Making New Waves 2007

Arditti Quartet (UK)

The Arditti Quartet enjoys a world-wide reputation for their spirited and technically refined interpretations of contemporary and earlier 20th century music. Several hundred string quartets and other chamber works have been written for the ensemble since its foundation by first violinist Irvine Arditti in 1974. These works have left a permanent mark on 20th century repertoire and have given the Arditti Quartet a firm place in music history. World premieres of quartets by composers such as Birtwistle, Cage, Carter, Dillon, Ferneyhough, Gubaidulina, Harvey, Hosokawa, Kagel, Kurtag, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Nancarrow, Reynolds, Rihm, Scelsi, Stockhausen and Xenakis show the wide range of music in the Arditti Quartet's repertoire.
The ensemble believes that close collaboration with composers is vital to the process of interpreting modern music and therefore attempts to work with every composer it plays.
The players' commitment to educational work is indicated by their masterclasses and workshops for young performers and composers all over the world. From 1982 to 1996 the quartet's members were resident string tutors at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music.
The Arditti Quartet's extensive discography now features over 130 CDs. 42 discs have been released as part of the ensemble's continuing series on the French label Naïve Montaigne. The series presents numerous contemporary composer features as well as the first digital recordings of the complete Second Viennese School's string quartet music. Stockhausen's infamous Helicopter Quartet is to be found here. As well as many composer portraits recorded in their presence, the complete quartets of Luciano Berio were recorded shortly before his death. Latest releases include music by Ades, Cage, Fedele, Finsterer, Frith, Ingolfsson, Neuwirth and Paredes.
Over the past 25 years, the ensemble has received many prizes for its work. They have won the Deutsche Schallplatten Preis several times and the Gramophone Award for the best recording of contemporary music in 1999 (Elliott Carter) and 2002 (Harrison Birtwistle). The prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize was awarded to them in 1999 for "lifetime achievement" in music.

Pascal DUSAPIN (FR)

was born in Nancy in 1955, and studied fine art and science, art and aesthetics at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Between 1974 and 1978 He attended the seminars of Iannis Xenakis. 1981-1983 He was a scholarship holder at the Villa Medici in Rome. 1993-1994 He was composer-in-residence with the Orchestre National de Lyon.
Right from the beginning of his career as a composer, he was the recipient of numerous prizes and distinctions: in 1977, he received an award from the Fondation de la vocation; in 1979, he won the Hervé Dugardin Prize (SACEM); in 1993, the Prize of the Académie des Beaux-Arts; in 1993, the Prix du Syndicat de la Critique (Critics' Circle Award); in 1994, the SACEM Prize for Symphonic Music; in 1995, the French Ministry of Culture awarded him the Grand Prix National de Musique; and finally, he won a Victoire de la Musique in 1998 for a CD recorded by the Orchestre National de Lyon, and another one in 2002, as "Composer of the Year".
He has written many pieces for ensemble, for orchestra, and most especially for soloists and for chamber formations, a domain in which he excels thanks to his intimate knowledge of the subtleties of individual instruments. Pascal Dusapin's catalogue at present consists of around 70 works, including 14 for solo instruments, 24 chamber pieces, 13 works for ensemble and 14 works for symphony orchestra.
Autumn 2002 saw the first performances of A quia, a concerto for piano and orchestra, and the complete cycle of his Sept études for piano.
He has also written four operas:

• Roméo & Juliette (1985-88) - Premiered in Montpellier in 1989
• Medeamaterial (1991) - Premiered in Brussels in 1992
• La Melancholia (1991) - Premiered in Paris (Châtelet) in 1992
• To be sung (1992-93) - Premiered in Nanterre in 1994

"Pascal Dusapin's creative work is nourished by an exceptionally wide culture, which takes in literature, philosophy, and poetry, and ranges across the centuries from the works of Greco-Roman antiquity to the most modern writers. One need only read the list of titles of his works, and the texts used in those that require vocal participation, to measure the breadth of his knowledge.
The world comes to him from all sides, and one may also observe from time to time, between the staves of his manuscript scores, annotations dealing with the immediate history of our daily lives."

(Brigitte Massin)

Helmut LACHENMANN (GER)

was born in Stuttgart and after the end of the Second World War (when he was 11) started singing in his local church choir. Showing an early aptitude for music, he was already composing in his teens. He studied piano with Jürgen Uhde and composition and theory with Johann Nepomuk David at the Stuttgarter Musikhochschule from 1955 to 1958 and was the first private student of the serialist composer Luigi Nono in Venice from 1958 to 1960. He also worked briefly at the electronic music studio at the University of Ghent in 1965, but thereafter focused almost exclusively on purely instrumental music.
Lachenmann has referred to his compositions as musique concrète instrumentale, implying a musical language that embraces the entire sound-world made accessible through unconventional playing techniques. According to the composer, this is music "in which the sound events are chosen and organized so that the manner in which they are generated is at least as important as the resultant acoustic qualities themselves. Consequently those qualities, such as timbre, volume, etc., do not produce sounds for their own sake, but describe or denote the concrete situation: listening, you hear the conditions under which a sound- or noise-action is carried out, you hear what materials and energies are involved and what resistance is encountered". His music is therefore primarily derived from the most basic of sounds, which through processes of amplification serve as the bases for extended works. His scores place enormous demands on performers, due to the plethora of techniques that he has invented for wind, brass and string instruments.
His more important works include the music theatre work Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (1990-96, after, Hans Christian Andersen, Leonardo da Vinci and Gudrun Ensslin), the orchestral pieces Schwankungen am Rand (1974-75, for eight brass, two electric guitars, two pianos, four thunder sheets, and 34 strings), Accanto (1975-76, for clarinet, large orchestra and tape) and NUN (1997-99, for flute, trombone, male chorus, and large orchestra), the ensemble works Mouvement (- vor der Erstarrung) (1982-84, for three ad hoc players and 14 players) and "...zwei Gefühle...", Musik mit Leonardo (1992, an excerpt from Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, after Leonardo da Vinci, for two speakers and 22 players) and three string quartets (Gran Torso, 1971, revised 1976, 1988; Reigen seliger Geister, 1989; Grido, 2001), as well as other orchestral, ensemble and chamber works and six piano pieces.
He has regularly lectured at Darmstadt since 1978 and important among his many positions as a teacher was his term as professor of composition at the Stuttgarter Musikhochschule from 1981 to 1999. He is also noted for his many articles, essays and lectures, many of which appear in Musik als existentielle Erfahrung (Music as Existential Experience) Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden, 1996).
In November 2006 Lachenmann visited the Royal College of Music's week-long festival of his music.

Alvin LUCIER (USA)

A trailblazing force in psycho-acoustic music, avant-garde composer and performer Alvin Lucier was born in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1931; educated at Yale and Brandeis, he also spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship before returning to Brandeis in 1962 to teach and conduct the university's chamber chorus.
His breakthrough composition, Music for Solo Performer (1964-65) for Enormously Amplified Brain Waves and Percussion, was the first work to feature sounds generated by brain waves in live performance;
Biological stimuli played an increasing role in Lucier's subsequent work as well, most notably through his notation of performers' physical movements.
Acoustical phenomena, meanwhile, was the subject of 1970's landmark I Am Sitting in a Room, in which several sentences of recorded speech were simultaneously played back into a room and re-recorded there dozens of times over, the space gradually filtering the speech into pure sound.
1980's "Music on a Long Thin Wire" was a further extension of Lucier's fascination with the physics of sound - a conceptual piece featuring a taut 50-foot wire passed through the poles of a large magnet and driven by an oscillator, the amplified vibrations yielded beautifully ethereal results.
A professor at Wesleyan University from 1970 onward, Lucier's later works additionally included a number of sound installations as well as works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra.

Marco STROPPA (I, F)

Composer, researcher and professor, Marco Stroppa was born in Verona on December 8, 1959. He undertook a range of musical studies at the Conservatories of Verona, Milan and Venice. He also studied computer music, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence at the Media Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1984-86.
Between 1980 and 1984 he worked at the computer music centre (CSC) of the University of Padua (Italy), where he produced his first mixed piece, Traiettoria, for piano and computer.
In 1982 Pierre Boulez invited him to leave Italy for Paris where he worked as a composer and researcher at IRCAM (Institute de Recherche and Coordination Acoustique/Musique). He was appointed as head of the Music Research Department in 1987, but resigned in 1990 to fully concentrate on composition and research. He also taught regularly at IRCAM since his arrival there and his constant contact with this institution has been fundamental to his musical education and work as a composer until these days.
Mr. Stroppa has worked in Paris and lived near Paris since 1982. In 2005 he became a French citizen.
In 1987 Mr. Stroppa founded the composition and computer music workshop at the International Bartók Festival in Szombathely, Hungary.
He taught composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris as a successor to Gerard Grisey and since 1999 he has been full professor of composition and computer music at the University of Music and Performing Arts (Musikhochschule) in Stuttgart, as successor to Helmut Lachenmann.
Mr. Stroppa composed for both acoustical instruments and new media. His repertoire includes works for concerts, one music drama, two radio operas and various special projects. He is often inspired by the personal contact with performers (among others, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Cécile Daroux, Florian Hölscher, Thierry Miroglio, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Benny Sluchin).
His keen interest in sound and space has often led him to rethinking the placement of the instruments on stage so as to achieve a spatial dramaturgy that will be revealed and highlighted by the unfolding of the music.
Among his previous works, we mention: Traiettoria (1982-84) for piano and computer, Hiranyaloka (1993-4) for orchestra, Proemio (1990), in cielo in terra in mare (1992) two radio operas, Zwielicht (1998) for double bass, two percussion players, electronics and 13-D sound projection. He is currently composing a piece for the Orchestre de Paris (Ritratti senza volto), a concerto for cello and orchestra (And one by one we drop away) and a concerto for piccolo and string orchestra (No Boughs).

Iannis XENAKIS (Gr)

was born in 1922 into a Greek family residing in Braila, Romania. The sense of being an “outsider” has remained integral to his identity, as the title of a recently published book of interviews signals: "il faut être constamment un immigré." Forced to escape his country, Xenakis ended up in Paris, wanting to study music, but earning a living working as an engineering assistant for Le Corbusier.
His creative and intellectual intensity attracted the attention of both the reknowned architect, who delegated architectural projects to him in spite of his lack of professional training, and the composer and pedagogue Olivier Messiaen, who saw in the music he was struggling to produce in isolation an originality deserving of encouragement. Xenakis had his first major succès du scandale with the premiere of Metastasis at the Donaueschingen Festival in 1955, and by 1960, he was able to devote himself entirely to composition.
Critical of other developments in contemporary music at the time, dominated by the serialists (the "Darmstadt school") such as Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Xenakis followed his own path, aided by his background in mathematics, engineering and design and by his interest in complex sonic phenomena (rainstorms, street demonstrations, etc.). He incorporated probability theory into his compositional approach, as a means of generating and controlling large-scale events composed of massive numbers of individual elements. He also adopted the sonic entity (texture) as the primary material for the construction of musical form (rather than themes or pitch structures).
For over 40 years, Xenakis created a steady stream of remarkable works and his impact on contemporary music has been of crucial importance. Along with his acoustic works, he has produced a number of important electroacoustic pieces, and a series of multimedia creations involving sound, light, movement and architecture (polytopes). In the domain of computer music, Xenakis was a pioneer in the area of algorithmic composition, and has also developed an approach to digital synthesis based on random generation and variation of the waveform itself. In addition, he designed a computer system utilizing a graphic interface (the UPIC), which has proven to be a liberating, provocative pedagogical tool as well as a powerful environment for computer composition.
Iannis Xenakis died on 4 February 2001 at age 78. His last completed composition, O-Mega, for solo percussion and ensemble was premiered at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music in 1997. In December 2000, the world premiere of a couple of his very early works, from the Anasteria triptych based on an ancient Greek rite, took place in Germany, almost 50 years after they were composed (1952-1953).