Category: Geen categorie

Kees Tazelaar’s multichannel fixed media composition Viewpoints, commissioned by GRM, will premiere on 15 February 15 2025 at Maison de la Radio et de la Musique – Studio 104, as part of the INA/GRM concert series Akousma. More info about the concert can be found here.

Viewpoints is based on circuits that Jaap Vink demonstrated during his lessons in the 1980s. In the realisation of Viewpoints, however, no interaction took place with the circuits – an important characteristic of Vink’s working method – but the gradual timbre changes were ‘programmed’ with control voltages instead. At the same time, a certain degree of coincidence was incorporated into the circuits with the help of random control voltage generators: even when a control voltage program was repeated, the sounding result was always slightly different.

After working with these circuits in many studio sessions over a period of several months, a recording of more than 29 minutes was selected on the basis of which the composition was further designed. That recording was transposed a number of times, after which a second control voltage program consisting of very slow envelopes determined the balance between the original recording and its transpositions. An accidental silence two-thirds of the way through was emphasised with a caesura, resulting in a two-part large form. Finally, preserved material recorded in the studio in Utrecht in 1984–85 was integrated into the composition at a few places.

We are happy to invite you to the third Sonology Discussion Concert of the academic year 2024–25 on 12 February 2025 at 19:00 in Amare’s Conservatoriumzaal.

Please note: all discussion concerts will start at 19:00 this season!

The concert will have new multichannel fixed-media compositions by Lawrence Mc Guire, Nicolás Kliwadenko, Yaara Yaniv and Siamak Anvari, and two performances by the Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble.

Admission and drinks are free. 

Please be on time or even better, 15 minutes early. Doors are closed once the concert has started.

Sonology staff member Gabriel Paiuk is releasing a new album, titled Degrees of Transparency, on the Unsounds label. This album is the second volume in a collection resulting from the collaboration between Unsounds and Echonance Festival in Amsterdam, coming just one year after the first volume dedicated to the music of Phil Niblock. It will be officially launched on 7 February 2025 in the context of the third Echonance Festival at the Orgelpark in Amsterdam.

The album comprises two pieces composed by Gabriel Paiuk and premiered at last year’s Echonance edition: Rhythm, Presence, Voice, a piece for piano and string quartet perfomed by pianist Reinier van Houdt and the Maurice String Quartet: Georgia Privitera & Laura Bertolino, violin, Francesco Vernero, viola and Aline Privitera, cello, and Degrees of Transparency, an electronic piece based on field recordings and recordings of Paiuk’s own piano improvisations.

Rhythm, Presence, Voice is a piece dedicated to composer Peter Ablinger and Jazz composer and pianist Andrew Hill.  The piece taps into the extensive history of the relation between language, meaning and music. Often this relationship is bound to the habitual setting of words into music. In those cases, meaning is presumed to emerge from the capacity of language to refer to entities or events in the world. Nonetheless, language also produces meaning through rhythm (prosody), melodic articulations (intonation), stresses, pauses and the fundamental possibility of coupling different sensing agents. Rhythm, Presence, Voice delves into the space in-between music and language, exploring the material and rhythmical qualities of prosody as a realm where the possibility of meaning appears.

Degrees of Transparency is part of a series of works Paiuk elaborated in the past decade that explore the material and spatial aspects of sound as they are rendered audible by sound reproduction technologies. Given that sound is always the product of coupled material oscillations, the border between that which is distinguished as a material or as a spatial property of sound is ambiguous.  As sound takes part in circuits of sound propagation and mediation – and bear traces of the artefacts and protocols inherent in the recording and reproduction process – it simultaneously expresses material and spatial conditions that inform how we affectively engage with it. In Degrees of Transparency, Paiuk taps into a personal archive of field recordings and excerpts of his improvisational practice at the piano, many of them bearing traces of the contexts in which they were produced, to pose questions on the role processes of mediation play in our engagement with the realities we take part in.

The album will be available from 1 February 2025 on:
https://unsounds.com/shop/degrees-of-transparency
https://unsounds.bandcamp.com/album/degrees-of-transparency

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Konrad Boehmer’s death, the Konrad Boehmer Foundation asked the New European Ensemble to compile a programme of instrumental compositions by Boehmer and composers he admired, Willem Breuker, Luigi Nono and Edgard Varèse. The selected works by Boehmer have never been performed in the Netherlands before. Also special is the Dutch premiere of the original version of Nono’s Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica. This concert was performed on 4 October 2024 in The Hague and will now be repeated in Amsterdam on 22 January 2025.

The concert will be preceded by a pre-concert lecture given by Italian musicologist Veniero Rizzardi on the ongoing dialogue between Luigi Nono and Konrad Boehmer. 

22 January 2025, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ
19:15, Foyer Deck 1: Pre-concert lecture by Veniero Rizzardi
20:15, Main Hall: Concert

Konrad Boehmer – Fünf Bagatellen
Edgard Varèse – Octandre
Konrad Boehmer – Qadar
Luigi Nono – Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica

intermission

Konrad Boehmer – Da Ciri
Willem Breuker – Fidget
Konrad Boehmer – Rabioso

Information about tickets and the route to the Muziekgebouw can be found here.

We are happy to invite you to the second Sonology Discussion Concert of the academic year 2024–25 on 4 December 2024 at 19:00 in Amare’s Conservatoriumzaal.

Please note: all discussion concerts will start at 19:00 this season!

The concert includes a new multichannel reconstruction of Jan Boerman’s Kompositie 1979, a fixed media piece from 1974 by Wolf Rosenberg, a fixed media piece by Karmen Ponikvar, a performance with electric bass guitar, cello and live electronics by Klyl Shifroni and Sheng Chiun Lin, a performance with violin and live electronics by Alina Petrova and Yota Morimoto, a trio for bass clarinet, electric guitar, percussion and fixed media by Nicolás Kliwadenko Mouat, and a performance by the Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble.

Admission and drinks are free. 

Please be on time or even better, 15 minutes early. Doors will stay closed once the concert has started.

Upcoming events:

30 November 2024: Royal Conservatoire Open Day
12 February 2025: Discussion Concert 3, Conservatoriumzaal
9 April 2025: Discussion Concert 4, Conservatoriumzaal

The composer and music critic Konrad Boehmer (1941–2014) was head of the Institute of Sonology from 1994 to 2006. On 21 November 2024, members of the New European Ensemble will perform his Rabioso for piano quintet in the Mennonite Community, Oudegracht 270, Utrecht. Other composers on the program are Zaid Jabri, Yixie Shen, Willem Breuker, Mihkel Kerem and Kate Moore. More information can be found here.

We are happy to invite you to the first Sonology Discussion Concert of the academic year 2024–25 on 16 October 2024 at 19:00 in Amare’s Conservatoriumzaal.

Please note: all discussion concerts will start at 19:00 this season!

The concert includes new multichannel fixed-media compositions by Justin Bennett, Agita Reke, Kees Tazelaar, a piece for fixed media and actor by Isul Kim, a performance with live coding and electric bass guitar by Seraina Fässler and Klyl Shifroni, Lucie Nezri’s piece for harpsichord and computer performed by Maciej Skrzeczkowski, and a performance by the Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble.

Admission and drinks are free. 

Please be on time or even better, 15 minutes early. Doors are closed once the concert has started.

On 17 October at 19:00 a concert that is part of the Crossing Bridges Symposium will take place in Amare’s Conservatoriumzaal. The symposium is a collaboration between the Early Music department and the Institute of Sonology. The concert will include a performance by the Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble led by Richard Barrett with Sonology and Early Music students, a selection of historical harpsichord pieces and two-part inventions with Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI) by Francesco Elgorni, and a multichannel work by Siamak Anvari based on historical Persian instruments.

The composer and musicologist Konrad Boehmer was born in Berlin in 1941. His early works were conducted by Bruno Maderna and Pierre Boulez. His dissertation on the open form in new music, which he defended in 1966 at the age of 25, made a great impression. In the same year he followed the route of his teacher Gottfried Michael Koenig to the Netherlands.

Boehmer was initially embraced by the Dutch avant-garde and began teaching at the Royal Conservatoire in 1972. From 1994 to 2006 he was head of the Institute of Sonology. Konrad Boehmer died on 4 October 2014 in Amsterdam.

As a music critic, Boehmer – often rightly, sometimes wrongly – attacked many of his colleagues at home and abroad, for example via his legendary radio programme Muziekspiegel. Perhaps because of the polemical battle in which he was regularly involved, the composer Boehmer has faded into the background in the Netherlands.

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death, the Konrad Boehmer Foundation has therefore asked the New European Ensemble to compile a programme of instrumental compositions by Boehmer and composers he admired, Willem Breuker, Luigi Nono and Edgard Varèse. The selected works by Boehmer have never been performed in the Netherlands before. Also special is the Dutch premiere of the original version of Nono’s Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica.

The concert will be preceded by a pre-concert lecture given by Italian musicologist Veniero Rizzardi on the ongoing dialogue between Luigi Nono and Konrad Boehmer. 

4 October 2024, Conservatoriumzaal
19:00, Pre-concert lecture
20:00, Concert

Konrad Boehmer – Fünf Bagatellen
Edgard Varèse – Octandre
Konrad Boehmer – Qadar
Luigi Nono – Polifonica–Monodia–Ritmica

intermission

Konrad Boehmer – Da Ciri
Willem Breuker – Fidget
Konrad Boehmer – Rabioso

Admission free

Sonology master’s student Adomas Palekas graduated with distinction and received the Konrad Boehmer Prize 2024 for the outstanding quality of his research project titled Microbial and Molecular Sonifications.

From the jury’s report: “Adomas was an exceptional student in every way, producing some of the most interesting bio-art we’ve encountered, with an innovative approach to sound, using his time at Sonology to expand his horizons and explore new ones.”

We congratulate Adomas and look forward to the further development of his research.

Sonology’s final presentations take place on 21, 22 and 23 June 2024.

These concerts are in Amare Studio on the third floor of the Amare building at Spuiplein 150, 2511 DG Den Haag. Please note that all concerts start at 19:00.

Friday 21 June, 19:00
Works by Lawrence Mc Guire, Oscar Peters, Ege Şahin and Elif Gülin Soğuksu.

Saturday 22 June, 19:00
Works by Liza Kuzyakova, Roc Montoriol Torent, Gyuchul Moon and Adomas Palekas.

Sunday 23 June, 19:00
Works by Amit Dagim, Jacob Eckhardt and Gaia Heichal.

Admission and drinks are free. 

Please be on time or even better, 15 minutes early. Doors are closed once the concert has started.

Adomas Palekas will also present work at Trixie, Scheldestraat 1–11, 2515 TA Den Haag. The exhibition will start on 19 June at 19:00 with a performance and will be open on 20 and 21 June from 14:00–19:00. On Sunday the exhibition will end on 22 June at 16:00 with kwass pouring and tasting.