposing samples of bland, anonymous pop music with transcriptions for live acoustic instruments, the piece inhabits a strange universe bordered by pure sounds on one side and musical meaning on the other. Atopia (hyperamplified) by Yannis Kyriakides explores the relationship between loudness and distance, inspired by the sounds of sand drifting past a kitchen window in Cairo. A structure of slowly moving, delicate detuned harmonies is literally over-amplified to reveal a microworld of musical detail.
Apartment House was created by the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze in 1995. Under his Direction it has become a venerable exponent of avant-garde and experimental music from around the World.
Apartment House’s performances have included many UK and World premieres of music by a wide variety of composers. Notable portrait events have featured composers Christian Wolff, Luc Ferrari, Dieter Schnebel, Christopher Fox, Laurence Crane, Michael Parsons, James Clarke, Helmut Oehring, Clarence Barlow, David Behrman, Philip Corner, and Richard Ayres. The Apartment House ensemble is of flexible instrumentation, allowing for a vast range of performance possibilities. Apartment House has made many radio broadcasts for BBC Radio 3, Danish Radio, Swedish Radio 2, WDR Cologne, ORTF Austria and Deutschlandfunk, Berlin. www.apartmenthouse.co.uk
JOANNE BAILIE
Joanna Bailie has been living in Brussels since 2001. She studied composition with Richard Barrett, and in 1999 won a fellowship to study at Columbia University. Together with composer Matthew Shlomowitz, she is the founder and artistic director of Ensemble Plus-Minus. In May 2010 she was the guest curator at the SPOR Festival in Aarhus, Denmark. Her music has been performed by groups such as Ensemble Musikfabrik, The Nieuw Ensemble, Apartment House, The London Sinfonietta and the Ives Ensemble. She has become increasingly involved in collaborative pieces, working with choreographer Brice Leroux on his Quantum Quintet at the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts and with scenographer Christoph Ragg on a series of projects for camera obscura which culminated in the premiere of C.O. Journeys in October 2010 at the Almost Cinema Festival in Vooruit, Gent.
