Author: matrixnewmusic

ContemporaryComposer

Performing contemporary music can be challenging, especially for amateur musicians. In order to lower the threshold and facilitate the first step towards this oeuvre, we created this blog. It will function as a gathering place for scores, videos, tips and contact information of previous performers. In short, this blog will (hopefully) encourage non-professional musicians of all ages to discover the wonderful world of new music.

Please feel free to send us scores, video’s at info@matrix-new-music.be that we can integrate into this blog.

The Matrix Team

Dan Tramte: Degradative Interference LITE for guitar and video (2015)

Instrumentation: guitar and video
Contact: datramt@gmail.com
Score

Degradative interference LITE for guitar, objects, and vine videos is a spinoff of a larger work for electric guitar called degradative interference. These pieces are modeled after the experience of scrolling through Instagram feeds, as we casually stop to view a short repeating video for a moment, and then scroll onward. While we effortlessly browse, we witness the hyperactive noise of the web—a disparity analogous to the relationship between the audience and the performer, who assumes a virtual role as the actor of the video in this piece.

Video for performance

This piece is also part of a publication No(w) guitar with pieces for amateur guitarist by Lundén, Kreidler, Steen-Andersen, Malaussena and Tramte

Dmitri Kourliandski – Emergency Survival Guide 2 (2009)

Instrumentation: 2 automobiles and orchestra
Contact: dmitri@kourl.ru + pieter.matthynssens@gmail.com
Score: Fragment

Let’s imagine: when on the stage, the musician finds an automobile instead of the piano. What can he do in such an emergency situation? He has only to choose between canceling the concert or getting into the car and drive out. In the similar situation finds himself a composer who was asked to write a piece for a car. Perhaps, the score of such a piece should be entitled “Emergency Survival Guide”…

Emergency Survival Guide 2

Lars Petter Hagen – The Artist’s Despair Before the Grandeur Of The Ancient Ruins

Instrumentation: orchestra and electronics
Contact: lphagen@ultima.no + pieter.matthynssens@gmail.com
Score: Fragment

(…) His take-off on Gustav Mahler in Kunstnerens fortvilelse is not an arrangement or a transcription or even a paraphrase of the original, but an appropriation that leaves Mahler far behind. The question of the meaning of the past, the consequences of knowing one’s history, the composer’s clumsy attempt to connect to folk traditions and nature – all of this in the end leads to a music of its own. (…) (Fragment from cd-booklet by B. Gottstein)
XIR41534
The Artist in Despair over the Magnitude of Antique Fragments  1778-80 by Johann Heinrich Fussli

Alvin Lucier – Nothing Is Real

Instrumentation: orchestra and electronics
Contact: info@frederikcroene.com + elisamedinilla@gmail.com
Score: Fragment       Buy

This is surely one of the most charming pieces in Lucier’s œuvre. Fragments from the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever” are played on the piano and simultaneously recorded. In the second part of the piece, the recording is played back from a small loudspeaker hidden inside a teapot. The sound of the playback is altered by different positions of the lid (e.g., open, closed, partially closed, partially open…) or by lifting the closed teapot off the piano. From time to time even “melodic lines” – as indicated in the score – are created by changing the distance of the lid to the teapot. The curiosity to hear a grand piano from the inside of a teapot is similar to hearing the sound of the Cologne train station inside a thimble, as in CHAMBERS, one of Lucier’s earlier works.
Lucier hides the technical details, and for the listener, the sounds coming from the teapot are somewhat ghostlike. Maybe because of this, the whole situation reminds us of the fairytale “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp”: Alvin and the magic teapot…