Tag Archives: solo

something golden in the night

some­thing golden in the night rep­res­ents a first at­tempt to trans­form the tra­di­tional con­cert hall con­text through an ab­stract sceno­graphy that be­gins to con­struct a new con­text within the frame­work of a clas­sical con­cert. A sax­o­phonist is ac­com­panied in their per­form­ance by a play of shadows coming from a sculp­ture, the move­ment of which is […]

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With the weight of a tree at my back

This short, two-movement work came out of an earlier work for solo viola, Gaza Cantos, which was written after the in­va­sion of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Defence Forces in December 2008. The title ref­er­ences Amir Nizar Zuabi’s play I am Yusuf and this is my brother, set be­fore and after ‘al Nakba’ in […]

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Three Sky Studies

Chant-cris Notturno/Abschiedslied I Aubade/Abschiedslied II Three Sky Studies, for solo piano, were com­posed over the course of 2009, with ‘Chant-cris’, a vir­tu­osic scat­tering of notes in­spired by bird­song and Elliott Carter’s Caténaires, acting as a kind of short pre­lude to the second and third move­ments, which were written with pi­anist friends in mind. The first […]

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Gaza Cantos

There is no such thing as polit­ical music. It is an il­lu­sion to think that notes  –  sounds  –  can teach you how to be­have, be a good cit­izen or con­tribute to so­ciety. Music is an ex­per­i­ence, a cel­eb­ra­tion of our ex­ist­ence, not a lan­guage which can convey meaning. Beauty can be ex­per­i­enced by everyone re­gard­less of polit­ical affiliation, […]

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3 Sunsets

Written for Sebastian Grand, 3 Sunsets is made up of three sharply con­trasting mini­atures aimed at es­tab­lishing at­mo­spheric vign­ettes and ex­amining various as­pects of con­tem­porary piano tech­nique. Each mini­ature ex­am­ines ex­tremes of speed and dy­namic in a some­what ali­en­ated, but hope­fully ghostly land­scape. 3 Sunsets was premiered on November 21 2008 by Sebastian Grand in […]

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  • Microbiography

    Chris Swithinbank is a British-Dutch com­poser who works with both acoustic in­stru­ments and elec­tronic sounds. He is cur­rently a stu­dent at Harvard University with Chaya Czernowin.
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