Donemus welcomes composer Matthew Wright. Read his biography and about the upcoming world premiere of his Thrift Hybrids.
Matthew Wright:
During the lockdown of 2020, many musicians sat at home without work, their instruments barely played. Communication with the outside world was often through Zoom calls, where audio dropouts and frozen screens became incorporated into everyday speech. In the political and social domain, the notion of the ‘truth’ had never been more contested, and the dialogue between the ‘real’ and the ‘edit’ led to increased fragmentation. The challenge was to keep it all together, to maintain focus amongst all the shards and splinters.
When asked to make a new piece for Ensemble Klang, I knew it would need to be a piece about ‘being apart’. The ensemble is therefore not seated in the traditional sense: the musicians are treated as six soloists, stranded at home, looking in various directions, practicing their instruments whist Zoom calls flicker in the background. The instrumental writing is ruthlessly fragmented and blunt – only the odd note or fragment is heard at any one time: the instrumental situation is very ‘cubist’ and raw. Throughout this fragmented ensemble situation, the voice of Claron McFadden can be heard via recorded samples and video calls, projected on six video screens that create a kind of glitched choreography around the stage. My own electronic score, made from recordings of Claron and Klang, darts throughout the piece: it aims to bring all the fragments together over a propulsive 35 minutes. This dialogue between live and recorded, between virtual and physical, between domestic studio and public stage, is something I call a musical hybrid: a composition that can exist as a score, a performance, a recording, an installation, a film, a theatre piece. In English,thrift means to work with little resources, to make a lot with a little: thrift shops are where previously discarded materials can be reclaimed, reused and renewed. Thrift is also the name of a coastal flower native to the UK, responsible for spots of ecstatic pink colour amongst harsh, fragmented rocks and cliffs.
More information can be found here:
https://www.ensembleklang.com/programmes/thrift-hybrids/
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention