Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music

Sonorities Festival 2015

Belfast, Ireland - April 22-26 2015

Sonorities Festival 2015: Fractured Narratives  -  There’s an argument that all the best stories have always been non-linear. They have always played with our sense of passing time in a dynamic manner, moulding our anticipations, expectations and our capacity to remember. And recent theory and technology have enhanced our capacity to play with such notions; with the sense that all our narratives form histories, and all our histories are narratives. Sonorities 2015 explores our capacity for resolving the discontinuous or the incommensurable into some sort of continuity; conceptually, sonically, visually . . .
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Francis Poulenc

Les Chemins de l'amour (1940)

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Jesse Norman (soprano) and Elisabeth Cooper (piano)         ~ ~                  check out our video archive        post your comments at PytheasTalk

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With Ge Gan-ru, Avant-Garde Crosses Cultures

Express/The Washington Post

Just because there isn’t a lot of competition in your field, that doesn’t mean you can’t be great at what you do. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Ge Gan-ru emerged as China’s first avant-garde composer. His 1983 composition for radically detuned solo cello, Lost Style, came out of a comparative study of Eastern and Western traditions. “In Western music, the precise pitch is the most important [thing],” Ge said. “In Chinese music, what is important is how to manipulate a pitch in an imprecise way.” The emphasis is on timbre and on all the tones around the central pitch, its microtonal character. “Once you returned the cello one octave lower,” Ge said, “it completely destroyed the physics of Western music.” The historic 1983 recording by Frank Su Huang is now the title track of Ge’s new disc. Preceding it is Wrong Wrong Wrong! a commission for Margaret Leng Tan, a onetime associate of John Cage who has established herself as the world’s foremost exponent of the toy piano, taking as her motto Marcel Duchamp’s observation that “poor tools require better skills.” “Boy, have my skills improved!” Tan said. “What a bonus it is. Because [of] the control it takes to control these very primitive toys — and you translate that back to playing the adult piano and your fingertip control and everything is so finely honed, so paramount at this point, that I can create the five-p pianissimos that George Crumb requires in his piano music Makrokosmos” . . .
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