London Sinfonietta Research Articles

Generative Music with Partitioned Quantum Cellular Automata

Cellular automata (CA) are abstract computational models of dynamic systems that change some features with space and time. Music is the art of organising sounds in space and time, and it can be modelled as a dynamic system. Hence, CA are of interest to composers working with generative music. The art of generating music with CA hinges on the design of algorithms to evolve patterns of data and methods to render those patterns into musical forms. This paper introduces methods for creating original music using partitioned quantum cellular automata (PQCA). PQCA consist of an approach to implementing CA on quantum computers. Quantum computers leverage properties of quantum mechanics to perform computations differently from classical computers, with alleged advantages. The paper begins with some explanations of background concepts, including CA, quantum computing, and PQCA. Then, it details the PQCA systems that we have been developing to generate music and discusses practical examples. PQCA-generated materials for Qubism, a professional piece of music composed for London Sinfonietta, are included. The PQCA systems presented here were run on real quantum computers rather than simulations thereof. The rationale for doing so is also discussed.

Laura Bowler and Cordelia Lynn, Houses Slide. London Sinfonietta, Aszodi, Edwards, Mitchell. Royal Festival Hall, 9 July 2021.

At its beginning Houses Slide is raised from complete darkness by 16 cyclists. Their pedalling powers the show; its constant woosh is the pedal point against which Laura Bowler's music is played. Both impressive and absurd, pedalling fast but getting nowhere, these cyclists are an apt symbol for the questions that Houses Slide raises. This London Sinfonietta commission explores the consciousness of the ecologically conscious. At the heart of the piece lies a paradox that has become part of our collective and personal anxiety. We are repeatedly told two contradictory things: that our actions are utterly disastrous (for example, heating the world, killing the whales) and, at the same time, that they are too insignificant to create positive change. How can we be simultaneously so dangerous and so ineffective? And what can we (guilty yet useless creatures as we are) do? These are the questions that come to mind as we listen to the recorded text that accompanies the piece throughout. This text is a verbatim record of personal testimonies gathered through the artists' call out to the public to submit answers to questions about how they've experienced the climate changing and what it makes them feel. Some speak of the disappearance of moths and hedgehogs, others of unseasonal snow or floods, and one voice candidly says that they haven't experienced any change at all, but they believe the scientists who tell them that change, the crisis, is happening.

Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Transit’, The London Sinfonietta, and the Emergence of Complexity in 1977

Abstract In November 1977 the London Sinfonietta began its tenth-anniversary season with a performance in London of Transit by Brian Ferneyhough. The concert marks a significant moment in the formation of Ferneyhough’s public persona, just as the tenth-anniversary season marked a turning point for the London Sinfonietta. In this article I undertake a microhistory of this performance in order to ascertain how Ferneyhough’s reputation for complexity was forged in Britain. Rooted in performance and reception history, and based around close readings of key tropes, I show that early critical opinion ranged from sympathetic to ambivalent or curious; yet it never developed into the type of hostility commonly referenced in critiques of New Complexity. The historical detail of this pivotal performance, I argue, suggests the need for a broader cultural history attuned to the transitional state that characterizes both the history and the historiography of new music in the late 1970s.

My Blake (Part 2: In England)

Part 1: In Russia appears in Blake 51.4 (spring 2018). England welcomed us cordially in 1991. Our concert was a success: my Jacob’s Ladder, a musical depiction of William Blake’s magnificent Jacob’s Dream of almost two hundred years before, came from Moscow to London to be played by the London Sinfonietta under the baton of a Russian conductor. It seemed to me that Londoners appreciated this. The horn concerto by my wife, Elena, was equally well received. After the concert we were invited to the Garrick Club, and together with our small children had a joyful dinner until late at night. The next morning we moved from Kensington’s Tara Hotel; our friends took great care of us and took turns in kindly offering us temporary shelter. The newspaper reviews were positive: “Its spiralling motifs and sun-lit instrumental colours [made] a dreamlike counterpart to the visionary William Blake picture which inspired it”; “Inspired by William Blake’s drawing of the Biblical story, this beautifully crafted piece is sectional, with contrasted instrumental groupings marking the boundaries. It is also refined, revealing sensitivity for instrumental characteristics and a predilection for lyrical phrases. The ending, when the first violin emerges from a lovely texture of celesta, vibraphone, bells and the higher stringed instruments is a moment of transcendent magic. It also exemplifies the economy of Smirnov’s writing: not a note was inessential.” Our publishers were pleased and decided to print both our scores.

Steve Reich's Clapping Music, iPhone ed., v. 1.0.4. Amphio Limited, London Sinfonietta, and Queen Mary University of London, 2017./Third Coast Percussion: The Music of Steve Reich, iPhone ed., v. 1.0.7. Joseph Gender and Third Coast Percussion, 2017.

<i>Steve Reich's Clapping Music</i>, iPhone ed., v. 1.0.4. Amphio Limited, London Sinfonietta, and Queen Mary University of London, 2017./<i>Third Coast Percussion: The Music of Steve Reich</i>, iPhone ed., v. 1.0.7. Joseph Gender and Third Coast Percussion, 2017.

London Sinfonietta: ‘Spectrum of Sound’ at Southbank Centre and White Cube Gallery residency, February/March 2015

How important is it for ensembles and orchestras to engage in performances outside of the typical concert environment? With a seemingly endless number of works commissioned and premiered every year, one could continue to experience new music without ever straying from the concert halls. Although cross-artistic endeavours between music and arts institutions are creating new and exciting performance environments, more often than not collaborative endeavours fail in their ability to communicate the relationship between mediums clearly and faithfully. Uniting different art forms into a single artistic experience is often seized as an opportunity to take music out of the concert hall and into more unorthodox performance spaces: do we need to see reputable music ensembles engage in projects with other art forms, or should organisations be created with this type of practice at the heart of their work?

Tomorrow’s Music On Yesterday’s Machines

In April 2012 London’s Southbank Centre hosted a two-day festival entitled “Impossible Brilliance: The Music of Conlon Nancarrow.” A three-way collaboration between the Southbank, London Sinfonietta and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, the event included what was probably the second ever performance of the complete Studies for Player Piano over ten 40-minute concerts. During the two or more years it took to develop the event it became clear that programming these works posed a great number of artistic and practical questions for which there are few existent performance traditions. The author was the instigator and curator of the festival and this essay discusses these issues and explore the solutions that emerged. The first section examines the unique qualities of the Studies in their original form and surveys the many ways the Studies have already been presented in performance and on recordings; the second is a report on the approach adopted for the festival. The article concludes with a brief discussion of broader issues of authenticity and reproduction raised by the process of curating the event to suggest that Nancarrow’s work emerged from a particular, non-repeatable historical moment.

London, Queen Elizabeth Hall: Luke Bedford in Portrait

In my recent review of a Col Legno disc of music by Luke Bedford (born 1978), I described this composer as ‘a major voice’. That disc included the piece Wonderful Two-Headed Nightingale, for solo violin, solo viola and 11 players (2011); this concert by the London Sinfonietta under Sian Edwards began with a reworking for 10 players and no soloists, hence its new title, Wonderful No-Headed Nightingale (the heads are lost but the bird sings on). This was the UK première of the revision. In absentia soloists, strangely, the lines seemed even more expressive. Perhaps it was the rather small space of the South Bank's Purcell Room, but climaxes tended towards overwhelming; the use of quartertones seemed emphasized by acoustics, also.

London, Royal Festival Hall: Steve Reich's ‘Radio Rewrite’

Radio Rewrite, whose world première by the London Sinfonietta (who co-commissioned it) was warmly greeted by the capacity audience at the Royal Festival Hall on 5 March 2013, represents a fascinating postmodern symbiosis that attests to the veteran minimalist composer's continuing quest to cross new aesthetic boundaries in his eighth decade. It formed the centrepiece of a stunning concert, broadcast live by BBC Radio 3, which marked the first leg of a UK Reich tour that preceded the work's first USA airing (in Stanford on 16 March by the other commissioning ensemble, Alarm Will Sound). Reich concerts are occasions, and here the master himself together with percussionist David Hockings opened the programme with Clapping, then joined Sound Intermedia in their artful shaping of the amplified soundscape in a virtuoso performance by Mats Bergström of Electric Counterpoint. It was a performance of that work in Krakow in 2011, by Johnny Greenwood from the rock band Radiohead, that led to Reich's exploration and exploitation of their repertoire – notably two songs, ‘Jigsaw Falling into Place’ and ‘Everything in Its Right Place’ – in his new work.

Sonic Art – Opportunities for a Level Playing Field for Disabled Composers and Performers

Sonic Art is an umbrella term that encompasses electro-acoustic music and sound design which involves the use of technology in its creation and performance. In this paper I wish to argue that, almost uniquely in the area of music, Sonic Art provides a level playing field for composers and performers with disabilities. This is due to the fact that composition and performance conventions in Sonic Art, which rely heavily on the use of sensor technologies and computer software, free practitioners from the usual musician’s prerequisite of having finely developed motor skills; to be a virtuoso requires only that a creative imagination is at work. I will illustrate my argument with a case study of the Wired Ensemble, a groupcomprising musicians with varying disabilities who include amongst their achievements three separate invitations to perform at one of the most prestigious contemporary music festivals in the world, Sonorities, based at Queen’s University, Belfast.The violinist Darragh Morgan, who has performed with the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern and Icebreaker, recently commissioned a new work for violin and live electronics that he premiered with the Wired Ensemble in April 2004 to great acclaim. I will argue that the combination of creativity and cutting-edge technology has taken this group out of the normal circuit of disability events into the mainstream where they are accepted and appreciated on their own terms as musicians regardless of their disabilities. I will further argue that these developments should be taken seriously by further and highereducation institutions and that pathways in Sonic Art should be made more widely available for musicians with disabilities.

JUDITH WEIR IN CONVERSATION

Judith Weir (b.1954) is one of Britain's leading composers. Her three full-length operas (A Night at the Chinese Opera, The Vanishing Bridegroom and Blond Eckbert) have been widely performed in Britain and abroad. Since the 1990s she has had a fruitful association with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and its sister group, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG). Weir's theatre work includes collaborations with the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her interest in community music projects included an innovative spell of six years as the Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival in London. Recent works include the orchestral piece The Welcome Arrival of Rain for the Minnesota Orchestra, heard at the Proms in 2002, and the ensemble work The Tiger Under the Table for the London Sinfonietta.

The London Sinfonietta 1968–2004: A Perspective

The London Sinfonietta’s reputation as a contemporary music ensemble comes from the continuing commitment by its players and artistic directors to its quality of performance. The ensemble also developed a sense of its musical identity by generating a repertoire of commissioned works. This article looks at some of the ways that the Sinfonietta defined its musical ideology and has functioned as a performance-centred art world in which composers are invited to collaborate but are not there by right. It examines the Sinfonietta’s strategies for audience building, the ensemble’s contribution to the development of London’s concert life since its foundation in 1968, and looks at the ways that it has sought to renew itself in response to the different funding and aesthetic environments it has encountered in its history. The Sinfonietta’s venture into Broadway repertoire is discussed in terms of social identity. The article argues, after Jürgen Habermas and T. W. C. Blanning, that one of the most significant contributions of the Sinfonietta has been its continued commitment to the concert event as a forum for critical engagement and cultural debate.

London, Sinfonietta and Spitalfields: new works by Judith Weir

Judith Weir's Tiger under the Table, premièred by the London Sinfonietta under Thomas Adès in March 2003, is a reference to an exceptional energy in the lower registers, exemplified by an angry bassoon and twanging double bass. The gruff and dark-hued emphasis on the bass line in the opening section is in stark contrast to the typically bright and shiny ‘Judith Weir sound’ as exemplified by Moon and Star and the Piano Concerto, for example. The feeling of an underground upheaval recalls, rather, the ominous stringed-instrument slapping from the fifth movement of Weir's We Are Shadows. A heavenly string quartet offers repose: as in Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia, it operates on a different plane from the rest of the ensemble. There ensues a quick parade of trios and quartets made up of unlikely combinations, including an ill-fated attempt to form a piano concerto. Finally, all 14 players join together and the composer truly becomes herself again in a witty and jazzy coda of prodigious invention. The pointillism here is engagingly full of heart. Glissandi threaten to destabilie the structure, but the work ends optimistically, with a warm unison.

London, Queen Elizabeth Hall: Carter's ‘Dialogues’

It's been more than 40 years since Elliott Carter wrote a concertante work for piano and orchestra: the 1963 Piano Concerto was one of the high watermarks of the complexity and richness of his early maturity. His latest piece is Dialogues for piano and large ensemble, and at its dazzlingly expressive world premiere performance on 23 January, by its commissioners and dedicatees, pianist Nicolas Hodges and the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Oliver Knussen, the work was revealed as one of the most significant of Carter's recent catalogue.

Six Bagatelles: for Solo Viola, and: Rhapsodic Variations No. 4: for Solo Viola, and: Sonate: pour alto seul, and: Requiescat: for Viola and Piano, and: Tinuviel's Dance: pour alto &amp; piano, and: Urizen: for Viola and Piano (review)

In a recent recording by Paul Silverthorne (principal violist of the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Sinfonietta) of contemporary viola works by eleven composers (Invocations, Black Box BBM1058 [2001]), a diversity of compositional styles is readily evident. The most convincing of these pieces achieve expressivity by capturing the viola's rich sonority, whatever the range or technical requirements of the work. The same can be said for the six modern viola compositions here under review—three for solo viola: Henri Lazarof's Six Bagatelles (1996; pub. 1997), Francis Thorne's Rhapsodic Variations no. 4 (1987; pub. 1999), and Georges Migot's Sonate pour alto seul (1958; pub. 1996); and an eclectic mix of three works for viola and piano: George Tsontakis's Requiescat (1996; pub. 2000), commissioned in memory of a beloved musician, and Adrian Williams's Tinúviel's Dance (1986; pub. 1997) and John [End Page 453] Hawkins's Urizen (1983; pub. 1995), both inspired by literary sources.

An Evaluation of the Effects of London Sinfonietta Education Projects on their Participants

The effects of London Sinfonietta education projects on their participants are identified and analysed, through questionnaire and interview, and then measured against London Sinfonietta policy itself. To a great extent the aims of the policy are being met: the work is found to be an enjoyable and valuable experience leading towards an understanding of contemporary art music. Some problems identified concern the integration of the teachers, appropriate training for the players and composers, and the elitism of the concert hall. The fieldwork was undertaken with the kind co-operation of the London Sinfonietta education team and the schools involved.

The London Sinfonietta Education Programme – An analysis of an interface between the professional artist and music in education

The Gulbenkian Report (1982) highlighted the need for bridges to be built between performing artists, arts organisations, teachers and pupils. The London Sinfonietta Education Programme can be seen as an exemplar in this respect; it is not perceived as merely an arm of marketing, but seeks to be an educational resource in itself providing children with a rich rewarding experience that fosters not only musical skills but also transferable social and life skills.

‘In Sleep, in Thunder’: Elliott Carter'S Portrait of Robert Lowell

Elliott Carter's new work for the London Sinfonietta, In Sleep, In Thunder, is a setting of six poems by Robert Lowell scored for tenor and fourteen instrumentalists and composed ‘in memory of the poet and friend’. With it Carter completes a triptych on contemporary American poetry that began with A Mirror on Which to Dwell (six poems of Elizabeth Bishop) and continued with Syringa, on the poem of that name by John Ashbery. Since Lowell himself suggested to the composer the initial choice of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry it seems appropriate that Lowell should receive a parallel (though posthumous) tribute.

Redcliffe-Maud and its Implications

Apart from suggestions that such pioneering chamber orchestras as the Fires of London and the London Sinfonietta ought to receive regular grant-aid, and that ‘The Arts Council should initiate discussions between the four subsidised London orchestras and the BBC, in the light of recommendations made in the 1970 Peacock Report, of subsequent experience and of present and future shortage of funds available for music’, Lord Redcliffe-Maud's report on Support for the Arts in England and Wales contains few specific proposals calculated to have an immediate impact on the fortunes of contemporary music in Britain. It is not that sort of report. Properly enough, Maud has deployed his wide knowledge of and enthusiasm for particular arts fields not as a topic in itself, but as background and justification for a much broader consideration of how those arts are and ought to be supported in this country. So even if the immediate impact is limited, the longer-term effect of his views will be of vital interest for all of us who are concerned with the welfare of music today and of musicians today.

The London Sinfonietta and its World Tour

The London Sinfonietta has just returned from its first world tour, which took it to Germany, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S.A. and Canada. In seven weeks the ensemble travelled approximately 33,000 miles and gave 29 concerts with programmes ranging from J.C. Bach and Mozart to Henze and Ligeti. It was in fact the fulfilment of an ambition we had long held to take our kind of programmes round the Commonwealth and so make contact with a much wider audience—hitherto reached only by the gramophone record and radio tapes.