In Spring Term 2021, the New Music Society at Guildhall School of Music and Drama launched two parallel projects.
Project 1 paired composers with co-habiting student ensembles to create new micro-commissions which could safely be workshopped and recorded from the performers’ homes.
Project 2 linked composer-performers to create new solo pieces for each other to perform.
We wanted to create a mini-archive here, online, to extend the project beyond the final objects which will be created, embedding them within this collection of contributions on process and inspiration from those involved.
Watch / listen to the micro-commissions we have launched so far:
blog posts:
don’t you dare go missing (those good old days)
Watch don’t you dare go missing (those good old days), a text score by Audrey Wu for Joanna Ward and her loop pedals, voice, guitar, and record player:
Keep readingDom Stokes: Ink pots
This piece is one movement from a larger work, small pots of ink: short stories for solo piano: little experiments for Audrey at the piano with different things as the focus, ping pong balls, ebow…
Keep readinghome improvements
by James Allen. This short piece is for recorder, electronics and various domestic foley sounds. A huge thank you to Olivia Petryszak (recorder). I recently started reading the poetics of space by Gaston Bachelard […]
Keep reading‘Preparing to laugh’
thoughts from Nazli and Joanna. “Preparing to laugh”: text-audio as score by Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh written to be performed and produced by Joanna Ward. […]
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Making ‘melodica experiments’
by Pia Rose Scattergood. ‘melodica experiments’ is a collection of text scores inspired by four basic elements of matter, made in collaboration with Efe Yüksel.
Keep readingwriting ‘Jazz Bird’
interview with Michael Bascom and Clare Best. For this blog post, we spoke to Michael Bascom and Clare Best about their ‘jazz opera in one scene’, Jazz Bird. […]
Keep readingworking on ‘idle passing’ with the Cephei Duo
by Patrick Hegarty. idle passing is a very simple piece built out of intervals and pitches which I have resisted over and over in various pieces throughout the past year. They are contained in short fragments […]
Keep readingmaking ‘INK’
by Mathis Saunier. INK is a piece for multi-instruments based on the shape of the labyrinth. The piece gives different possible directions, paths […]
Keep readinginspirations for ‘from the gift of the pope’
by Jo Fraser. This piece is about a church. Specifically, it’s about the Florence Cathedral, also known as the Duomo Firenze […]
Keep readingEden Lonsdale: Clear and Stormy Horizons
Listen to Clear and Stormy Horizons by Eden Lonsdale, performed by The Paddington Trio.
Keep readingwriting ‘raindrops keep dancing…’
by Emily Hazrati. As a recorder player myself, I was over the moon to be working with Julien and to really get stuck into writing for the voice flute […]
Keep readingwriting ‘Like Clay’
by Amy Crankshaw. With this piece I wanted to explore the inner workings and general phenomena of clay mineral and clay soils. I’ve always been fascinated […]
Keep readingbeans
by Joanna Ward. The source for my piece is these purple beans which my Grandad sent me in the post. […]
Keep readingmaking a piece for Pia Scattergood
by Anna Semple. This piece is a playful experiment based on Emily Dickinson’s ‘Hope is the thing with Feathers’ and tries to inject a bit of hope into our lives […]
Keep readingdeciding to run project 2
by Joanna, co-president of the New Music Society. We decided that we wanted to do a project pairing composer-performers with each other for the New Music Society. This came about […]
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GUILDHALL NEW MUSIC SOCIETY // Spring 2021 