We had two more concerts/performances in The Hague before performing a series of three for the Holland Festival, in Amsterdam in June.
Since the new year, the band has had changes in personnel alongside new forms/ideas of ‘collective’ performance. There are now twelve people or so and we’ve been split into groups of three to four players each. This structure was hatched to practice and find a way to communicate with each other, to play in a structured/deconstructured order, directed by the leader of each group with appropriate hand gestures to indicate that the group will enter into play. There would be elements of play as a whole group also.
The two concerts, one in March and one in April ( the last one of the concert series, which was a double concert over two days ) were experiments in structure and interplay. These resulting formats or experiences would be worked and combined into three separate (one hour long) lunchtime concerts for the Holland Festival in June. This presented a great opportunity for Sonology to perform outside the school and into a broad(er) audience net.
The Holland Festival is a huge festival happening every year in Amsterdam. For these gigs we were to set up underneath a beautiful archway called the Rijksmuseum Tunnel where cyclists can cycle through the middle. A beautiful and echoful space where the design of four stages would be built between big pillars. Sight between the four stages ( where groups were placed ) would be limited to three.
April concerts
Wave Field Synthesis with 192 speakers placed around the Schoenbergzaal hall. below…
The WFS at the Venice Biennale: Ji Youn Kang, composer (below)
“The concert on the 16th will include pieces for live instruments and electronics, multi-channel fixed media pieces and the Dutch premiere of a piece by our alumna Ji Youn Kang for Wave Field Synthesis playback, commissioned by the 2013 Venice Biennale.
The concert on the 17th will include two more works by alumni: the monumental 2013 final exam piece for Wave Field Synthesis by Siavash Akhlaghi, and the Dutch premiere of a piece for piano and 8-channels of electronic sounds by Ángel Arranz, performed by Akane Takada.
The concert will conclude with another exciting performance of the Sonology Electroacoustic Ensemble in a spatial setting around the audience, conceived as an upbeat to its Holland Festival Nono Interventions in the tunnel of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum on 5, 12 and 19 June 2014.”
I forgot to say that I was playing a solo piece too. Jongchan Hyun, a second year masters student, processed my cello through MaxMSP. We came up with a structure of texture and time and then I was given the freedom to improvise using such things as: body of instrument, wood of bow, pizz and scratching etc. The picture below was not part of this improvised piece.
At the Holland Festival, each Thursday in June (5th, 12th and 19th ) we all met at 8.30am to build the stages and rig up the PA and generally be on hand to sound check and keep operations running smoothly. A lot of people turned up and were encouraged to stand and move about in the middle and listen to sounds bouncing around from all four stages. The cyclists were banned from cycling through that space during the performances. Unfortunate ( for me ) as it would have been really interesting and funny to see people sidestep out the way as they listen to sounds around themselves. oh well. Another time. Very encouraging to see people bring their kids and just being interested in that kind of musical landscaping. And they stayed!
