Wednesday 14 November, 12-4pm (CM.107)
For Lab 18 we welcome composer Thomas Meadowcroft from Berlin to talk about his recent work, focusing on composing and neoliberalism. In the second half of the Lab, PhD composer Goni Peles will present his recent CompositionCloud project, with some opportunities to create content and explore distributed creative practices.
12-2pm | CM.107 | Thomas Meadowcroft – Composing and Neoliberalism: some preliminary remarks
Thomas Meadowcroft will discuss his recent orchestra work, ‘The News in Music’. Although the work deals with the symbolic power of news and orchestral media, the role of the concert hall composer in relation to commodification and civic space will also be discussed.
Thomas Meadowcroft is a freelance composer who has lived in Berlin since 1998. He attained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 (composition studies with George Crumb). He makes orchestral and chamber music for the concert hall, as well as music for theater, film and radio. His work has been described as ‘reaching an inexpressible purity’ (Le Monde), ‘dreamy post-rock’ (New York Times), ‘never-ending, sugar-sweet’ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), ‘motorized nostalgia’ (The Scotsman, Glasgow) and ‘between academic schmaltz and avantgarde-pop’ (Zitty Magazine, Berlin). His orchestral music has been performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg and the SWR Symphony Orchestra. His chamber music has been performed internationally by, among others, ensemble recherche, Third Coast Percussion, Klangforum Wien, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, Speak Percussion and Yarn/Wire.
2-4pm | CM.107 | Goni Peles: CompositionCloud
Goni will be presenting two examples of collaborative composition from CompositionCloud, a project he initiated in March 2015 after deciding to stop writing “pieces”. The first, modularSoundStories, is an ongoing collaborative writing experiment. The second, ccloudlab1, was CompositionCloud’s first laboratory. He will then discuss the future of CompositionCloud, a virtual world game he will be developing as his PhD research project at Bath Spa University.