LABORATORIUM 2007 AT DEDONDERDAGEN

The first public showcase of the LABORATORY project will be presented as part of dedonderdagen at deSingel. The musicians of Champ d’Action present a performance of ‘Accord’ (for soprano and ensemble) by Vinko Globokar and students of the conservatory are invited to
bring one or several solos by the Slovenian composer.
Globokar himself will be working intensively with the students, giving workshops about performance practice during the two days prior to the concert. Cello player Arne Deforce and the British composer Richard Barrett will together perform Barrett’s piece for cello and electronics ‘Blattwerk’.

To Richard Barrett, composing is something entirely different from assembling notes in an aesthetically justifiable way. He considers music as a holistic entity
with some indispensable accents such as communication and collaboration with the performers, the research into the relation between composed and improvised music, or the integration of live electronics. Blattwerk is a composition of about 25 minutes for cello and live electronics, completed during the summer of 2002. Although there is only one instrumentalist involved, Barrett has conceived the piece explicitly as a duo for cellist Arne Deforce and himself manipulating the live electronics. Blattwerk combines extremely precise musical instructions (both in the notation of the cello part as well as in the use of the electronic passages that
have been designed and recorded in advance) with free improvisation for both performers. In addition to that, there is the computer software with ‘automatic’ samples (‘automatic’ here denotes: with a considerable degree of variability of chance or random). The combination of exact notation with improvisation had already been tried out by Barrett in earlier
compositions: in ‘transmission’ for electric guitar
and electronics (written for Daryl Buckley and completed in 1999) and in the works for large ensemble ‘Opening of the Mouth’ (with the Elision ensemble, 1997) and ‘DARK MATTER’ (for a combination of the Elision and Cikada ensembles, 2001-2003). In those works the expansion of compositional horizons by the inclusion of improvisation was each time the natural and logical
result of a lengthy collaboration. This was also the case here with Arne Deforce. The communication between the performers is by consequence considered as a fundamental aspect of improvisation. In that respect, also the notation has always been regarded by the composer as a means of communication between composer and performer(s), therefore neither as a set of instructions or demands, nor as some kind of goal in itself. Blattwerk is in a sense an attempt at attaching structural/ dramatic ‘significance’ to the different modes of communication that can exist between musicians, between different musical material, or between performers, instruments and sounds. This implies a certain type of relationship between the composer and the performer, that includes the possibility to break with the ‘established' 20th-century model of relationship.

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