Paul McGuire features in a concert at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
The concert on 27 November is part of a series of three concerts which showcase up-and-coming composers who are emerging out of higher education in Britain.
Currently based in London, where he is studying for a PhD in Composition at Brunel with Jennifer Walshe and Christopher Fox, Dublin-born composer Paul McGuire was selected as one of 12 composers for the Sound and Music / NMC Recordings Next Wave programme. The programme involves selected composers developing works for leading UK performers, and receiving mentoring from composers Richard Baker, David Horne, Alwynne Pritchard and Richard Rijnvos.
McGuire’s work composed as part of the programme, Panels, will be performed by Sarah Nicolls (inside-out piano), Loré Lixenberg (mezzo), Oren Marshall (tuba), and the percussionist and string players of the London Sinfonietta in the first of the three concerts on 27 November at 12.30pm. He writes about his experience of the project on Sound and Music’s sampler blog:
‘As a composer, I am interested in the grain of sound, and, in particular, sounds that are compositionally underused and considered incidental. I re-imagine the way in which performers of my music should approach their instruments, beyond a use of extended techniques, in order to hone in on sounds that are often unrecognisable from their sources. This scheme presented an ideal opportunity to apply these ideas to a larger and more instrumentally-varied chamber group than what I usually write for.’
More on the concert here.
Listen to an extract of the work, recorded during a workshop with the musicians.
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Watch a short interview with Paul McGuire
[youtube:http://youtu.be/kzebn90kCqo]