Tim Hodgkinson and Dans les arbres

English clarinetist, composer, and improviser Tim Hodgkinson and Dans les arbres, an improvising quartet of Xavier Charles, Ivar Grydeland, Christian Wallumrød, Ingar Zach, share a program of improvised and composed music.
Tim Hodgkinson – clarinet

Dans les arbres
Xavier Charles (FR) – clarinet, harmonica
Ivar Grydeland (N) – guitar & banjo w/ preparations, sruti box
Christian Wallumrød (N) – prepared piano, harmonium
Ingar Zach (N) – bass drum, percussion

Program

Tim Hodgkinson:
GUSHe for clarinet and tape
For the Ghosts of Departed Quantities for solo clarinet
Improvisations

Dans les arbres:
Improvisations

http://danslesarbres.net/
http://www.timhodgkinson.co.uk/

Notes

Tim Hodgkinson:

In this concert I will perform two composed pieces and one or more improvisations.

The longer piece is called 'GUSHe', for Bb clarinet and tape and was first performed at Muzeului National de Arta al Romaniei, Bucharest, December 8th 1999. Here I'm particularly working on gesture and space: the (pre)text is the springboard for the creation of music in real time out of the 'objectivity' of the player. In Iranian music, a gushe is a constituent of a mode - but a mode is not understood as a fixed scale so much as a repertoire of motifs, often with their associated plectrum techniques, trills, etc. Here, I invent several modes and define them likewise not just by pitch areas but by types of activity and gesture to the instrument, working on parallels between ways of playing clarinet and ways of playing guitar. (Sound sources for the tape are electric guitar, clarinet and drum.) As in many
eastern musics, things happen mostly IN the same time as other things, rather than AT the same time.


The shorter piece is a recent composition for solo clarinet, provisionally called 'For the Ghosts of Departed Quantities'. This piece originated as a thought experiment in ring-modulation. The idea is that you selectively and sequentially feed back in the output frequencies of a ring-modulator, starting from the position that your original pair of frequencies A and B produces new frequencies (A+B) and (A-B). I discovered that starting from a fifth, and adopting a very simple rule for a sequence that alternated between sums and differences, produced a very curious and unforeseen mathematical object. At this point the object itself seemed so seductive that I threw up my hands in despair at ever producing a piece of music out of it. I then realised that I could interpret this object on any scale without altering its intrinsic properties. The musically audible content of the piece is, then, more a result of choices about which scales to use and when. Scales are altered and combined between the different modules thrown up by the object as it repeats and doesn't repeat in peculiar ways. The smallest scale I deal with is the scale of quarter tones as it more or less matches the limits of my accuracy as a clarinetist. This is not quite true because the piece has an element of emptying itself out, so that towards the end, modules that had been in other scales reduce to single sustained pitches as quantity evaporates.

–Tim Hodgkinson

Dans les arbres:

Dans les arbres will perform a concert of the approximate duration of 60 minutes. The repertoire of this concert is based on the two records Dans les arbres has released on the ECM label. The concert will be improvised.

–Ingar Zach


Biographies

Tim Hodgkinson

Increasingly lauded as a composer, with works featured at international contemporary music festivals, and two sets of pieces for ensemble out on the Mode label, Tim Hodgkinson has an equally powerful commitment to intense and highly energised performance practice. In over forty years' work he has placed himself in a series of definitive projects, whether as co-conspirator in the seminal Henry Cow group, as saxophonist with influential avant metal band God, or as bass clarinet soloist in the spectral compositions of Iancu Dumitrescu. His lap steel guitar playing remains completely uncategorisable, bringing subdued and not so subdued echoes of rock musics and other ethnicities.

Tim Hodgkinson (b. 1949) studied social anthropology at Cambridge, where he met Fred Frith in 1968. Together they initiated what became the politically and musically radical group HENRY COW. This was the band in which he began to write music and explore sound. Following the demise of the Cow in 1978, he threw himself into various experimental rock projects, notably THE WORK. As an improviser his centre of gravity shifted from alto saxophone and keyboards towards clarinets and lap steel guitar. In the early 90’s he found his own way to fuse distinct kinds of musical experience and began writing scored pieces that drew directly on acoustic experimentation and improvisation. The first of (what turned out to be) many trips to Siberia rekindled his interest in anthropology, and research into music and shamanism led him towards new ways of ‘grounding music in being’.

As an improvising musician on reeds and lap steel guitar, he has performed all over the world with many of the most acclaimed artists in the field, and continues to be fully engaged in the celebrated KONK PACK trio with Roger Turner and Thomas Lehn. In 2009 he released Klarnt - a CD of solo clarinet improvisations. Other continuing projects include an international quartet with Denman Maroney, Paul Lytton and Dominic Lash, and the UK-based ZINK trio with Hannah Marshall and Paul May.

Mark Medwin wrote about his Klarnt CD: Many of these eleven untitled vignettes are fairly brief, packing myriad gestures into each moment. Even on the longer pieces, such as the final track, each second seems ready to burst with ideas. Dynamics have little to do with impact, as many moments of the most concentrated energy hang barely above a whisper. Instead, there is a sense of heightened emotion as Hodgkinson plums every register and mood of which the clarinet is capable.

With Ken Hyder from Scotland, and Gendos Chamzyryn from Tuva, he works in the
K-SPACE project, named after the Soviet cosmologist Nikolai Kozyrev. With numerous tours of Europe and Siberia, K-Space's CD releases include INFINITY, a set of recordings that breaks new ground by using customised software to re-compose the music with each listening, creating an experience intended to parallel that of shamanic flight. In 2009, K-Space developed a sound-installation for the exhibition Shamans of Siberia at the Museum of Ethnology in Stuttgart. In 2015, they will perform a new collaborative project with the Bergersen String Quartet at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

As both bass clarinetist and composer and conductor, Hodgkinson has participated in many concerts of spectral music with Iancu Dumitrescu's HYPERION ENSEMBLE. His own compositions have been interpreted in such international festivals as: Spectrum XXI (Brussels, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, London), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (U.K.) where he was a featured composer in 2007, Craiova and Ploiesti Festivals (Romania), Guarda Festival (Portugal), Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte di Montepulciano (Italy), Konfrontationen Festival (Austria), Nordlyd Festival (Norway), Musique Action (France) and the European Symposium of Experimental Music at Barcelona.

His Piece for Harp and Cello was selected for the SPNM shortlist in 2005. His composition SHHH was accepted for the IMEB electroacoustic music archive at Bourges in 2006. His piece Fragor appeared in the Martin Scorsese film Shutter Island in 2010. He has worked with Hyperion Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Ne(X)tworks, the Bergersen String Quartet, The London Sinfonietta, Insomnio Ensemble, Phoenix Ensemble, Basler Schlagzeug Trio, Nidaros Slagverkensemble, and the Bindou Ensemble. He is currently working on a commission for Ilan Volkov’s Tectonics Festival to be performed in Israel.

As a writer, he has published articles on improvised music, musique concrète (he interviewed Pierre Schaeffer in 1986), spectralism, the boundary between shamanism and art in southern Siberia, and aesthetic responses to the impact of new technology on contemporary music - in, amongst others, Perspectives of New Music, Arcana, Contemporary Music Review, Musicworks, The Wire, Cambridge Anthropology, Variant, RER Quarterly, and Resonance Magazine.

He has given lectures, workshops and seminars at Cagliari and Lyon Conservatoires, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, at Goldsmiths College and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, at Istanbul, Edinburgh and Cornell Universities, and art schools in several European countries, at COMA summer school, and at the Verband für Aktuelle Musik in Hamburg where he was artist in residence in 2010.

RECENT DISCOGRAPHY

HODGKINSON : ONSETS : NEW WORKS 2001-10. Mode 266, USA, 2014
KONK PACK : DOING THE SPLASH, Megaphone 026, USA 2013
K-SPACE : BLACK SKY : SM2410 Setola di Maiale, Italy, 2012
KONK PACK : THE BLACK HILLS (2010, GROB) GROB. 962, Germany
HODGKINSON : KLARNT : solo clarinet, ZRTH3, Rer, UK, 2009
K-SPACE : INFINITY (2008, AD HOC) ADHOC 21, USA
HODGKINSON : SKETCH OF NOW : NEW WORKS 2001-04. Mode 164, USA, 2006

http://www.timhodgkinson.co.uk/

Dans les arbres

Xavier Charles (FR) – clarinet, harmonica

Ivar Grydeland (N) – guitar & banjo w/ preparations, sruti box

Christian Wallumrød (N) – prepared piano, harmonium

Ingar Zach (N) – bass drum, percussion

This quartet stems from work that Ivar Grydeland and Ingar Zach began in duo toward the end of the twentieth century. Grydeland and Zach established the label SOFA, performed as a duo, and started several ensembles in which the two worked with musicians from the European improvised music scene. The duo passed through several stages, but their music really took shape while Grydeland and Zach were studying for their Master’s degree in Chamber Music at the Norwegian Academy of Music between