Explore Ensemble return to HCMF to present the world premiere of a major new work by Bryn Harrison, alongside music by Rytis Mažulis.
Programme
Bryn Harrison — The spectre...is always already a figure of that which is to come*
Rytis Mažulis — Canon Mensurabilis
*World premiere: commissioned by Explore Ensemble with the support of the Vaughan Williams Foundation and the Radcliffe Trust, co-commissioned by hcmf// and developed with support from the University of Huddersfield Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM)
Read Bryn Harrison’s note to the new work:
The title of this work comes from Jonathan Boulter’s Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett’s Short Prose (2019). Drawing on Derrida, Boulter makes the interesting claim that the characters we encounter in Beckett’s prose, although disfigured or disembodied, are nonetheless still located within the world. Over the past six years I have begun to consider how we might think of recordings made by musicians as being a bit like spectres - sounds from the past that are now disembodied and removed from their original location, yet still able to communicate in the present. I am reminded of what the composer Morton Feldman said about his piece Three Voices (1982) in which the solo singer is accompanied by two recordings of their own voice played back through speakers, one to the left and one to the right. Feldman described the relationship between the live soloist and the two speakers as being “tomb-stoney”.
This is the fourth piece I have written in which pre-recorded versions of the events that are performed live are incorporated into musical works as part of the real-time experience. As with another recent piece, Towards a slowing of the past (2023), the recorded material heard during the performance is often presented in reverse, and sometimes pitch-shifted, or speed-adjusted. In the case of this new work, live and recorded materials are often heard simultaneously, or slightly ahead of or behind one another. It is the complexity and the friction that arises from, on the one hand, the fixed/representative aspects of recordings, and on the other, their live presence, that I find to be perceptually compelling. The piece was commissioned by the 2025 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and is dedicated to Explore Ensemble.
Bryn Harrison, August 2025