Our online listening club will be held monthly from 7-8pm on Friday and is a chance to come together regularly to listen to new music and find out more about today's composers.
We will invite a variety of different guest hosts who will explore the music of a different contemporary composer each time. You'll be invited to spend some time listening to one of the composer's works before we meet, but there will also be an opportunity to listen to the work during the session if you don't get around to it beforehand.
Like a book club but with less homework!
For this month's listening club we'll be exploring Bekah Simms' metamold - 12.5', flutes (C, alto, bass), bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano/virtual electric just intonation piano, percussion, and electronics (2020)
*Winner of the 2019 Barlow prize
*Nominated for the 2022 Gaudeamus Prize
Programme note:
METAMOLD
For Eighth Blackbird, Crash Ensemble, and New York Music Ensemble
Commissioned by the Barlow Endownment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University
The three commissioning ensembles of “metamold” are embedded within the work; the electronic element is sourced almost exclusively from provided recordings of their musical performances. Both their sound and interpretive inclinations are inherent within these recordings, and this carries forward into the processed audio that make up the fixed media portion of the electronics. This audio influences the acoustic component, reflecting three very different groups of performers.
The transmission and processing of audio – as it becomes further and further away from its intended purpose as a recorded performance – becomes diluted, accruing artefacts both sonic and contextual. The disembodied version of the players is further abstracted, granulated, separated from the whole. It was impossible to ignore the connections between this concept and the experience of global-pandemic-induced isolation; for now, the only way I’ve experienced my family and friends is abstracted, granulated, separated from the whole, disembodied and transmitted through speakers and screens.
As a result, “metamold” is at times fragmented and sectional while simultaneously being repetitive and insistent: an electronic echo that shifts quickly but maintains core elements of itself (the commissioners themselves) always at a distance through the speakers.
Biography
Composer Bekah Simms hails from St. John's, Newfoundland and is currently based in Glasgow after nine years living and working in Toronto. Her varied musical output has been heralded as “cacophonous, jarring, oppressive — and totally engrossing!” (CBC Music), “visceral contemporary music that enfolds external inspirations with dazzling rigor and logic” (Peter Margasak), and lauded for its "sheer range of ingenious material, expressive range and sonic complexity" (The Journal of Music.) Propelled equally by fascination and terror toward the universe, her work is often filtered through the personal lens of her anxiety, resulting in nervous, messy, and frequently heavy electroacoustic musical landscapes. Recent interests in just intonation and virtual instruments have resulted in increasingly lush and strange harmonic environments.
Bekah's music has been widely performed across North America and Europe. She has worked with some of the top interpreters of contemporary music internationally, including Crash Ensemble - with whom she is currently an artist-in-residence - Riot Ensemble, Eighth Blackbird, and l’Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal. Bekah has also been the recipient of over 35 awards, competitive selections, nominations, and prizes, including the 2019 Barlow Prize. The resulting work, "metamold," was nominated for the 2022 Gaudeamus Award. She has received three JUNO nominations for Classical Composition of the Year in 2019, 2020, and 2023. Her music has thrice been included in the Canadian Section's official submission to World Music Days (2016, 2019, & 2021), and in 2016 the CBC included her among their annual 30 hot classical musicians under 30.
Bekah is a Lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, following previous academic positions at the University of Toronto and University of Western Ontario. She holds a D.M.A. and M.Mus in music composition from the University of Toronto, and a B.Mus.Ed. and B.Mus in theory/composition from Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her principal teachers during academic studies were Gary Kulesha and Andrew Staniland, alongside significant private study with Clara Iannotta and Martin Bédard.
http://www.bekahsimms.com/inde...
Please register in advance by clicking BOOK on the right hand side. After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the session.
You can join the session on Zoom via an internet browser on your computer or mobile device or you can phone in on either a mobile or landline to listen using the Dial by your location number.
If you have any queries please email info@sound-scotland.co.uk.
