spnm Shortlist Portraits at HCMF

New partnership between spnm and HCMF spotlights emerging composers

spnm and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival are launching a new partnership that will put the UK’s best up-and-coming composers at the forefront of one of the world’s leading new music festivals over the coming years.

Each year two composers in the early stages of their careers will be featured during the festival, giving festival audiences the chance to hear the work of the most exciting new voices before they are familiar names.

The artists featured at HCMF will be from the spnm Shortlist, the UK’s launch pad for composers at the start of their careers. The Shortlist is a group of 90 of the freshest new voices in new music, each of whom is promoted by spnm for three years. Each year 30 composers are selected from anonymous submissions to join the Shortlist.

The first spnm composer features will take place at the 2007 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. The featured composers will be Tim Hodgkinson and Matthew Sansom, who will have new pieces and installations presented at the festival.

Tim Hodgkinson’s career has been multi-faceted and he has come to composition from many other activities. A Social Anthropology graduate, he co-founded cult radical group Henry Cow in 1968 and became deeply involved with improvisation and ethnomusicology. In the mid 1990's his compositions underwent a strong change from a combinatorial and procedural emphasis to an acoustic and phenomenological one.

Matthew Sansom is a musician, composer and theorist. Exploring relationships within a variety of found and made sounds his music generate subtle sonic forms that play upon listener awareness and perception. Having graduated in Music with first class honours and a clutch of prizes, a questioning of the validity of his musical ability and artistic direction began. Abandoning repertoire playing as a saxophonist, he used the opportunity of doctoral research to theorise about and play freely improvised music in an attempt to rediscover and understand something of the pleasure and meaning behind improvising. This, in turn, led to his compositional practice that now includes soundscape composition, electronica, process scores, installations, and ambient works.

Listings:

18th November, 1pm: Insomnio 1 – new work by Tim Hodgkinson

19th November until the end of the festival: Matthew Sansom installation

20th November: Insomnio 2 – Ahmas by Tim Hodgkinson

23 November, 5pm: Rarescale – new work by Tim Hodgkinson

Notes:

spnm promotes new music and supports the development of emerging composers. Its shortlist of composers is a group of the most promising compositional talent in the UK. Since 1943 spnm has been uncovering and creating opportunities for composers and has supported the development of many of the UK’s leading composers – Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle, Judith Weir, James Macmillan, Joby Talbot, Steve Martland. In addition to its work with composers, spnm promotes music to audiences through the UK. Its annually appointed Artistic Director curates a national performance programme of events bringing the best of new music to audiences. http://www.spnm.org.uk