Composer Vlog No.1 at Handel House

Ta-da!

Here I am! I've had a packed few months at Handel House. I'm planning my concert series in October, and my commission in June, but so far, I've been creating learning projects. With some talented children from RNIB, we created an ode to Handel House, drawing inspiration from court composers from across the globe, and their practice of dedicating work. Handel himself was blind at the end of his life, so it was truly inspiring to experience sound more intensely with such young masters. To contextualise, I performed a planxty by O'Carolan (a blind harper, and contemporary of Handel), and 'Kamantcha', an ode to a 'spike fiddle' by Sayat Nova, an 18th century Armenian composer to the Georgian court. His song beautifully concludes : 'the fiddle relies on Sayat Nova for its voice, while Sayat Nova relies on the fiddle for his sight'.

During the London Handel Festival in March, Hillyfield Primary School helped me 'improve' Handel's opera Imeneo, by writing a pirate copy. We enjoyed the original, but the children were not convinced that Rosmene should be married off in the name of duty. We constructed a libretto set on the pirate ship from Handel's opera, and the First Mate found herself in a similar battle of heart and duty to that of poor Rosmene : torn between the mutineering crew, and her selfish Pirate Captain. The children insisted that the First Mate followed her 'moral compass', and the Pirate King saw the error in his ways. The role of Pirate King was owned by the charismatic Luke D Williams – none other than Imeneo in the London Handel Festival. He gave us a vocal masterclass about baritone range, and the bits of opera that singers love – arias, chorus numbers, etc. The children (or terrifying mutineers) then developed a new style of recitative using their own musical language, which included a rap battle, with much shouting and kissing of teeth. The performance was an instant hit with the rest of the school and the pirates' parents.

I will be sending out a little vlog from Handel's room each week, with news of my music series, compositions, and answering any requests. I might even sing something at the harpsichord, if you like.

So anything you want to know, see, hear, discuss : get in touch here, on youtube, Facebook, twitter – whatever floats your boat.

www.youtube.com/CevanneTV

www.facebook.com/Cevanne

www.twitter.com/CevanneMusic

Bowing Out (introducing Screech! A composing video webgame)

It's hard to believe that it has been almost two years of being Composer In Residence here at Handel House Museum. I've led tons of workshops in the space, got kids to write a mini-opera, worked with a wealth of wonderful musicians via the RNIB's various projects including summer schools in composing for voice, and hugely enjoyed curating two seasons of new music.

My first commission for the House, the electro-acoustic/spoken-word portrait Graininess and Sheen, now sits amidst other British Sonic Journeys as well as elsewhere online, but it's been a while since you heard any new music from me!

I've actually worked over many a month in 2012 on my second commission; entitled badluck birds, and for the recorder quintet Consortium 5, it had the aim of demystifying the process of composition, by existing only in layers which could be re-arranged by, well, YOU! The piece, which is in three movements (which all take the idea of a British bird's regional mythology as a starting point) ended up taking many forms.

Two of them, Scribblie and Bog-Drum, exist as live pieces; I wrote two linear pieces, but with the idea that an audience member could 'turn on' and 'turn off' players as the piece went along. This meant that as I composed, I always had to have in mind that any combination of players might be being heard at any one moment... they were premiered at Handel House in October. Here's one!
The other movement, Screech, ended up as a different beast. First of all, it is made up only of 51 fragments for recorder, of different lengths, which can be arranged (but only in up to 5 at a time) any which way. I made a graphic score version that Consortium 5 can play live, and also take into schools for younger groups to be inventive with. BUT most excitingly, it also exists as a fabulous webgame, which is here!

SCREECH - composing webgame

Please visit the site and see how YOU can compose a piece for recorder quintet! Think of it as an 'open-source' piece, made up of layers that you can put together. The most fun thing is that you work with videos of the girls, and can drag and drop musical fragments at your own volition, then play and watch your work in progress! Make sure you visit the 'About/How it works' page before you start, then save and share your work!

Huge thanks to Consortium 5, Vincent Van Uffelen, master web designer, and Pete Gomes, filmmaker, for their hard work on developing this with me.

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And before I go, a plug for my third and final commission for the House! I've been writing a small set of songs based on London's lost rivers, what with Handel House being on the site of the old Tyburn. I'll be singing these with the part-improvised help of wonderful jazz/folk/classical acoustic trio, 7 Hertz, on February 3rd. Not only that, but you can get a guided walk of part of the Tyburn with London's river guru, Tom Bolton! A perfect Sunday afternoon, if you ask me...

That's it from me! Big thanks to all at Handel House, and a hello to incoming composer Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian. Over to you, Cevanne!

Composer in Residence Curated Season 2012!

I'm very excited to introduce this autumn's Composer in Residence season, as curated by... moi! It's a series of concerts featuring old and new music, twisted and turned.

1) Ensemble Amorpha with special guest Michael Finnissy
    Thursday October 4th, 6.15pm

Ensemble Amorpha are an exciting chamber ensemble led by composer Luke Styles (currently Composer in Residence at Glyndebourne), who champion new music often across various disciplines. They will be bringing Michael Finnissy's 'Molly-House' to Handel House's various rooms, and Michael will be giving a talk about the piece, which samples Handel himself. Come along and wander through the rooms to hear this piece, as well as hear Ligeti's Solo Violin Sonata and work by Luke.

2) Consortium 5 plus You Are Wolf
     Thursday October 11th, 6.30pm

Effervescent recorder quintet Consortium 5 will be giving the premiere of my second commission for Handel House, a three-movement work called badluck birds,  a three movement work inspired by regional lore around three British birds. The work has 'open source' elements: the piece has been composed in layers, with the audience able to arrange various layers as they choose, creating new versions of the piece for each performance. Keep an eye out for the online game version of one movement, 'Scrietch'! 

Also featuring Kerry in her alt-folk guise, You Are Wolf, with some exclusive arrangements of her folksong project 'birdlore: murders, charms and murmurations' for YAW and C5.

3) Alasdair Roberts
     Thursday October 18th, 6.30pm

Don't miss the brilliant opportunity to see renowned Scottish folk singer/songwriter in the hushed and intimate performance room of the Georgian townhouse where Handel lived and worked. A totally unique folk gig!

Alasdair Roberts is a much-admired singer and guitarist immersed in the traditional song and balladry of the British Isles. His starkly beautiful renditions of centuries-old songs are complemented by self-penned material

 dense with dark wordplay and mythological references. He is an avid collaborator, having created music with the likes of Will Oldham, Emily Portman, Jackie Oates, Lisa Knapp and the poet Robin Robertson.

4) juice
    Sunday October 28th, 3pm

I sing in the experimental (and award-winning!) vocal trio juice, and we'll be returning to Handel House for an hour of brain-tingling vocal fabulousness! Featuring the London premiere of Lucy Mulgan's cheeky work '7 Sins'.









All concerts last an hour. Tickets are £9/5 and can be booked on 020 7399 1953. I really hope to see you there!

badluck birds! Part 1

I've been working over several months on my second commission for Handel House, for the brilliant recorder ensemble Consortium 5, who perform a mixture of early music and pioneering new commissions.

The piece is entitled badluck birds; it forms another part of my current musical output using birds in some way - my current obsession! This year I've already written a set of 8 songs based on British birds in folklore for my folk project, You Are Wolf, which exists in its original version for me on vocals, loop station and various other bits and bobs plus Andy my husband on bass guitar, and also in a more experimental-classical incarnation for me plus string quartet and clarinet. You can find out more about that here! I also wrote a piece for the piano duo, duoDorT, with loop station and me as a speaker, at Aldeburgh last year, which took birds as a theme. This commission explores the lore of birds again, but without voices: I bought a beautiful secondhand book, 'All The Birds Of the Air' by Francesca Greenoak, which details the regional names, lore and literature of birds in the UK, and chose three who were sometimes thought to bring bad luck as my subjects to use as inspiration for three separate movements.

The first is Scribblie, a regional word for a yellowhammer; the second Bog-Drum, for the bittern; and the third is Scrietch, for the mistle-thrush. The high concept for this piece was to break down the barriers between composer and audience, and create a flexible piece of music that could be re-arranged by the public. I'm really interested in loops and layers as a performer, and particularly in how to make these continue to be interesting, and not predictable building blocks. For the first two movements, I wrote linear material for all five recorders in sections, imagining at any one time that any combination of the players, from solo to all five, might be happening. The idea will be that an audience can choose, before the gig, which of the performers will be playing in each section.

Scrietch has turned into an altogether different (flying) beast. I am developing, with the help of a wonderful web-maker, Vincent Van Uffelen, and a filmmaker, Pete Gomes, a website where visitors can really make their own version of the piece, which exists only as 51 fragments of sound! Online arrangers will be able to watch videos of the players individually performing their 10 or so bits of material, and then pull a track version down onto a timeline, which will sync to the nearest second. They can freely arrange this material however they like.

We've so far recorded the audio up at Sound Solution in Hackney, and yesterday filmed at Handel House, with the girls looking beautiful and poised whilst being absolute synchronisation demons and playing along to the existing audio perfectly. Next time I blog about this I'll be introducing you to the website itself... excitement!

Folk, Mini-Operas, Cries of London

I had a lovely day trying out something new with young musicians from the RNIB; I often don my folk hat as a performer these days, but haven’t really led workshops using much traditional music, so this was the perfect opportunity to get stuck into some fresh songs and approaches. We co-arranged a beautiful vocal version of The Unthanks’ Newcastle Lullaby (I insisted upon pronouncing this in the Northumbrian fashion, naturally…) and then worked on arranging Jamie Woon’s take on Wayfarin’ Stranger. This was transformed from Jamie’s own loop vocal arrangement into a version for an ensemble including voices, percussion, recorders, flute, double bass, ‘cello and harpsichord. Brilliant! In the afternoon, the group divided up to have a go at arranging two London-based folk songs, and created wonderful fresh sounds including unusual seascapes for these traditional numbers. The performance to parents at the end of the day was great, and Sally from the RNIB said she would have thought it was being performed by adults if she was just listening. That’s good enough for me!

St Saviour’s finished off their mini-opera about the battle for Land and Sea in some style, with an afternoon filming a concert version of the music and then some action scenes that Darren, our cameraman, will drop in. Naturally, most of the class, when asked what they had enjoyed most about the project, was filming the fight scene; but I like to think they also did very well writing melismas on glockenspiels for our fabulous visiting baritone Bradley, instinctively singing recitative-style, and creating a rip-roaring story way better than some operas can boast. I’m looking forward to seeing the results!

Back to some more customary workshops with four classes of Year 5 boys from King’s College School in Wimbledon, where they have happily created musical collages in voices and percussion inspired by street sounds that might (or might not!) have been around in Handel’s day. Here’s an example of a choral/harpsichord version!

And here's a version with added percussion to evoke church bells, footsteps, horses' hooves and carriage wheels:

Mini-Opera-writing (with swordfish sword-fights)

This term I have been working with primary school children at St Saviour's Primary School in genteel Warwick Ave on Handel House's annual opera project. St Saviour's is my old stomping ground (my first job was teaching music there after my PhD), so it's been super-lovely to revisit, and to work with a Year 5 class that were about half the size when I last saw them. Amazingly, I remembered most of their names!

This year, the London Handel Festival are performing the little-known Riccardo Primo (even Handel wasn't that keen on it, and happily re-used about eight arias in later works). So we took this as our starting point and learnt a little about the plot (the usual mix of revenge, despair, fighting, love, etc) through a hilarious freeze-framing exercise. We also brought in a lovely singer from the Royal College, Bradley, who gave them a blast of one of baddie Isacio's arias. I was impressed that the class of 9/10 year-olds were pretty knowledgeable about opera already, from being able to describe that a recitative was a bit like musical talking, to how opera singers sing more in head than chest voice. Blimey!

Since then we've been working on our own mini-opera, featuring Bradley and the class, and using the playground's fabulous jungle/sea murals as inspiration. Cue lots of quite amazing ideas including a trained killer shark chorus, shipwrecks and fights with swordfish instead of swords. More professional operas should feature trained killer sharks! I took these ideas away and came up with a synopsis and simple libretto. This week the Year 5s composed, instinctively and rather brilliantly, I might say, a recitative for Bradley - or should I say, Bradley The Tigerclaw, King of the Land; they were tickled to hear it sung dramatically by him the next day. They also worked on some atmospheric, textural shipwreck music and a chorus, along with body percussion riffs, to accompany the fight scene.

I've now got to take their melismatic ideas - composed in small groups on glockenspiel - and use them in Bradley's aria. Then we'll work on some drama and get them decorating their sea or land animal masks. Can't wait!