Friday, 17 February 2012

CoLab - Xenakis - Thursday and Friday

So, first things first, this my first EVER blog post, exciting much? and the sceptics say CoLab doesn't have it's uses haha. Right, well, I've just got back from the second day of rehearsal for the Xenakis project. Over the last day and a half we have been rehearsing Iannis Xenakis absolutely crazy composition Terretektorh. The piece is composed for 88 musicians and everyone has their own individual part and a collection of percussion instruments (yeah, we didn't act like small children when we saw the percussion, no no, that would be silly...). Also, we are sat in a circle around the conductor, cos that's not weird, which is, erm, an interesting experience. It was quite disconcerting at first tbh and so, to make me feel better, I decided to see if their was a pattern to the circle, yes I am that cool. Everybody is arranged pretty much opposite their matching instrument, eg the trombones are opposite each other, and, where the instruments don't have an match, opposite their corresponding "partner in crime", eg because I was playing Contra bassoon I was sat opposite the Contrabass clarinet. The circle is split into 8 sections and each section contains a double bass, and a various assortment of other instruments.
The piece it self is an experiment with textures and rhythms are passed throughout the orchestra, around the sections. The piece doesn't even change off one note for the first 100 or so bars. The two "solo" instruments, much to my horror I might add, are the contra bassoon and the contrabass clarinet as they have the heaviest going and most interesting parts. In addition to playing their instruments everyone has, as I mentioned earlier, percussion instruments. These are a wood block, maracas, whip and siren whistle. The first thing we did when we started was learn how to play the siren whistle as it is more complicated than one would think.
Despite the fact that if I had been listening to the piece I would have hated it, I've really enjoyed rehearsing it. The way the sounds pass around the orchestra is really interesting. It was also different working with the other instrumentalist around me rather than mainly just working with the bassoon section, it took a while to get used to but we worked together really well.
It took the entirety of yesterday to sight read the piece just because it's so complicated and we did go back and rehearse bits. The bits most people found most difficult though wasn't playing the music, it was playing the percussion. It's amazing how people pick up a percussion instrument and loose all sense of rhythm. Thankfully I didn't have this problem but it was quite amusing to watch the others haha.
So far I'm really enjoying the project and on Monday we start the satellite projects, I'm doing an audio visual one, which I believe is going to be the more "collaborative" part of the project. I'll probably update again on Wednesday but until then, Deanna out.

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