Simon James Performing Percy Grainger’s ‘Free Music’ September 27th

Posted: 8/27/2007 9:55:30 AM
omhoge

From: Kingston, NY

Joined: 2/13/2005

Came across this notice from Simon James.
Unfortunately he does not mention the place and time but hope he'll announce that information soon.

""
I just found out I’ll be performing Percy Grainger’s ‘Free Music’ as part of a Theremin quartet on September 27th.

Percy Grainger was a Australian composer born in 1882. His work was inspired by folk music and featured traditional tonality, gliding intervals, polyrhythms and electronic instruments. Free Music was his attempt to break free of the traditional way of scoring using graphical notation. The central idea of Free Music is the gliding tone.


He worked with Leon Theremin in his pursuit of the idea and went on to build his own musical devices. The image to the left is the ‘Kangeroo Pouch’, one of the Free Music machines he built and installed in his living room in 1950. The scores themselves are really interesting visually with one ’stave’ for pitch and another for amplitude, and zig zagging lines indicating the level of each.
I don’t often get the chance to play live but I always enjoy it when I do and I think this will be a great show. Rehearsals will be taking place over the next few weeks and I’ll keep you updated on how the performance is coming along and venue details.
""

http://www.simonsound.co.uk/author/Simon/

If any TW members know, please add on here. I'm sure folks who can would try and get to hear this rarely performed piece.
Posted: 8/28/2007 6:00:48 AM
Charlie D

From: England

Joined: 2/28/2005

Free music is *really* hard to play. Unless you have perfect pitch, or absurdly good relative pitch, you have to keep glancing at the score and your tuner simultaneously in order to play the thing.

You must be logged in to post a reply. Please log in or register for a new account.