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Welcome to EXAUDI 2012
Hello and welcome to EXAUDI 2012! It’s our 10th anniversary season this year and it’s in full swing, as you can see from our website here. I’ve set up this blog to write about one project in...
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Myself and Aaron Cassidy
Well it’s Saturday, it’s raining again, and I’ve awarded myself the weekend off Cassidy-learning, so time to fill in some background to the project… Aaron and I have known each other since almost the...
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Hand-to-mouth: planning the project
This is the kind of project EXAUDI was formed for. Idealistic, ludicrously labour-intensive, with no guarantee of ultimate success and no clear path towards it – it’s the kind of challenge I love and...
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So what’s so difficult?
So what is it that’s hard about the piece? Like all of Cassidy’s works it uses a technique of ‘decoupling’, whereby many of the different physical components of the player’s technique or...
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Among the foothills
Two days to go till our Huddersfield Residency and excitement is reaching fever pitch! Or rather, some of us are running a high fever of panic trying to get everything in some sort of state to start...
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What’s the point? – The composer’s view
Aaron Cassidy writes: James has kindly invited me to make a few contributions to his blog series. Let me say, first and foremost, how thoroughly I have enjoyed reading the posts so far. Even as...
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The Residency – Day 1
One day into our Huddersfield Residency and it’s all going rather well! As I predicted, there is a range of levels of capability across the group at this stage, but it’s a very small range from...
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The Residency – Day 2
Strange portents and wonders: sun in Huddersfield. Birds singing, flowers blooming, the grim and freezing streets we know and love from Festival time filled with happy singing Yorkshiremen; laughing...
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The Residency – Days 3 and 4
I wouldn’t normally regard two days of wall-to-wall student workshops as ‘light relief’, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to wake up on Tuesday morning feeling a bit of a weight lifted from my...
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In the pub
So there we were, in the pub, and I got talking to some of the EXAUDI singers about how things are going with our Cassidy project. Lucy, Tom, Steve, Jon Bungard and Simon gave their opinions… James:...
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Learning Process 1: Simon Whiteley
We’ve asked the singers if they’d like to contribute a slightly longer description of the learning process for Aaron’s piece. For regular readers of this blog there might be a risk of overkill here,...
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Learning Process 2: The Conductor
EXAUDI is, more often than not, a conducted ensemble; but it’s also a rather small ensemble and makes what one might call chamber music, and in many of the pieces we do it’s either preferable not to...
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Rihm’s Vigilia in Munich
Lest this blog begin to seem obsessive, I’m taking a few posts to catch up with some of our other projects this summer. June is always one of our busiest times of year, being the summer festival...
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Cage and more Cage
25th June I’m sitting on the train feeling very tired and completely inspired. EXAUDI has been paying homage to John Cage this week, which means four completely different concerts in four days: two at...
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Francis Bacon, a painter of figures in rooms
In advance of next Saturday’s premiere, Aaron Cassidy writes: One of the great challenges of presenting and discussing my work over the last several years has been pulling the conversation back from...
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Into the mouth
A short post to wrap up this series on EXAUDI’s Aaron Cassidy project. The first and second performance of A painter of figures in rooms took place within half an hour of each other at the Purcell Room...
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Darmstadt Review I: Bryn Harrison
July saw EXAUDI’s first visit to the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt. It was sad that we didn’t have more time to spend going to lectures and concerts and meeting the many interesting people...
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Darmstadt Review II: Niklas Seidl
Our other major premiere at Darmstadt was a Staubach Honoraria commission from German composer Niklas Seidl. Completely unknown in the UK, he works in Cologne as a composer, cellist and ensemble...
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Ferneyhough’s Finis Terrae
We premiered Brian Ferneyhough’s latest work, Finis Terrae, with musikFabrik and Emilio Pomarico at the Festival d’Automne, Paris on 12th November. In advance of its broadcast on France Musique on 17th...
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Goodbye, EXAUDI 2012
The season is over. The tuning forks are packed away, the music is back on the shelf, the black shirts have been tossed into the bottom drawer, and the last shreds of voices are being flogged through a...
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