I picked up a baton again this weekend for the first time in 15 years. Having spent a lot of time as a student conducting my own ensembles or youth orchestras around West London, it wasn’t something I continued to pursue whilst I was focussed on composition. It was a joy to come back to conducting in these performances of Illusions with the London Sinfonietta for the PRS Foundation and Southbank Centre’sNew Music Biennial, also part of the Coventry City of Culture.
Illusions (my video+ensemble piece with David Hoyle) was selected as part of the celebration of the 10 year anniversary of the New Music Biennial, among ten pieces from previous years, forming a retrospective alongside the ten new pieces this year. I’m delighted about this selection, and also that the Sinfonietta generously allowed me to onto the podium. We did performances on 22nd April at the HMV Coventry Empire and on 3rd July at London’s Southbank Centre, including a lovely interview on stage with Gillian Moore. Illusions was also broadcast again on BBC Radio 3 and featured in NMC’s re-release bundle, as part of the NMB celebrations.
The photos on this post can be used for press purposes with the appropriate credits.
Some production images from the Staatsoper Hannover production of Denis & Katya, February 2022, at Ballhof Eins in Hannover. The singers were Weronika Rabek and Darwin Prakash, with cellists Reynard Rott, Gottfried Roßner, Clara Berger, Marion Zander, Killian Fröhlich and Gonçalo Silva. Direction by Ted Huffman, Music Direction by Maxim Böckelmann, Sound by Oliver Sinn and Markus Schwieger, Video by Pierre Martin, Design by Andrew Lieberman, Light by Bernd Purkrabek and Costume by Raphaela Rose. All images by Clemens Heidrich. They can be used for press purposes with the appropriate credit. Very high-resolution photos can be downloaded here.
The Dutch premiere of Denis & Katya took place on Friday at Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, as part of the Opera Forward Festival. It was performed by Inna Demenkova and Michael Wilmering, with cellists of the Residentie Orkest The Hague. Here is a selection of excerpts of press reviews for the production (machine translated), including a five-star review in Dutch newspaper, Trouw.
Illusions — my collaboration with performance artist David Hoyle — will feature in this year’s New Music Biennial retrospective at Coventry City of Culture and London’s Southbank Centre. This year’s Biennial not only features ten new works as usual, but also celebrates its first ten years with performances of ten works selected from previous Biennials.
Pittsburgh Opera has just announced its 2022/23 Season, including performances of Denis & Katya on 6th, 9th, 12th, 14th, & 20th May 2023. They will be performing the Opera Philadelphia premiere production that we made in September 2019, with direction by Ted Huffman, design and light by Andrew Lieberman, video by Pierre Martin, sound design by Rob Kaplowitz, costumes by Millie Hiibel and dramaturgy by Ksenia Ravvina. The performances will take place in the George R White Theatre at the BItz Opera Factory. Cast yet to be announced.
Some production images from the Ensemble Intercontemporain concert performance of 4.48 Psychosis, December 2021, at the Philharmonie de Paris as part of the portrait of my work in the Festival d’Automne à Paris. The ensemble was conducted by Matthias Pintscher, the singers were Gweneth-Ann Rand, Robyn Allegra Parton, Karen Bandelow, Samantha Price, Rachael Lloyd and Lucy Schaufer, with video by Pierre Martin and Mise-en-Espace by Elayce Ismail. All images by Quentin Chevrier. They can be used for press purposes with the appropriate credit.
The Festival d’Automne à Paris and Ensemble Intercontemporain gave a concert performance of 4.48 Psychosis on 16th December 2021. The concert was part of the Festival feature about my work, and took place in the Cité de la Musique in the Philharmonie de Paris. The concert featured singers Gweneth Ann Rand, Robyn Allegra Parton, Karen Bandelow, Samantha Price, Rachael Lloyd and Lucy Schaufer, and was conducted my Matthias Pintscher, with Aurélien Gignoux and Gilles Durot taking the solo percussion roles. Nicholas Berteloot and Emmanuelle Corbeau did sound design, Elayce Ismail looked after ‘mise en espace’ and lights, and Pierre Martin the video.
The Philharmonie de Paris have just released this trailer video in advance of the concert performance of 4.48 Psychosis there on Thursday 16th December with Ensemble Intercontemporain, in a co-production with the Festival d’Automne à Paris. The 9-minute video features a short interview with me about the piece, and some clips of the staged production from Strasbourg.
An article about 4.48 Psychosishas just been published in the Tempo journal of new music, written by Tom Crathorne, about the interaction between music and libretto. The full article is available here. This is the abstract:
Andreas Borregaard will perform My Favourite Piece is the Goldberg Variationsat the Transit Festival in Leuven. The strapline of the festival is “The Sound of Tomorrow”. Ted Huffman and I made this piece with Andreas during the lockdown, and it has a string of performances this year in Norway, Denmark, France and Belgium. The piece is based on interviews made with Andreas’ mother. Andreas will perform it alongside Asthma by Simon Steen-Andersen.
These pieces may be performed alongsidenumbers 76–80and/or numbers 91–95(both published by Ricordi), in which case they should be performed in sequential order.
Voice (F3 to A5) Alto Flute Clarinet in A Violin Viola Cello Projection (optional but recommended)
Programme Note
My relationship with Numbers by Simon Howard began in 2011 when I worked with two poems from the book: numbers 76–80 and numbers 91–95. Ever since, I had the intention to set more poems from the book, to gradually form a kind of loose ‘meta-piece’ of all 100 stanzas. The 2011 settings mark the beginning of my explorations of spoken text within my work, and were pivotal pieces for me in that respect. Ten years later, when the circumstances arose to be able to return to the book, I found that, having spent a decade working primarily with spoken text, I wanted to focus back on musical settings of text. To remember, if you like, how to compose. So these two pieces from numbers are just that — my attempt to get back to a more music-led setting of text, while retaining a strong relationship to the structures and ideas in Simon’s work, but hopefully refracted through a musical lens.
numbers 81–85 is a series of five episodes, each quite different from the other. In each episode I’ve tried to distill a feeling or action from the narrative of each stanza, and illustrate it in music. In numbers 96–100 the fives stanzas are taken as a single form. The form of text is mirrored through the fractured pronunciation of the words, the overall idea is of a collective meditation.
Twenty-five years ago, I learnt to play J.S. Bach’s Prelude in D minor BWV940, and ever since then, almost without exception, I play it every time I sit down at the piano to compose. It is the only piece that I can play from memory, with my poor piano skills, and playing this Prelude is a ritual that I go through every time I sit down to write. Improvisation often grows out of this prelude, from mistakes I make, or repetitions and variations. New music is catalysed from old music. This ritual for me is a way of focusing, shutting out other thoughts, clearing the mind, sparking ideas. Indeed, versions of Bach’s Prelude have appeared in a number of my pieces (Scene 19 in 4.48 Psychosis; the male chorus in The Schmürz).
I was asked by Festival d’Automne to make a sound installation for Saint Eustache, and so I decided to try to capture some of this compositional process. For around 50 days I recorded my daily ritual of playing Bach’s Prelude on the digital piano in my studio, complete with my improvisations, my mistakes, my singing, my tangents, my thoughts, improvisations and repetitions, as I sketched out a new piece (also for the Festival d’Automne) for mezzo-soprano and quintet, based on text by the late British poet Simon Howard. Using excerpts from these recordings, I have moulded a kind of ‘meta-composition session’ across 42 speakers in the church. Wander around and you will find small details of different days, but I hope that the whole effect it creates is an honest and reflective meditation on the act of composing, and my personal relationship to this Bach prelude.
The resulting installation has a very strong relation to the chamber piece numbers 96–100, also commissioned by Festival d’Automne, Festival Musica Strasbourg and Collectif Lovemusic.
Introduction from the Festival
Philip Venables got into the habit of starting his composition work by playing Bach’s Little Prelude in D minor BWV 940, which he has known since the age of fourteen and which he plays by heart, sometimes deviating from of the text following an oblique movement which takes in other directions.
For his installation at the Saint-Eustache Church, the composer recorded himself every day and for several weeks on his electronic keyboard, creating a sort of “audio diary”of the work in progress. The idea of ​​the “making” of the work and the “thinking presence” of the composer are at the center of the process, the playing and the voice of Venables letting “the wanderings of a mind and its music” filter. Thus we can discern in Venables Plays Bach this divergent path which leads to the composition of Numbers 81-85 and 96-100, parts under construction at the time of registration. Around fifty small speakers are distributed in the space of the church, broadcasting the daily recordings in a loop and at low voltage, in a soothing atmosphere conducive to listening and reflection. “Besides the sound experience,”the composer tells us, “the piece explores the depths of my intimate relationship with Bach’s prelude and constitutes a meditation on the act of composingâ€.
Technical details
The installation is a 22-minute loop that can loop indefinitely, depending on technical constraints of the speakers used. In Paris it was installed on 42 small battery-powered speakers. (Zealot S36), each running a single wave file off a micro SD card, and only roughly synchronised by technical staff. There was no unified system to synchronise the speakers. In Paris it ran in 3-hour blocks. Charging, setup, and starting the installation required two staff, as the church was very large.
The installation lends itself particularly well to very resonant acoustics, like churches. It is also connected closely to the chamber piece numbers 96–100, and would work very well as an accompanying project to a performance of that piece.
Twenty-five years ago, I learnt to play J.S. Bach’s Prelude in D minor BWV940, and ever since then, almost without exception, I play it every time I sit down at the piano to compose. It is the only piece that I can play from memory, with my poor piano skills, and playing this Prelude is a ritual that I go through every time I sit down to write. Improvisation often grows out of this prelude, from mistakes I make, or repetitions and variations. New music is catalysed from old music. This ritual for me is a way of focusing, shutting out other thoughts, clearing the mind, sparking ideas. Indeed, versions of Bach’s Prelude have appeared in a number of my pieces (Scene 19 in 4.48 Psychosis; the male chorus in The Schmürz).
I was asked by Festival d’Automne to make a sound installation for Saint Eustache, and so I decided to try to capture some of this compositional process. For around 50 days I recorded my daily ritual of playing Bach’s Prelude on the digital piano in my studio, complete with my improvisations, my mistakes, my singing, my tangents, my thoughts, improvisations and repetitions, as I sketched out a new piece (also for the Festival d’Automne) for mezzo-soprano and quintet, based on text by the late British poet Simon Howard. Using excerpts from these recordings, I have moulded a kind of ‘meta-composition session’ across 42 speakers in the church. Wander around and you will find small details of different days, but I hope that the whole effect it creates is an honest and reflective meditation on the act of composing, and my personal relationship to this Bach prelude.
In addition to the speaker installation, I was asked to provide a ‘live element’, and so on two evenings during the installation, the organist Baptiste-Florian Marle-Ouvrard will perform a kind of ‘exponential blossoming’ of the Bach prelude. This taps into another love of mine: the spreadsheet. I use spreadsheets in almost every piece I write, usually to chart some harmonic pattern or musical form or rhythmical change using an exponential curve. It’s an approach that I first started in 2011 with the Klaviertrio im Geiste. So for this live element, I decided to put a spreadsheet to work, to turn the Bach Prelude into a kind of ‘mathematical flower’ gradually opening up and revealing itself over a period of 28 repetitions. The idea was for the music to emerge exponentially from a point of a single note (the most recurring note in the Prelude, F4) to recreate the complete Prelude of 170 notes.
I will write below a brief method for how this was done. Suffice to say, the result is (hopefully) more of a conceptual meditation rather than a piece of music, so to speak. But one that gradually reveals the Bach Prelude over a period of around 30 minutes, emerging from a single pitch. It’s a beautiful instrument and a magical acoustic space to do this kind of thing, and I encourage the audience to come and go as they please, wander round the church and soak it up or sit down and let it wash over them.
A brief analysis of the Prelude
To start, I counted the occurrences (prevalence) of each pitch in the Prelude BWV940:
In the table, the ‘central’ tonic pitch of D4 is highlighted, and the most prevalent pitch, F4. I chose F4 to be the central axis of this performance. In total, there are 170 notes in the Prelude (i.e. the sum of all these occurrences), but adding the Tierce de Picardie in an extra repetition gives 171 notes (more about this later).
Then I calculated the distance of each pitch from this central axis F4, counted in number of semitones. I also classified each pitch with a weighting according to how closely-related each pitch, harmonically, to the tonic D minor. I called this the Harmonic Weighting Factor, and allocated the tonic pitch with a factor of 1, immediately related pitches with 2 (i.e. the pitches in the tonic and dominant triads), lesser-related pitches with 3 (the flat seventh and the sixth), and distant pitches with 4 (E-flat, F-sharp, G-sharp, B). The results are shown here:
Using these three parameters (Prevalence, Distance from F4, Harmonic Weighting Factor), I calculated the following equation:
(Distance from F4)2 x Prevalence x Harmonic Weighting Factor
The results are in the far right hand column of the table above, and in this graph:
On this graph, my spreadsheet programme (Google Sheets) calculated the line of best fit, which is marked as a grey line on the graph. The line of best fit had an R2 value of 0.97, which means it’s a very good fit to the given data. The equation for this line of best fit is:
The concept of the performance
I decided that the total length of the performance should be about 35 minutes long, which I worked out would be 28 repetitions of the complete prelude at my preferred tempo. Each repetition would reveal a certain number of the 171 notes in the prelude, and sustain those notes until the next occurrence of a pitch in that particular voice (for the most part, there are three simultaneous voices in the prelude, sometimes four or five). By gradually unveiling pitches in each repetition, the prelude would gradually ’emerge’ or ‘take shape’ from a series of sustained notes based around F4. That, in summary, was the concept — the gradual blooming of a ‘musical flower’.
I wanted the unveiling, or blooming, to also happen exponentially, so that very few notes would be revealed at first, and this would increase through to the final repetition. I used the same logarithmic equation that was derived from the pitch analysis to map out the number of pitches that would be revealed on each repetition of the prelude. In this case, the logarithmic curve must be inverted, in order to start with a low number and end with a high one. x becomes (29–x), since I want 28 repetitions. The equation looks like:
And in order to find the number of notes revealed in each repetition, as a proportion of the total number of notes, 171, the equation is:
The table below shows the results, for each repetition from 1 to 28, rounded to the closest integer:
The pitches were ‘unveiled’ according to the chart above. For practical purposes, the value for repetition 1 was switched with that for repetition 2, so that a pitch was presented at the beginning of the performance rather than just silence (consequently there was no new pitch in repetition 2). Thereafter, 1 new pitch was presented in repetitions 3 to 5, and so on, with 17 new pitches presented in repetition 27.
For artistic purposes, an extra complete repetition was added at the end (number 29) to delay the final pitch (F#4) that forms the Tierce de Picardie. Therefore we have repetition 28 with 21 pitches and repetition 29 with just one, the F#. This, in effect, gives us two performances of the complete Prelude, without and with the Tierce de Picardie.
The pitch allocation is show in the following chart. The pitches were allocated by intuition within this chart, but two guidance lines were plotted on it to aid with pitch placement. These were linear (shaded in blue) and the same logarithmic line as found in the pitch distribution (17136-5065 Ln x) (shaded pink). Pitch distribution roughly followed these curves, in a scattered approach.
The score can be seen here, with the pitches numbered:
Some production images from the Opéra Orchestre National de Montpellier production of Denis & Katya, July 2021. Directed by Ted Huffman, design and lighting by Andrew Lieberman, video by Pierre Martin, music direction by Tim Anderson, sound by Max Hunter. The performers featured in the photos are Chloé Briot and Elliot Madore with the cellists of the Orchestre National de Montpellier. All images taken by Marc Ginot. They can be used for press purposes with the appropriate credit.
A Photograph — a little piece I wrote last year for the Hermes Experiment with playwright Cordelia Lynn — will be appear on the group’s forthcoming album, SONG. The album is on Delphian Records, and will be released on 22nd October. It is available to pre-order here.
A Photograph was commissioned by the Oxford Lieder Festival for their 2020 Festival, specifically for The Hermes Experiment. It was my first collaboration with playwright Cordelia Lynn, and was based on a photograph that was found in my parents’ attic while our old family home was being cleared out — a photo of my mum in her early 20s with two friends, on holiday. Cordelia (who didn’t know of what or whom the photo was) wrote a text based on her invented back-story of the photo.
Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam have announced that they will make a new production of Denis & Katya in the Opera Forward Festival 2022. The Festival features a range of new operatic each year in March in a range of venues in Amsterdam. The cast is yet to be announced, but the production is a collaboration with the Young Artists Studio at Dutch National Opera.
I will be making a brand new 42-speaker sound installation at the Church of Saint Eustache in Paris as part of this years Festival d’Automne à Paris. The installation, Venables plays Bach, explores my relationship with J.S. Bach’s Little Prelude in D minor, BWV 940. This Prelude was one of the earliest pieces I learnt to play on the piano when I was a teenager, and a piece that, over the last 25 years almost without exception, I have played as a warm up every time I sit down at the piano to compose. This installation is a kind of ‘composing diary’ recorded over about 50 days earlier this year, while I was writing numbers 96–100, also commissioned by the Festival d’Automne. These ‘diary entries’ form a kind of meta-composing-session, consisting of my improvisations, repetitions, explorations of the musical material for the new piece, growing out from and catalysed by the Bach Prelude.
In addition to the installation, I’ve made a 30-minute durational ‘unfolding’ of the Bach Prelude, to be performed live on the organ in Saint Eustache by Baptiste-Florian Marle-Ouvrard, on the evenings of 8th and 15th October. This is not really a new piece, so to speak, but more a live element of the installation: a conceptual performance based on a pitch-frequency analysis of the Bach Prelude and an exponential revealing of all 170 pitches in the Prelude over the course of 28 repetitions of it.
Venables plays Bach opens on 7th October at 2.30pm and is open every day until 16th October inclusive from 2.30pm–5pm. Entry is free. The organ performances are also free but require prior registration due to covid rules.
numbers 96–100 and numbers 81–85 have been commissioned by the Festival d’Automne à Paris, Music Festival Strasbourg and the ensemble Lovemusic, and will be premiered in these festivals on 1st (Strasbourg) and 26th October (Paris) by Lovemusic with mezzo-soprano Grace Durham.
Denis & Katya made its french premiere a few weeks ago in a new french-language version at the Opéra National Montpellier. The production featured soprano Chloé Briot and baritone Elliot Madore, and cellists from the Orchestre National Montpellier. Ted Huffman directed the production, based on the Philadelphia production from 2019, with lights and set by Andrew Liebermann, video by Pierre Martin, sound by Max Hunter and music direction by Tim Anderson. Opéra National Montpellier were co-commissioners of the opera, and these performances were postponed from May because of Covid. Luckily, this meant that the performances in July became part of the Radio France Festival Occitanie, and the opera was later broadcast on France Musique.
Reviews in the french press have been very positive. Here are some excerpts, all machine-translated from french:
Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier have made two little videos taking a peek behind the scenes of the production of Denis & Katya. Episode 1 features interviews with me and Ted about the show (mostly in english) and Episode 2 features interviews with the cast: soprano Chloé Briot and baritone Elliot Madore (mostly in french). Here are the videos:
