Matthew Bourne

Matthew Bourne – improviser, innovator and all-round inspired pianist/composer -  is currently collaborating with the London Sinfonietta players to create new material for the ensemble’s Written/Unwritten festival.

With the world premiere on the horizon (3 June), Matthew tells us how things got started at his first workshop session with the players, including Karen Jones (flute), Gareth Hulse (London Sinfonietta Principal oboe), Timothy Lines (clarinet), Ollie Coates (cello)  and David Hockings (London Sinfonietta Principal percussion) …

Matthew Bourne (r) starts his collaboration with the LS players. Images © Briony Campbell

I was incredibly nervous before and on the day of the initial workshop sessions in April. Even though this is a collaborative project it is always a daunting prospect presenting one’s ideas to an ensemble of new musicians for the first time. After arriving for the first session my nerves were put immediately at ease by Gareth’s arrival on a BMW GS1200 motorcycle (having become a recent convert to the many facets of motorcycling – with some spanner rash and plenty of dirty fingernails to prove it), with whom I talked to (or bored him to death…) until the other members of the ensemble arrived.

We started by working at some improvisation ideas and then tried some scored sketches/structures that I’d brought along. At one point, Karen, after trying to work around the sample phrases that I’d written for her in Idea I, took the music and turned it over so she couldn’t see the notes at all – preferring to find her own way of doing the same thing without being a ‘slave to the stave’, so to speak. This was a great moment – as this is the kind of collective approach I hoped we would achieve: losing the written music once the principles behind it are uncovered, leaving the musicians to trust their intuition, creating often better ideas than what was written in the first place!!

Over the course of the sessions, the improvised pieces became stronger and more varied and the structured elements began to change with various suggestions from the ensemble. I hadn’t written a great deal for David (sorry, David – I’ll make it up to you in the next sessions!) but I learned a lot from his input and we had some good conversations about sound(s) and the role of the percussion in the pieces and about notation – with reference to Elaine Gould’s incredible (and surprisingly addictive) book Behind Bars. 

Snapshot of one of Matthew's scores in progress ..

My main aim for this part of the collaboration was to try and learn as much as I could from the London Sinfonietta musicians and it was humbling to be working alongside players with such high standards of musicianship. After reflecting on the rehearsal recordings, work has started on a further set of notated ideas, so I’ll be bringing a few more things along that will challenge and stretch us all a little – and hopefully bring our collaborative efforts to fruition on 3 June.

Matthew Bourne

Hear the world premiere of Matthew’s collaboration with the London Sinfonietta at Written/Unwritten on Friday 3 June,  click here to read Matthew’s answers to our 12 quickfire questions, and click here to read Principal percussionist David Hockings’ blog about how the collaboration got started.

We will also be streaming short clips from the audio recordings taken at this first workshop session, so keep checking the Written/Unwritten page for the latest news and music.

www.matthewbourne.com

David Hockings on Matthew Bourne, improvisation and percussion-related injuries …

London Sinfonietta’s Principal percissionist David Hockings is taking part in Written/Unwritten, our genre-busting festival where composed and improvised music collide. Together with a handful of players, he is working with Matthew Bourne in a new collaboration which will be premiered at Kings Place on Friday 3 June 2011. Read on to find out how things got started …

David Hockings, London Sinfonietta's Principal Percussionist. Image © Briony Campbell

Working with Matthew last week was a very interesting experience, mainly because he’s a really interesting guy. It’s often difficult to begin a collaboration when musicians from quite different backgrounds come together, five of us (LS) versus one of him, so far the odds are good!  However as almost always happens, as soon as we begin to make music a sixth sense cuts in and the creative process begins, no barriers exist.

Matthew has a background largely based around improvisation, and guess what… we don’t. In order to “get going”, we used material selected from Berio’s Sequenza for Oboe that after several attempts we organised into a short repeatable section of music. During the rest of the sessions this process continued based on original material roughly sketched out by Matthew. Virtually everything we tried was recorded so that between now and our final sessions later in May, Matthew will have an opportunity to formulate some of the musical building blocks into one or more pieces.

As well as all this quite challenging work we did find time to exchange stories on how performing various works over the years we had all managed to injure ourselves, my own involving a football ratchet to the head, totally self-inflicted of course and drawing blood. Matthew’s involved staining various pianos with blood as a result of over enthusiastic plucking.

It would be wrong of me not to mention Matthew’s incredible technique on the piano, but perhaps the most surprising area that I think any of us have come across was his method of reaching the highest or lowest notes on the piano whilst both hands were busy in the “central area”: he uses his feet. Another injury story waiting to add to the list perhaps?

Matthew Bourne demonstrates his signature technique ... Image © Briony Campbell.

Whether this will be present in the final work/s who knows, you’ll just have to come and see for yourselves.

David Hockings

Keep an eye on the London Sinfonietta blog over the next few weeks, as Written/Unwritten gets ever closer.

Click here to find out more about London Sinfonietta’s Written/Unwritten festival at Kings Place, book your tickets and view for more photos from this collaborative workshop.