Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, CBSO Centre, Birmingham. Causton, Usui, Žuraj, Saunders. 15 December, 2019

A review of a concert given by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group on the 15th of December 2019. Located at the end of a quiet side street in the middle of Birmingham, the CBSO centre is the venue for many of BCMG's concerts throughout the year. If the venue seems somewhat hidden away, concealed behind a Victorian red brick façade, the music that takes place inside is certainly not insular. As one of the world's leading contemporary music ensembles, BCMG's longstanding commitment to commissioning new work, and to fostering relationships with composers, has continued since 2016 under the artistic directorship of Stephan Meier. The final UK concert of 2019, Migrating Sounds, provides clear evidence of the ensemble's aims. Of the four works performed, Richard Causton's Transients and Vito Žuraj's Tension for two ensembles were world premieres, Rebecca Saunders’ Scar was a UK premiere, and Shiori Usui's Deep was commissioned by BCMG in 2014. The pieces by Causton and Saunders were also ‘sound investment commissions’, part funded by many individuals who, in return for their support, receive various rewards, including rehearsal and reception invitations. The concert was conducted by Michael Wendeberg

Composition as Commentary: Voice and Poetry in Electroacoustic Music

What is the role of a spoken or sung text in an electroacoustic composition? Does it represent anachronism, assigning the role of communication to the voice and thereby depriving more abstract electroacoustic material of its rhetorical force? Does the disembodied, electroacoustic voice distance the audience from the communicative power of the words that are heard? Although Simon Emmerson argued that the disembodied human voice in acousmatic music can often seem frustrating, this sense of disembodiment might be turned to the composer’s advantage, as the basis of a methodology for creative practice. In the process of developing a methodology to address questions of text, language, voice and electroacoustic technology, I created two musical compositions. Both works used the untranslated words of an enigmatic Old English poem known as Wulf and Eadwacer. At first glance, the idea of using a text in an obscure or ancient language that carries little or no semantic meaning for the listeners might raise further questions. Is this a deliberate attempt at obfuscation, hiding the paucity of the composer’s ideas behind a veneer of archaism or even naive exoticism? As my investigation progressed, I began to envisage the process of electroacoustic composition as a type of non-linguistic commentary on a text. Rather than hindering the listener’s understanding of a composition inspired by literature, the electroacoustic voice might help to reveal different interpretations of a text, allowing multiple ideas and identities to be heard

'The Difference Between Us': Using Early Medieval Northern European Texts in the Creation of a Work for Instrumental Ensemble, Voices and Electronics

The aim of this investigation was to explore ways of using untranslated early medieval texts in contemporary musical composition, drawing on literature in Old English, medieval Irish, Old Norse and Middle Welsh. The ultimate goal of this research was to compose a chamber opera for three singers, ensemble and electronics. Despite focusing on the use of text, this is not a literary or linguistic research project. While a knowledge of languages, form and metre has been crucial to my work, the texts have been treated as an element of the creative compositional process. The music has not been written to exemplify text, but to explore and extrapolate the ideas that might arise from it. Moreover, although the texts under consideration were from early medieval northern Europe, the project did not address issues of historical performance practice. Neither was there any attempt to recreate a historical or imagined form of early music. Instead, the texts were used for the literary and sonic content that they provided. The musical language with which these ideas were expressed is my own, which owes its development both to contemporary music and to the legacy of the twentieth century. The first chapter introduces the background to the project, with reference to contemporary composers whose works have informed and influenced the development of my ideas. This is followed by a brief description of the major piece, a chamber opera for three singers, ensemble and electronics entitled The Difference Between Us. In order to hone and explore the various approaches that had the potential to be used in the chamber opera, it was necessary to compose a variety of supporting works. The first supporting work, We Are Apart; Our Song Together, is discussed in detail in Chapter Two, since the composition was included in its entirety as part of the final work. Additional supporting works are discussed in Chapter Three, with sections of this chapter devoted to the vocal, instrumental and electronic compositions of the portfolio. The ideas that were !ii developed in these three compositional genres achieved synthesis in the final work, The Difference Between Us, which is discussed in Chapter Four. In writing The Difference Between Us, the supporting compositions provided invaluable preparatory research into the ways in which early medieval texts could shape the musical structure and content of the work at every level, from surface detail through to global structure. However, the use of untranslated texts in a chamber opera raised profound questions regarding communication and narrative. The form, structure and content of The Difference Between Us arose precisely as an attempt to answer these questions. Rather than limiting the scope of the chamber opera, the early medieval texts became the cornerstone of the musical structure and drama of the work. These conclusions are discussed and evaluated in Chapter Five

Michael Finnissy: Pious Anthems and Voluntaries, The Choir of St John’s College, Nethsingha , Dempsey, Anderson-Besant, O’Flynn, Ward. Signum Classics, SIGCD624

A review of an audio CD: MICHAEL FINNISSY: Pious Anthems and Voluntaries, The Choir of St John’s College, Nethsingha , Dempsey, Anderson-Besant, O’Flynn, Ward. Signum Classics, SIGCD624

Ants determine their next move at rest: Motor planning and causality in complex systems

© 2016 The Authors. To find useful work to do for their colony, individual eusocial animals have to move, somehow staying attentive to relevant social information. Recent research on individual Temnothorax albipennis ants moving inside their colony’s nest found a power-law relationship between a movement’s duration and its average speed; and a universal speed profile for movements showing that they mostly fluctuate around a constant average speed. From this predictability it was inferred that movement durations are somehow determined before the movement itself. Here, we find similar results in lone T. albipennis ants exploring a large arena outside the nest, both when the arena is clean and when it contains chemical information left by previous nest-mates. This implies that these movement characteristics originate from the same individual neural and/or physiological mechanism(s), operating without immediate regard to social influences. However, the presence of pheromones and/or other cues was found to affect the inter-event speed correlations. Hence we suggest that ants’ motor planning results in intermittent response to the social environment: movement duration is adjusted in response to social information only between movements, not during them. This environmentally flexible, intermittently responsive movement behaviour points towards a spatially allocated division of labour in this species. It also prompts more general questions on collective animal movement and the role of intermittent causation from higher to lower organizational levels in the stability of complex systems