Magnetic Fields – Magic Realism | Gothenburg Concert Hall

Event has already taken place. Sounds of attraction when Gageego! plays limitless music by Cleare, Holloway-Nahum and Iannotta. The Pioneer concept brings you contemporary music in experimental combinations.

Concert length: 1 h 30 min Scene: Stenhammarsalen

210-260 SEK Student 105-130 SEK

Saturday 18 March 2023 19.00 — Event has already taken place

Included in: The Pioneer subscription
Saturday 18 March 2023 19.00 — Event has already taken place

Included in: The Pioneer subscription

Listen Art piece in the foyer Programme & Participants

Event has already taken place

This evening’s programme is permeated by sounds of attraction. As if conjured up by magnetism, sounds are produced in the most diverse and imaginative ways when Gageego! plays limitless music by Cleare, Holloway-Nahum and Iannotta. It is as if the music is invoked from whence it was previously barely possible to discern a contour of something. The words of philosopher Timothy Morton frame the entire process:

”Every aesthetic trace, every footprint of an object, sparkles with absence. Sensual things are elegies to the disappearance of objects.”

The Pioneer concept brings you contemporary music in combination with other forms of expression, such as art, film, audiovisual elements and drama. This season’s six Saturday evenings in the Stenhammarsalen auditorium are a must for anyone interested in cutting-edge artistic expression.

The Pioneer concept

Listen

Get to know Gageego!

Art piece in the foyer

Adjacent to the concert we are showing the art piece Pixilation (2019) by composer Johan Svensson, composed for two keyboards, light and samples and specially adapted for Gothenburg’s Concert Hall foyer. Tightly connected sound and light sources create interlaced animation sequences that evolve over time inside light-protected tents. Let yourself be enveloped in darkness and experience how bass frequencies fill the room.

Note: Installations will contain flashing lights and stroboscopes.

Programme

Clara Iannotta We left her in a sack for fairies to reclaim 20 min

Clara Iannotta (f 1983) We left her in a sack for fairies to reclaim Once in place in the concert hall, we can choose to stop or keep our eyes open. For Iannotta, the latter is a matter of course. And as a composer, something that almost takes precedence. Iannotta returns again and again to how important the movement, the visual, is to how she sculpts her sounds; that in recent years she has been working like a choreographer. At a speech a few years ago, she quoted her compatriot, the Italian composer Luciano Berio: "we should look at music, and listen to theatre". In the piece We left her in a sack for fairies to reclaim from 2021, this does not mean that the sound is secondary, quite the opposite: it is a meticulously carefully chiseled, sound world where the movements and choreography to evoke these (microphone-amplified) sounds rather become a sort of poetic commentary. The title is taken from Dorothy Molloy's posthumous poetry, and is one of several recent works that in one way or another take inspiration from Molloy's death-marked poems. Poems where her advanced liver cancer is a kind of constant undertone. The poetry constantly moves between different states, between the world of the mind and the spirit world, life and death to the banal and the most expressive. In Iannotta's music, the transition between sonic states becomes central, but not in that we actually get to hear the extremes, but that we seem to be drawn into the microscopic levels of what a sound is, we are constantly in a world that is shaped on the border between noise and tone. ESAIAS JÄRNEGARD

Holloway-Nahum Days, distance, Days (commission) 15 min

Aaron Holloway-Nahum (f 1983) Days, Distance, Days In previous concerts with Gageego! we have seen the American Aaron Holloway-Nahum in the role of conductor, just one of the strings on his lyre. Tonight we also meet him as a composer in a premiere performance written for trombonist Ivo Nilsson and Gageego! Aaron says the following about what we can expect: “Days, Distance, Days is an approximately 15 minute concerto for trombonist and large ensemble that explores some of the many ways that groups of people relate and interact with each other in this digital age. It is portrayed in different ways in the music. Sometimes it is strict, almost locked - exemplified by the digital "click track" (a kind of electronic metronome) that the percussionist starts at different times /… The structure, harmony and counterpoint of the piece are all created "organically" from a recording of Ivo (our soloist) reading Elisabeth Bishop's poem "Argument". We hear this recording, filtered and manipulated by the computer and played via speakers in the center of the ensemble. Now that I'm still composing the piece, I find that the music constantly goes from individual to collective and back, sometimes one carries to the other, and sometimes it doesn't. As Elisabeth Bishop puts it: Distance: Remember all that land beneath the plane; that coastline of dim beaches deep in sand stretching indistinguishably all the way, all the way to where my reasons end?”

Ann Cleare on magnetic fields 15 min

Ann Cleare (b 1983) on magnetic fields Ann Cleare's music is often reminiscent of a sculptural approach, where timbre, texture, color and form are meticulously examined. As a common thread through the last decade's composing runs a desire to make us in the audience hear the world differently. In ‘on magnetic fields’, written in 2011-2012, we are faced with a Gageego! divided into three groups of musicians. To the right and left, two constellations swirl forward, each led by a violinist, in the center of the scene is what Cleare calls "a box of light". The two violinists act as the magnetic fields around which each section's instruments are energized. Slowly, the sounds (or the "electricity") that the violins emit spread to the other instruments, and a process of constant change begins. The instruments at the center of the scene, piano, harp and percussion form a contrasting unity; which at first seems to regard the two panned ensembles as if to slowly begin a form of intervention.

Saturday 18 March 2023: The event ends at approx. 20.30

Participants

Gageego!

The ensemble was formed in 1995 and works to explore and make contemporary chamber music more accessible. As one of the most important actors in Music Sweden, the ensemble is appreciated for interpreting today's music at the highest technical and artistic level in a joyful and curious way. The group collaborates regularly with Swedish and international guests such as Peter Eötvös, H K Gruber and Pierre-André Valade. In addition to concerts in Sweden, the ensemble has toured in Russia and Denmark, among other places, and played as a guest at Lange Nacht der Neuen Klänge in Vienna's Concert hall.

Aaron Holloway-Nahum conductor

American composer Aaron Holloway-Nahum has established himself as one of the key players on the British contemporary music scene. Although his career as a composer is impressive in its own right – he has composed on commission for, among others, the London Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Third Coast Percussion – he has also had time to immerse himself and achieve success as a recording producer, conductor and art entrepreneur. Aaron Holloway-Nahum is the conductor, CEO and artistic director of The Riot Ensemble, an organization whose work has generated more than £650,000 in contributions to the performance of contemporary music and which has premiered more than 250 original compositions. Aaron Holloway-Nahum's music has been performed in around 20 countries worldwide and is characterized by its many details, ornate timbres, bold melodic unisons and experimental narrative structures.

Ivo Nilsson trombone

Trombonist Ivo Nilsson debuted as a soloist with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1989, after studying at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm and at IRCAM in Paris. In the same year, he also debuted as a composer with an octet premiered by the ensemble l´Itineraire on Radio France. He is a member of the ensembles Axelsson & Nilsson, Ensemble Son and KammarensembleN. As a soloist and with the forementioned ensembles, he has performed at numerous festivals around the world. Ivo Nilsson was artistic director of the Stockholm New Music festival in 2003 and 2005. In 2007, Ivo Nilsson was awarded the Interpreter Award by the Swedish Composers' Association.