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Percussion premiere
By: Alison Field
Last updated: Wednesday, 4 November 2009
An innovative new musical work by Dr Sam Hayden will be given its southern premiere at Falmer House Debating Chamber on 20 November.
Actio is a large-scale five-movement work for voice and percussion, using a variety of percussion instruments, from the metal sonorities of vibraphone, gongs and tam-tam to an array of drums, woodblocks and other un-tuned sounds, often featuring rapid changes in timbre, rhythm and register as well as live-electronic sound processing.
It was inspired by a text by French theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes, entitled Le Plaisir du Texte.
Sam is a Senior Lecturer in Music at Sussex whose works have been performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Sinfonietta.
He says: "Barthes discusses the ancient Greek concept of 'Actio', a form of expressive discourse coming directly from the body.
"I was interested in how an extract of Barthes' rather beautiful text could be performed according to this idea, using voice and percussion: perhaps the two most directly physical of all musical instruments. In this context, the meanings of the words become less important than how they sound."
Actio was commissioned by Swiss contemporary music specialists, duo Canto Battuto, and will be performed alongside a new work by Swiss "audio artists" Blablabor, entitled Hirsch Hirn Hornisse, which consists of a singer, a percussionist and 60 radios performing questions and statements in four languages.
The two pieces, connected thematically through their use of language, form Le Grain de la Voix.
Tickets for the performance at 7.30pm on 20 November cost £8 (£4 students/concessions). Contact Terry Bryan, E t.j.bryan@sussex.ac.uk, for tickets in advance.
The performance is preceded by a free lecture-recital and workshop at 2pm.