So the boy arrived, he’s called Stanley Robin Oliver and is great!
This means that Juice will premiere ‘Songs for Stanley’ next Thursday 6th November at 7pm in Shoreditch Church alongside a couple of new pieces by Holly Harrison and Amy Beth Kirsten for Juice and the Riot Ensemble. Details available here. Should be fun and hope to see you there!
My lovely and patient wife, Anna, is very pregnant right now. It’s an exciting time! The baby not turning up at this point means that I can’t announce the name of my new piece for Juice Vocal Ensemble yet. Following my dedication of Lullaby for Joni for my daughter I thought it would be wise to even out the score and have written five new settings of nursery rhymes for the impending arrival, Songs for ______. The new piece (with it’s full name), which has been commissioned by Riot Ensemble, will be performed at an excellent sounding gig, ‘she is a myth‘, at Shoreditch Church on 6th November at 7pm.
Elizabeth Kenny gave a stellar premiere of my ‘Extending from the Inside’ for solo theorbo at the Cymnock Trust promenade concert last week. Sadly I wasn’t able to make it up to Ayreshire but hopefully Liz will be performing the piece at the Turner Sims Concert Hall at some point in the coming academic year. There was a nice (possibly best ever review?!) mention of my work in the Scottish Herald by Keith Bruce:
“Elizabeth Kenny [played] a wonderful new piece by Benjamin Oliver, ‘Extending from the inside’ [for solo theorbo], which sounded a little like King Crimson’s Robert Fripp guesting with the Young Marble Giants.”
I’ve been commissioned by the London Sinfonietta to write a new piece for solo tuba and distortion pedal. My new work, The Thing, will be performed by David Powell alongside four other new solo works at the British Film Institute as part of ‘Alternative Visions’ on 10th December at 6.30pm. The new pieces will be played alongside new films by student artists from Central Saint St Martins. The other featured composers are Christopher Mayo, Luke Styles, Deborah Pritchard and Jacob Thompson-Bell. Booking info.
I’m really excited to be heading to New York tomorrow for the mise-en music festival 2014. This new festival will take place in Manhattan over the next few days and features the wonderful ensemble mise-en. They will be presenting a range of new music in collaboration with the Momenta Quartet, Ensemble Paramirabo, and more than 30 international composers, of which I am one! The works of these composers were selected from the festival’s call for scores, which yielded 862 submissions by 702 composers from 65 different countries. This will be my first time in New York. I can’t wait to work with the ensemble and spend some time in a city I’ve always wanted to go to!
A lot of my work is now available on Composers Edition. You can buy digital and printed scores, which incidentally look very lovely indeed!
Workers Union Ensemble have been selected for Sound and Music’s Composer-Curator Programme for 2014/2015, which is funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
We will tour Simon Steen Andersen’s On And Off And To And Fro (2008) for soprano saxophone, double bass, vibraphone and three players with megaphones alongside five new commissions. I will be on conducting duties as usual and will also pen a new piece for my Workers mates!
I’m delighted to have been selected by the Riot Ensemble to compose a new piece for Juice Vocal Ensemble. Australian composer Holly Harrison and myself have been chosen from 126 applications to the ensemble’s 2014 Call for Scores. I’m looking forward to composing a new piece for the fabulous vocal trio for performance in November!
I’m delighted to be one of the 2014 Sound and Music British Music Collection ‘New Voices’. There is a rather lovely new website detailing the new cohort of composers:
http://thecollection.soundandmusic.org/new-voices
I am very pleased that the ‘Interactive Music Awareness Programme’ (IMAP) for cochlear implant users we have developed at the University of Southampton is now up online and ready to use @ http://morefrommusic.org/. This is one of the main outcomes of the AHRC funded ‘Compositions for Cochlear Implantees‘ project and producing the online version has been a real labour of love! The computer based resource is aimed at helping cochlear implant (and hearing aid) users improve their music perception skills, it is also supposed to be fun and engaging to use. Some fantastic artists have contributed materials to the resource including Cliff Richard, Philip Selway and 10CC. I’ve loved being involved with this project for the past two years; the highlights having been working with all the lovely CI users I have met and collaborating with my colleague Dr Rachel van Besouw from the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research.
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