NAOMI PINNOCK  COMPOSER

13/02/2017

MUSIC FOR EUROPE

Hoch und strahlend steht der Mond.

Ich habe meine Lampe ausgeblasen, und tausend Gedanken erheben sich von meines Herzensgrund.

Meine Augen strömen über von Tränen. 

Paul Klee (1916)

 

High and radiant is the moon.

I blew out my lamp, and thousands of thoughts rise up from the bottom of my heart.

My eyes overflow with tears.

Music for Europe 

 

Paul Klee created a text-painting using these words a hundred years ago, the year he was conscripted into, though never fought for, the German army. I saw this painting just days after the UK voted to leave the European Union. I was touched by it’s simple, fragile vulnerability made at a deeply fractured time.

 

The 20-minute piece is divided into five movements: I] transparent lament II] porous with loss (i) III] untitled IV] porous with loss (ii) and V] rising, rising.

 

Music for Europe was written for Ensemble Adapter, commissioned by hcmf// with support from the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung. It was premiered in Huddersfield on 26. November 2016, with a live broadcast on BBC Radio 3

13/02/2017

LINES AND SPACES REVISITED

NEXT

CONCERTS 

 

26/11/16

Music for Europe 

ENSEMBLE ADAPTER

hcmf//

Huddersfield

PREMIERE

 

 

06/05/17

String Quartet 

MANON QUARTET

840: New Music series

London

UK PREMIERE

The odd-numbered movements, comprising the ‘spaces’, are somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand they display a kind of floating liberty, free from obvious harmonic and/or metric underpinning. Yet the way each chord or note is positioned with respect to its neighbours carries an overwhelming sense of deliberation and the greatest care having been taken.

“Seriously intoxicating stuff; has opulence ever been handled with such delicacy?” 

 

Simon Cummings recently wrote in-depth about Lines and Spaces on his blog 5against4 :

© 2015-2017  Naomi Pinnock