This Friday, the UK’s biggest festival of contemporary and experimental music will launch for 2010. Over ten days it will consist of approximately 50 events spanning a variety of music/sound forms. The festival programme combines work by established figures such as John Cage and Mauricio Kagel with that of emerging composers such as Juste Janulyte, Patrick Allison, Edward Caine, Stephanie Conner and Johnny Herbert.

Huddersfield Festival is an important event for this art-form and almost certainly the largest collection of contemporary music works in one place over a given time span in the UK. What is worrying is that in comparison with the currently ongoing exhibition for The Turner Prize*, a comparable event in terms of credibility and standing for contemporary art, Huddersfield Festival is not very well known. This contrast in popularity is indicative of a wider issue concerning the place of contemporary (experimental) music within contemporary arts as a whole.

Lots of theories about why this may be the case have been proposed. In fact, in researching this article, I came across a post on The Wall Street Journal by Paul Sharma which points to a new theory on the matter in the form of a short book by David Stubbs entitled, Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen.

Irrespective of the reason why, contemporary experimental music does not seem to enjoy the same popularity as other contemporary arts forms and The Medium of is keen to at least redress the balance a little bit. We will be giving the same level of coverage to HCMF as we do to The Turner Prize. During the course of the festival we will be featuring some of the composers whose work is appearing at the festival. We will be featuring both established and emerging composers and hopefully bring you some contemporary arts that you may not have heard of before!

Please check back over the next few weeks to find out more.

And if you have any thoughts or opinions on the issues touched on within this post, please do let us know. This is a debate we’d really like to open on this site.

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival runs from Friday 19th November to Sunday 28th November. For further details, please visit Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival’s official website

*For further details regarding The Turner Prize, you can visit the official Turner Prize website and/or check back here over the next few weeks for details on the 2010 nominees.

Ed McKeon from Third Ear, producers of music and mixed media events and tours, is looking for:

“…composers who also make films / video, film-makers / video artists who also compose / perform music, and intermedia artists who don’t lean one way or the other but do both.”

If you would like to find out more about this opportunity, email us at info@themediumof.org

If you would like to find out more about Third Ear, you can visit their website at www.thirdear.co.uk. Thanks.

This short film by Lawrence Jordan is an animation on 16mm film. Mostly on black space, the figures in blue perform a very compact and jewel-like opera in surreal form to Satie’s piano music. (courtesy of www.canyoncinema.com)

Jordan has been making films since 1952 and has produced some 40 experimental and animation films in this time.

Jordan’s new work, Cosmic Alchemy (2010) is being screened as part of the current London Film Festival on Sunday 24th October and Tuesday 26th October 2010. Caynon Cinema (of which Jordan is a Founding Director) describes the film as follows:

On ancient star maps of magnificent color quality, experimental animator Lawrence Jordan takes the viewer out of this world into a world of cosmic imagination.

“Cosmic Alchemy is thematically and visually consistent with his earlier shots and yet, set to an evocative score by John Davis, Jordan has crossed into an unfamiliar and richly rewarding territory of metaphoric complexity. For the handful of folks unfamiliar with Lawrence Jordan’s work, Cosmic Alchemy will leave you desperately wanting more. For the rest, already quite familiar with his brilliance, this film will install a fresh appreciation for Jordan’s justifiable position among experimental cinema’s ascended masters.”
Jonathan Marlow, Dir. San Francisco Cinemathoque

For further information about the screening of this film as part of the London Film Festival, click here

For more information about Lawrence Jordan, visit his info page on this website.