This is the final feature of composers/artists performed at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival this year. It’s taken a while longer than anticipated to get all the features finished, but we got there in the end. We hope you have found this series interesting. As always, you can let us know your thoughts about this by posting a comment…

Stef Conner’s piece, Still Sky Bells was performed alongside Edward Caine’s work (see previous feature) by the Nieuw Ensemble on Monday 22nd November at St Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield (for details about the rest of the programme, click here).

An audio recording of that performance is not available at this point in time, but we do have one of Stef’s other pieces, Laments of the Gorges which you can listen to:

Stef’s programme note for this piece:

“This piece is a setting of short fragments from an anachronistically experimental and uniquely surreal poem by Meng Jiao (751-814 AD). Although there are no voices in the piece, the language of the poem is present throughout, often in indiscernible and occasionally in discernible forms. Intelligibility of text is obviously limited in instrumental music, but certain elements of language, such as prosody, can be retained. In a ‘tonal’ language like Chinese, the potential for meaning to be discerned from prosody alone is greater than in most European languages. Much of the melodic material in this piece is derived from the contour of the spoken poetry and some of the harmonic progressions and timbral techniques intuitively emulate the sound of Chinese phonemes. I have also incorporated some spectral analysis of the human voice into the piece by tracking variation over time of frequency content in various vocal sounds, and then re-synthesizing them using instruments. These experiments in generating musical material from language provided me with a palette of sounds which I was able to drawn on to create an orchestral atmosphere inspired by the eerie sonorities and turbulent cascades of sound in Meng Jiao’s poem.”

Excerpts from the poem:

Xiá āi kū yōu hún, jiăo jiăo fēng chuī lái.
Laments of the gorges, shadowy spirits mourning. Winds howl.

Sān xiá yī xiàn tiān, sān xiá wàn shéng quán.
Triple Gorge one thread of heaven over ten thousand cascading thongs of water,

Shàng zì suì rì yuè, xià zhì kuáng yí lián
Slivers of sun and moon sheering away above, and wild swells walled in below,

Pò hún yī liăng diăn, níng yōu shù băi nián
Splintered spirits glisten, a few glints frozen how many hundred years in dark gorges

Xìng mìng rú făng jì, dào lù suí suŏ yuán
here, your life like fine-spun thread, its road a trace of string travelled away.

Diàn lèi diào pō líng, pō lĭng jiang shăn rán
Offer tears to mourn the water ghosts, and water ghosts take them, glimmering.

Shàng tiān xià tiān shuĭ, chū dì rù dì zhoū.
Water all heaven-above, heaven-below, a boat leaves earth entering here.

If you would like to find out more about Stef Conner, visit her info page on this site: Conner, Stef – Info

You can also see/hear more of Stef’s work by visiting the following:

Stef Conner’s website: www.stefconner.com
Stef Conner on myspace: www.myspace.com/stefconner

Everything’s Fine

The description for Everything’s Fine is, “it’s all cool and happy”. Matthew describes how he approaches writing his poetry:

I almost exclusively use existing texts as a starting point and edit massively, for example in ‘Verlaine’ I extracted all the words ending -ing from Verlaine’s complete translated works and ‘For Richard Dawkins’ I took out the first word from ‘The God Delusion’ beginning with G, then with O and then D, continuing this for 420 pages. I have just finished ’16 Big Bangs for Marcus Chown’ a piece extracting all the alliterative fragments from Marcus Chown’s book ‘Afterglow of Creation’. The book I used for ‘Everything’s Fine’? ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ by Frederich Nietzsche. Employing chance operations usually feature somewhere and in this piece, I used a present from a friend to decide the font sizes for the words. A bingo machine, my friend thought would be great for me, an update to the bucket of scraps of paper with numbers scribbled on which I’ve been using since I as about 14. I developed this idea in a piece called ‘The Thought of Suicide’ – a much longer piece, also using Nietzsche, who wrote “The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.”

This is just one poem within a considerable catalogue of Matthew’s poetry from which we could have chosen.


If you like this, you can find a lot more at Matthew’s pages on Scribd.

You can find out more info about Matthew on this website, here