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Still/s cycle

complete hardback collectors edition

Richard Emsley

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£59.99

complete hardback collectors edition

£59.99
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Composer Richard Emsley
Year of Composition 2002-2019
Duration ca.180'
Instrumentation Flute/Alto Flute/Piccolo/Bass Flute, Bb Clarinet/Eb Clarinet/A Clarinet, Violin, Violoncello, Piano
Categories (all composers) ,
Catalogue ID ce-re2sc1

Notes

220pp A4 collectors hardback edition with introductory texts by Richard Emsley and Tim Rutherford-Johnson, plus an interview with the composer by Dan Goren.

Richard Emsley’s still/s cycle started life in 2002 when the composer together with painter Joan Key were commissioned by the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill to collaborate on a work on the still life – a painting or drawing of an arrangement of inanimate objects. Key’s Six White Paintings for Composition were subsequently included in the Colour White exhibition, during which the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze premiered Still/s 1.

Over the following 17 years Emsley created 23 further pieces for every possible permutation of instruments in a standard Pierrot ensemble: flute, clarinet, violin, ‘cello and piano. While performable separately (ideally in groups), together they stand as hugely significant artistic statement of a composer focussed on the detail of performance, sound and listening experience.

The music of the cycle is characterised by a certain bareness – even emptiness – and a ‘whiteness’. The writing is often pared down to its musical ‘skeleton’, thereby drawing the listener in as it focuses on the minutiae of sonic detail – and thereby to “still”. It typically exposes and reiterates a single duration and celebrates the singularity of its ‘span’. It attempts to emulate musically the ‘empty space’ of traditional Japanese art, which regarded ‘negative space’ to be just as important as the rest of the artwork. And it takes the novels of Samuel Beckett as a model, whose principal characters are closely observed and minutely described ‘doing nothing’, and in which an overall process moves steadily towards “whiteness, absence, stillness and silence”.

This special 220-page hardback edition (297mm x 210mm) comprising the complete cycle with an introduction by the composer provides a unique source for anyone looking to explore and understand the contemporary moment in music today from the view of one of it’s most focussed and skillful composers.