Dai Fujikura: 8 questions

Dai Fujikura’s Double Bass Concerto is one of the pieces receiving its world premiere during our Pavilions: New Music Show 2 on 5 November at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.  Find out what Dai worries about during concerts, where he has many of his compositional ideas and what he considers to be perfection.

Dai Fujikura

 

What do you fear the most and why?

“Will musicians play the actual notes I wrote at the concert?”…”What if someone collapses in the audience during my piece and unwittingly disrupts the performance?”…”What if a power cut happens during the performance, and all the monitors for observing the conductor also shut down, will the musicians still be able to see the conductor and play?” and so on….

I think I don’t need to explain why…

Which mobile number do you call the most?

I hardly call anyone, nor does anyone call me. If I decided to cancel my phone, I don’t think anyone would notice!

What ­or where­ is perfection?

If it is music, music which doesn’t have any bits I dislike.

A perfect world exists only in my imagination where nothing I dislike exists, which I try to recreate in my composition. In a way, that’s the reason why I compose music.

 Who is your favourite hero from fiction (book/comic/film/opera) ­ and why?

Right now? I don’t know….when I was a child, I guess Dragon Ball and all those heroes in Japanese comic books; I am sure any kids in Japan (who were born in late 70s) would say the same.

What’s your favourite ritual?

Taking a long bath where I write emails, sketch, read books etc., but also think. Almost all of my compositional ideas come from the bath. I can’t live in a flat without a bath.

What other talent or skill would you like to possess?

I never thought about it…. even musical talent (since your question is “OTHER talent” so I presume you think that I think I have some musical talent?), do I have a drop of it, or not, I never thought about it…..

I don’t know, I am ok, being like this; maybe this would not be ok for others, but I have always done and am doing everything I want to do in my life, so I don’t think I have any desire for an extra talent or skill in addition to what I have already.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

You can’t have everything, and it is always good not to set your expectations too high so that when something good does happen, however little it is, I will feel positive.

What is the most played piece of music on your MP3 player or in your CD collection?

Secret of the Beehive by David Sylvian.

Writing the Future: First Pieces (part 3)

Tim Hodgkinson is another of the six composers selected to take part in the London Sinfonietta’s new Writing the Future scheme, and has been working with the ensemble’s Principal horn Michael Thompson since the scheme’s launch in February.

The result of this collaboration is a Sinfonietta Short, as yet untitled, which will be premiered at a free pre-concert performance as part of Pavilions, the London Sinfonietta’s celebration of new British music on Sunday 29 May.

Tim tells us more about his new piece…

Tim Hodgkinson (L) and Michael Thompson meet at the Writing the Future launch, Feb 2011. Image (c) Briony Campbell

I am at the stage where there is a great deal of impetus coming from what already exists but there are still major decisions being made that require me to step back and think or not think about what I am doing.

I’m not sure about the flavour: ripe fruits with dark undertones of tobacco perhaps.

Just had (Monday) an excellent session with Michael in which we went through the first part working on details of playing and notation. This all went fine. I thought he might tell me the second part was unplayable – it has a lot of little notes in it – but he didn’t. It simply sounds more snakey than I was expecting, which is fine, as the material all derives from a complex wave form. Then we looked at sound ideas for the third part and he suggested using a microphone for the performance so we can use varied breath sounds and they won’t disappear in the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

The next step for me is to firm up the third part whilst keeping hold of how it reflects on what goes before it, as well as how it reflects on a possible fourth part. I think what really holds the piece together is the silences and I have to keep weighing these up. They are hard to fix because they don’t feel the same length if you count them, and the listener won’t be counting them.

Tim Hodgkinson

Book your tickets to hear the premiere of Tim’s new Sinfonietta Short at Pavilions at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on Sunday 29 May, 2011.

Click here to find out more about how the London Sinfonietta is creating new music with some of the finest emerging composers on Writing the Future.

Pavilions is generously supported by Arts Council England, the Holst Foundation, PRS for Music Foundation and the RVW Trust.

Writing the Future is generously supported by The Boltini Trust, The John S Cohen Foundation, Anthony Mackintosh and Michael & Patricia McLaren-Turner.

Writing the Future: First Pieces

Edmund Finnis is one of the six composers selected to take part in the London Sinfonietta’s new Writing the Future scheme, and has been working with the ensemble’s Principal viola Paul Silverthorne since the scheme’s launch in February.

The result of this collaboration is a Sinfonietta Short, titled Veneer, which will be premiered on Tuesday 5 April 2011 at the ensemble’s Chopped and Screwed – itself a collaboration between the London Sinfonietta and rising stars of the experimental pop scene Micachu and the Shapes.

Edmund tells us more about his piece…

Edmund Finnis begins his collaboration with LS Principal Paul Silverthorne at the Writing the Future Introduction Weekend, Feb 2011. Photo © Briony Campbell

I have been working on my piece for solo viola while on residency at the Banff Centre in Canada. For the piece, the viola’s lowest string is tuned down a tone to a Bb. I am interested in the way that this seemingly small adjustment to the instrument alters the nature of its resonance. In particular, when played loud, partials from the low string now set up sympathetic vibrations in the D string. The work makes use of the scordatura tuning by exploiting its concomitant range of natural harmonics. These harmonics are played loud and stridently, in a way that lets them continue to resonate beyond the moment the bow leaves the strings. To accentuate the kind of singing quality that I am after, I am looking at the possibility of using subtle, unobtrusive amplification along with a small amount of artificial reverb. I am very keen not to alienate the sound of the natural viola by connecting it to an amplification circuit, and only want to use reverb to emulate the kind of sound one might hear if the piece were played in a large reverberant space such as a chapel.

My work on this piece will doubtless inform aspects of my next large composition, to be scored for 2 viola d’amores and 14 modern strings.

Edmund Finnis

Book your tickets to hear the premiere of Veneer at Micachu and the Shapes with the London Sinfonietta: Chopped and Screwed at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on Tuesday 5 April, 2011.

Click here to find out more about how the London Sinfonietta is creating new music with some of the finest emerging composers on Writing the Future.

Micachu and the Shapes with the London Sinfonietta: Chopped and Screwed is presented by Southbank Centre in association with the London Sinfonietta as part of Ether.

Writing the Future is generously supported by The Boltini Trust, The John S Cohen Foundation, Anthony Mackintosh and Michael & Patricia McLaren-Turner.

Guest Blogger 2: Lloyd Coleman on In Portrait: Beat Furrer

Lloyd Coleman, our second guest blogger from the Royal Academy of Music, explores the music of Beat Furrer…

 

I had not heard a single note of Beat Furrer’s music before this week’s In Portrait concert, which made me very curious indeed about hearing it for the first time. As a young composer, I am naturally drawn to music which is unfamiliar, mostly because I realise that developing my own compositional voice very much depends on learning from the people at the top of their game. Last week, before London Sinfonietta rehearsals began, Beat visited the Royal Academy of Music to give a seminar on his music as well as lessons with individuals students. He was very encouraging when he looked at my compositions, whilst also giving plenty of sound advice and food for thought, for which I am very grateful.

 

Once the lessons were over and done with, the percussionists at the Academy treated us to a performance of some of Furrer’s work in a short concert which proved to be a good preview or ‘appetiser’ to what would follow in the larger-scale works of the Sinfonietta concert. Music for Mallets (1985) and Quartet for Percussion (1995) both display what I think is most interesting about his music generally – timbre and rhythm. With the former, I admired the way in which he would carefully manage and converge individual sounds in such a way that my ears never felt overloaded; in both pieces, each and every musical event seemed to be given the time required for it to interest and resonate with the listener. With the latter, I enjoyed the ways in which the composer appeared to layer rhythmic patterns that in themselves are relatively simple, but when put together they appear to form a more complex structure.

 

This idea of layering rhythms and textures also appeared to be a key idea in Nuun, the large piece written in 1995 (the same year, incidentally, as the Quartet for Percussion). Scored for large ensemble and 2 solo pianos placed either side of the stage, it begins with music so chaotically complex and full to the brim with different motifs that I found it very hard to perceive any one instrument or line in the massive wall of sound. One comes to realise soon enough, however, that this striking use of the full ensemble is part of a larger picture, in which the individual layers are gradually peeled away like the skin of an onion, only the energy of each layer remains ready to re-erupt at various points as the piece descends onto a lower level of overall intensity. I have heard this work three times in total now (once on the internet, once at the rehearsal and then the concert itself) and the thing I loved most about it is that it is the kind of piece where the listener can choose to focus on different points of the music each time it is played. In fact, I think one could listen to Nuun perhaps a hundred times, and each time there would always be many new features in the musical ‘undergrowth’ that they didn’t notice before.

Xenos, a work for a slightly smaller ensemble minus the two pianos, was written in 2008 and interestingly enough I think it shows a completely different side to the composer’s style of writing. A lot of the raw energy from Nuun is still there, but it is presented in a highly contrasting way: the opening of the more recent work features a long, largely homophonic chordal-like procession, with the winds screaming deliriously at the top of their range – all rather removed from the complex ‘mash-up’ of highly individual lines.

 

Presto, the short piece for flute and piano which opened the concert, was again different in its nature to the other works in the programme. The incessantly repetitive stab chords in the piano provided a bare and stark backdrop to the whisperings of the flute in the foreground, which sort of grew out of itself into a sound world less removed from what might be called ‘normality’.

 

The fourth and final work on the programme was not by Furrer, but by home-grown talent Naomi Pinnock, whose new piece for baritone solo and ensemble was called Words. I was listening to Naomi’s interview about this piece elsewhere on the website, and found what she had to say about the way she has developed as a composer particularly interesting. She explains that as time has gone on, her search for her voice has led her to strip away anything she deems unnecessary from her music, to leave the bare essentials of what she wants to express. I find the result in sound is startling and rather beautiful, and it’s made me consider that perhaps less really is more.

 

All in all, the concert was very enjoyable and I now feel that I have not only heard the work of Beat Furrer, but that I have gone some way in understanding different aspects of his wonderfully varied music. For this, a large amount of credit should go not only to the composer and conductor himself, but the amazing musicians of the orchestra too.

 

I look forward to the next composer in the series!

 

Lloyd Coleman

Click here to visit Lloyd’s regular blog.