I think each piece has its own individual technique but what people hear is something much deeper and profound and long lasting. It’s the thing they recognise as a composer’s voice. Of course it does manifest itself in technical things like intervals, but there’s some kind of bedrock on which your voice is built.
Happy Birthday David Fennessy!
Listen to an interview with David Fennessy on I’ll cadence when I die!
Photo (c) Richard Greer
Thomas Butler of I’ll Cadence When I Die has recently invited David Fennessy to talk about the composer’s latest works, including Hauptstimme and Prologue (Silver are the tears of the moon).
Listen to the full interview on ICWID!
David Fennessy’s choral work Letter to Michael will be performed together with excerpts from Arvo Pärt’s Kanon Pokajanen on Friday 20 June at this year’s Pipeworks Festival in Dublin, which starts today and runs until 27 June. Paul Hillier conducts the Chamber Choir Ireland.
The composer about the work:
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A few years ago I came across an extraordinary piece of art by a woman named Emma Hauck. She was admitted to a German psychiatric ward about a hundred years ago diagnosed with schizophrenia. Whilst a patient there she produced pages and pages of text – thousands of lines in pencil which were addressed to her husband who had ceased to visit her. She simply wrote the words “Sweetheart Come” over and over again or sometimes just the word “come”. Every page is thick with overlapping text and some are so condensed as to be illegible. I was deeply moved by these repeated pleas and feel strongly that the desperate passion that can be seen on these pages could only really be expressed with voices. I imagine a dense layering of a simple line; each voice adding to the power of the plea… |
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David Fennessy: Letter to Michael
for choir (16 voices) a cappella | 7'
Arvo Pärt: Kanon Pokajanen
for mixed choir a cappella
20.06.2014, Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin; Chamber Choir Ireland, Paul Hillier
The Pipeworks Festival on Vimeo:
David
Fennessy’s The
room is the resonator is the first track of Oliver Coates’ recently
released album Towards the blessed islands, which
features eight cello pieces that were recorded in “churches, tombs, disused oil
rigs and […] railway stations at night.”
Listen to a complete recording of The room is the resonator on Fluid Radio.
Oliver Coates, who performed the world première of The room is the resonator in 2009, in an interview on Towards the blessed islands.
The recording is available here.
The latest Universal Edition newsletter, with information on world premières by David Fennessy, Wolfgang Rihm, Georg Friedrich Haas, and Alban Berg, is avaialble here.
Photos from another
(intensive) day of rehearsals for David Fennessy’s Hauptstimme, showing the composer, violist Garth Knox, conductor
Garry Walker, and the Red Note Ensemble. The piece for amplified solo viola and
ensemble will be premièred on 16 November at the huddersfield contemporary music festival.
David Fennessy on Hauptstimme:
The notion of the individual and how he/she contributes or functions in a group setting as well as how that group can meaningfully make a collective statement has been central to a number of my works over the years – starting with graft for string quartet (2000), through to 13 Factories for ensemble (2009). Once again, it seems to be at the core of this new piece for solo viola and ensemble.
For much of the time, the solo viola is buried in a thick ensemble texture with the primary goal merely to be heard. Once it has achieved this, a more complex question emerges – what to say?
Also on the programme:
James Dillon's New York Triptych, the
third and final instalment in a series of three-part pieces, and Bruno
Mantovani's D'un rêve parti, a brief
homage to the auld alliance.
Many, many thanks to Richard Greer for taking – and sending us – these photos!
Find a blog entry by John Harris, chief executive and artistic co-director of the Red Note Ensemble, in which he writes about the preparations for the ensemble’s concerts at the hcmf on the festival’s guest blog.
Happy Birthday David Fennessy!
The UK première of David
Fennessy’s 5 Hofer Photographs takes place tonight, 5 June 2013, at Sloan’s
in Glasgow. Robert Irvine plays the five short pieces for solo cello that were
inspired by the work of German photographer Evelyn Hofer.
David Fennessy: 5
Hofer Photographs
for solo violoncello | 10’
5/6/2013, Glasgow; Robert Irvine, vc
Here’s a short video from the ON - Neue Musik Köln on Ensemble Preasenz’ In die Nacht mit John und Morton [into the night with John and Morton]:
The video was taken on 28 November 2012 at the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Köln and features an excerpt of David Fennessy’s excellent Piano Trio | Music for the pauses in a conversation between John Cage and Morton Feldman.
Among the pieces performed on this evening, which focused on the friendship between Cage and Feldman, were also Feldman’s For John Cage, Steffen Krebber’s Konfusion IV and John Cage’s Imaginary landscape No. 1.
Tonight at 21:00 CET/CEST: RTÉ lyric fm broadcasts Bedford’s Chiaroscuro, Fennessy’s Piano Trio and Staud’s Für Bálint András Varga. The concert was performed by the Fidelio Trio and recorded on Saturday 2 March during the three-day New Music Dublin festival.
RTÉ lyric fm offers a live stream, which you can find here.
Luke
Bedford: Chiaroscuro
David
Fennessy: Piano
Trio
Johannes
Maria Staud: Für
Bálint András Varga
Fidelio Trio
RTÉ lyric fm | Listen live
Tuesday, 28 May 2013, 21:00
Here’s a short video from the Scottish Television channel stv
Glasgow featuring composer David Fennessy and conductor/curator Ilan Volkov. Enjoy.
The world première of David Fennessy’s Prologue (Silver are
the tears of the moon), which opened the second Tectonics Festival in Glasgow on
11 May 2013 (the first took place in Iceland in March 2012), was a great success. Ilan Volkov conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony
Orchestra.
We also took a photo of the panel discussion with David
Fennessy, Hildur Gudnadóttir, Alvin Lucier, Ilan Volkov and Fiona Talkington in
the Candleriggs Bar.
If you didn’t manage to attend the two-day festival, here is a short introductory video of Volkov talking about it. I’d say that the festival’s mixture of genres is a great idea, and am eagerly awaiting to see who will be on the programme next year:
Prologue (Silver are the tears of the moon) constitutes the first part of a trilogy of pieces I am
composing based on the diaries of the German film director Werner Herzog which he kept during
the troubled production of his 1982 movie Fitzcarraldo
and later published as the book Conquest
of the Useless. The movie itself concerns the doomed efforts of a turn of
the century rubber baron to build an opera house in the middle of the Peruvian
jungle and the central, iconic image from the movie of a steamship being hauled
over a mountain has been somehow translated here into a gigantic glissando,
starting in the depths of the orchestra and slowly climbing. I wanted this
piece to have all the grandeur and over-the-top emotions of a romantic opera
overture and as I began to compose, that wish became more and more literally
realised with snatches of Rigoletto
writhing in the undegrowth accompanied high above by the “melancholy peeping”
of tree-frogs.
(David Fennessy)
The world première of David Fennessy's new orchestral work Prologue (Silver are the tears of the moon) will be held on 11 May in Glasgow. Ilan Volkov conducts the BBC Scottish SO.
David Fennessy: Prologue (Silver are the tears of the moon)
for orchestra | 10’
3 3
3 3 - 4 2 3 1 - Table Guitar, timp, perc(3), pno, str(12 10 8 8 6), frog guiros
world prem. 11/5/2013, Glasgow; BBC Scottish SO, cond. Ilan Volkov
WQXR offers a stream of the Talea Ensemble’s performance of David Fennessy’s 13 Factories. You
can stream a recording of the US première, which was given by conductor Eduardo
Leandro and the Talea Ensemble on 20 April 2013.
Happy Birthday David Fennessy!