27 Feb 2021

NZ Composers at Exploratory Music Festival

From Sound Lounge, 9:30 pm on 27 February 2021

Several New Zealand composers will join composers from all over the world to have their works performed at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (BIFEM) from 6-8 September 2019. The Festival takes place each year in the culturally alive city of Bendigo, in Victoria, Australia.

BIFEM strutted onto the international music scene in 2013 and won critical praise from around the world for delivering festival and broadcast audiences a visceral experience, with an emphasis on premieres or rarely-performed long-form works.

The composers representing New Zealand contemporary music this year are Antonia Barnett-Mcintosh, Thomas Bedggood, Yi Min Chau, Dylan Lardelli, Clovis Mcevoy, Ihlara Mcindoe, Nathaniel Otley, Kerian Varaine, Na Weeney Xian and Oliver Bramah.

Between them they'll have 12 world premieres performed at the Festival. We look forward to playing these on Sound Lounge in the near future. In the meantime check out some other works by four of the talented composers.

'Accent' by Antonia Barnett-McIntosh

Using extensive transcriptions, close listening and improvisatory techniques, Accent is a duet, conversation and mutual impersonation. This is a composition carefully transposed from hours of casual conversation, serious discussion, drawn-out efforts at explanation, tetchy disagreements and myriad attempts - both lazy and sincere - to impersonate one another's accents.

'Conflux' by Clovis McEvoy

Conflux is a work for acoustic tenor recorder and live electronics written for Imogen Morris. The electronic components have been designed to shift and fluidly adapt to the performer's tempo, dynamics and pitch choices, creating exciting and dynamic relationships between the two mediums as they collide and combine. The work is evocative of New Zealand’s changing cultural identity – as our natural heritage gives way to encroaching industrialisation and urbanisation there is friction and stresses but also the opportunity for new creations, interactions and relationships.

'Musical Box’ by Dylan Lardelli

In ‘Musical Box’ Dylan Lardelli seeks to express in sonic form the notion that "memories often comprise reality and ongoing transfigurations." Alistair Fraser's pūmotomoto acts as memory and the other instrumentalists play "transformed and faded" versions of this. In this Stroma performance from its Tātai Whetū concert at the Hannah Playhouse, the composer plays guitar, with Ingrid Bauer (harp) and Andrew Thomson (viola).

'Alive in Berlin', music by Kerian Varaine

This is an excerpt of a multi-media performance piece, written and performed by Jenny Powell, composer Kerian Varaine, film maker Phoebe Lisbeth K McKenzie, and animateur Simon O'Connor. Kerian Varaine is a Dunedin-based composer, sound artist, performer and luthier.