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IAMIC Virtual Composers In Residence Programme
IAMIC first Virtual Composers In Residence Programme aims to share, network and publish information about composers and their work and process more widely, by enabling the composers community and audience to connect through virtual and interactive environment.
Creating a special space on the IAMIC and MIC’s website and hosting each month two new composers from different countries, should offer composers of all genres a context to gain greater visibility for their work, to reach new audience and online community, exchange experience and get in dialogue with their foreign colleagues.
Composers use email, chat, blogs and IAMIC website to discuss their daily work, music, education, possible projects and to track the progress of the work. The conversation is public and open for public comments.
Two new composers have been invited to participate in the IAMIC Virtual Composer in Residence programme. Topic of this month residence is working with music from different cultures and guests are Jack Body, New Zealander and Katharina Klement, the Austrian composer!
New month-long residency starts on February 16, 2010.
Jack and Katharina are the second IAMIC Virtual Composers in Residence. The inaugural residents were John McLachlan (Ireland) and Lucien Posman (Belgium).
Please see here their correspondence!
Use the opportunity to discover more about composers’ daily work, music, education, subsidies, ideas and to get in dialogue with them!
Scroll down to listen to music!
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Letter from Jack Body, composer
To Katharina Klement, composer
_______________________
March 8th, 2010
Dear Katharina,
Please forgive a little delay in getting back to you.
You mentioned in your letter that there were some sound files attached but they didn't appear.
But since then I have received your CD and have listened to it with great interest.
But please send the sound files of COWS CAUSED CHAOS and your HAYDN YEAR 2009.
They sound intriguing.
Talking of cows.....on my recent holiday I was staying on a family farm and heard a strange sound in the early evening.
It sounded like a giant crowd roaring at a football match, but slowed down and drawn out.
It was a paddock full of cows that had been disturbed. They had started mooing all together - but heard at a distance it had a strange, ghostly quality. Maybe I should try to record it some time....
You talk about the great distance between our countries - and I think there is a considerable distance between our musics as well - which is a good thing, surely!
Yesterday I attended a string quartet concert which included the Berg Quartet. This was followed by the premiere of a new work by a good friend of mine, Ross Harris.
(Ross's piece also used a soprano.) I was struck by the fact that the two works had a lot in common, since indeed Ross has always had a great affinity with the second Viennese School. Ross's work was wonderfully composed, rich in musical imagination and texture, and yet so foreign to my own aesthetic somehow.
I remember an occasion many years ago, when I was a music student, hearing Berg's Three Orchestral Pieces on the radio. The experience intoxicated me, exhilarated me. I had never heard a music that disorientated the senses so profoundly. I was captivated.
And yet I recognized that I could never identify myself with this tradition. Free tonality seemed to me a wilderness of quicksand, a dangerous trap into which one might sink to oblivion. The development of Western harmony has reached its end and where do we go from there...?
For me the answer was to explore other musical traditions, which are almost always derive from modal melody (apart from purely rhythmic musics).
And then I discovered the music of Jose Evangelista who lived in Montreal. His aesthetic seems among the purest possible, a music woven from a single line.
Do you know his music?
I'm sorry - I have to rush just now. I am hosting the unique Orchestra of Indigenous Instruments and New Technologies this week, and we have to prepare for a concert.
Also in town at the moment is a yangqin (Chinese dulcimer) player and I have encouraged some students to compose new pieces for her. I look forward to finding out what they've done.
Best wishes.
Jack
_______________________
February 19th, 2010
Dear Jack,
thanks a lot for your first letter, the introduction of your person with the spotlight on your momentary situation in life.
Our geographical distance is huge and also our situation in life is maybe in contrast. My life is at the moment not at all quiet but restless, everything runs fast, sometimes with quite high speed.
I am living in Vienna, more or less in the middle of Europe. The town is known as the center for the so called classical music – at least for the first and second Viennese school. A lot of tradition is on our shoulders, but the place has also enough power for a lively contemporary scene. Beyond the big performance halls we also have a lot of smaller places and groups which are organizing many low-budget concerts and performances. My person is more or less involved in this scenery of experimental/electronic/improvised music, although my focus lies on composition.
But the conception of composition has changed a lot for me in the last time.
The range of my works goes from precisely written pieces to concept pieces with verbal or graphical instructions. I am also performing with the piano, clavichord or electronics, mostly in the context of improvisation. The poles composition and improvisation are playing a big role for me, they are in a certain way „communicating vessels“.
Since three and a half years I am teaching at the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, leading the course for computermusic and electronic media. In the beginning of the 90ies I visited this course myself. Electronic music, the use of microphone and loudspeaker as an instrument has changed my sensibility of hearing and my musical approach essentially. I think that in the last 50 years electronic media (electronically generated sounds as well as recorded and stored sounds) has changed musical aesthetics radically.
Attached I send you excerpts of two works from the last year.
The first one was a comission of the „European cultural capital Linz 09“, a composition for 15 instruments. The title is „cows caused chaos“ , two structural ideas are constantly superimposed. (About the title: when we say „chaos“ in German it sounds like „cows“ in English ;).
The second one is a contribution to the „Haydn-year 2009“ : it is based on a virtual text / ideas by Haydn for a symphony in 4 parts. Actually the text was written by an Austrian writer, the realization was done by four ensembles with mainly electronic means. I developped a structure with enough space for improvisation and individual interpretation for an ensemble called „subshrubs“ :
Angélica Castelló, recorders & electronic
K. Klement, piano & electronics
Maja Osojnik, recorders & electronics
Billy Roisz, electronics
I enjoyed the video about your „three transcriptions“ for string quartett. It´s highly living music, the origin folk movement with the contemporary approach is tenderly connected, played by brilliant musicians. It is so far away from the colonial attitude of „world music“ , congratulation.
I hope you will enjoy your holidays, having summer in your region.
It´s still winter here in Austria, although days become slowly longer. People are quite bad-tempered here because of the lack of light, but you know, the Viennese charm is always a little bit dark.
Anyway, with warm greetings from this place
Katharina
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February 17th, 2010
Dear Katharina,
Please find attached an article - a quasi-interview - with a colleague composer, Michael Norris, about my penchant for transcription.
It will be published in a month or two in the journal of the Composers Association of NZ.
Best wishes,
Jack Body
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February 16th, 2010
Dear Katharina,
Here's something to introduce myself.
In a sense we in New Zealand live 'at the end of the world'. Coming from Europe or the US, the next stop after New Zealand is the South Pole!
Even in this age of efficient airtravel we are reminded of our isolation whenever we decide to go somewhere else - quite apart from the many hours of sitting suspended in an airplane, and the considerable expense that entails, we are also made to feel guilty about our big carbon footprint whenever we travel!
Our relationship with our nearest neighbour, Australia, is that of Big Brother/Little Brother; we pretend that Australians hold no interest for us (they are too much like us, except richer and louder!), and we feel that we New Zealanders don't really feature in the Australian consciousness.
But beyond Australia lies Asia, and for me personally this was my great discovery about 40 years ago.
I love exploring Asia, the landscapes, the history and culture, the people, the food, and of course the music.
I lived in Indonesian for two years in in the mid-70s and in so many ways that changed my view of the world, and of myself.
Since then I have explored, among other places, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines. I hope this year also to make my first visit to Burma.
Currently I am working on a project with Cambodian musicians for a concert that will be presented, all going according to plan, in March 2011.
Although Asia is closer to us than Europe, in terms of its cultures, histories, its many sensibilities, Asia is in total contrast to the character of New Zealand.
Asia "takes us out of ourselves". Yet through our encounters with 'the other" I believe we actually learn more about ourselves, as a people, and as individuals.
Asia is a marvelous antidote to our neuroses that have been born out of our isolation.
Speaking personally, at this time I feel that I am in a transitional period. I recently retired from teaching after 30 years. I have also experienced unpleasant medical therapy for a potentially life threatening condition. I decided I urgently needed to make my will. Even though I have several compositional projects beckoning, I find it difficult to motivate myself.
And then I tell myself, "That's OK", and that maybe it is good for me to have this hiatus, this break from constantly being busy, and that maybe something new will happen to my musical creativity. This is a period of quietness, a chance to listen to the birds and to smell the flowers - at last we have summer in my city, after what seems an interminable winter and and a restless, blustery spring. And that's why I'm about to take this little holiday......
In the meantime, by way of introducing my music, here is the NZ String Quartet, playing, and talking about, two movements from my Three Transcritpions.
http://www.jackbody.com/09_three_transcriptions.htm
(Apologies about the rest of my website here, which is still "under reconstruction"!)
Best wishes,
Jack Body
