And I’ve been invited into this process, to observe, and to then compose an original soundtrack.
Category: Music
Dance Hall
Action Station
Fill The Void
On a cool August night 2021, in the midst of rolling COVID-19 lockdowns, a magical thing happened. A small group of performers managed to stage a performance in a small, rural hall. Against a backdrop of pandemic fear and isolation, this was a strange and wonderful thing to occur. … Continue Reading
An end to discord
Music is music, right? But through the middle of the 20th Century, our evolving appetite for innovation took us on some pretty weird detours, especially in the world of classical music. Composers, performers and music departments suddenly went all experimental and seemed to abandon traditional ideas of melody and harmony. And audiences had to come to terms with performances that sounded more like they’d been hatched in science labs. … Continue Reading
Requiems for the 21st Century
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How do requiems help atheists and heathens to grieve in the 21st Century?
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Tricky business, this thing called opera
In 1954 Aaron Copland, one of the darlings of 20th Century American music, created an opera that was damned with faint praise. Everything else Copland touched seemed to turn to gold. So was it a bad opera, or was it just bad timing? Michael Shirrefs investigates.
Aaron Copland and The Tender Land
The 1950s turned out to be a tricky time for Aaron Copland, the master of Americana, to create his first major opera. In a period of mass-neuroses typified by Senator McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunts, Copland found himself less sure of his standing as a darling of the music world. … Continue Reading
A place called Morley
It’s one of the most important institutions for English music in the 20th Century—a place that Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Michael Tippett poured their heart and soul into. The buildings witnessed the creation of some of the best known works of the last century. But it’s almost certain you’ll not know of it, and it’s barely mentioned in the conventional histories of the period.
Sonic Structures
Our world is a complex organism, more interrelated than the silos in which we typically place it. One area of research to recognise this is the new discipline of participatory architecture, which explores among other things the relationship between music and buildings. But the idea has antecedents, including composers like Benjamin Britten and Edgard Varèse, and architects like Renzo Piano and Carlo Scarpo. Michael Shirrefs explores the search for harmony in the built environment.
Have you ever looked at a building and wondered what it would sound like? I’m not just talking about acoustics and air conditioner hum—I mean, what if that building was a piece of music? … Continue Reading
Acoustic Architecture
How does music speak to the buildings that house it? Music has always been a conversation with its environment, but from the 15th Century on, the craft became much more deliberate. And acoustic architecture has changed a lot since Dufay and the Gabrielis were composing their choral works for the Basilicas of Italy. … Continue Reading