The intense week is behind me

Last week was quite intense, and just as rewarding.

Monday: conducting test (see here)

Wednesday: voiceworks concert at Wigmore Hall where me and my group premiered my piece Ground: A dialogue study and it was good. More soon.

Friday: 6 hour workshop with Chroma ensemble, conductor, fellow students and professors. Each Mmus student presented sketches for their final project written for Chroma (pierrot ensemble: Flute, Clairnet, Piano, Violin, Cello). Extremely helpful and interesting but one was quite exhausted afterwards. Here are 2 pics with the ensemble trying out the bowed piano part in my piece Penelopeia. It was chaotic at times, but we managed to figure out some good solutions to better the logistics of the piece. It was a very difficult sketch to play as a group though the parts were quite easy, so I´m very thankfull for Chroma´s professionalism, understanding and patience (http://www.chromaensemble.co.uk/).

Here is a short clip from the workshop:

Workshop clip

Saturday: We, The choir of Icelanders in London, held our annual spring concert in The Parish Church of Saint Mark near Primrose Hill, London. The programme was put together of various classic´s of icelandic folk and choir music. I arranged one of the songs for us to accompany Bragi Jónsson, bass vocalist, currently studying at the Royal College of Music and celloist Guðný Jónasdóttir studying at Royal Academy of Music.


Nótt (arrangement) by Helgi Ingvarsson

Afterwards we went to Primrose Hill to toast and celebrate and enjoy the sun. A great end to a great week.

Conducting exam & MAX patch

Studying for a conducting exam is entertaining. You get some exercise (yes, flapping your hands is exercise, how minor it may be), get to study good music and get a release for all those pent-in "coloringbook-needs" (see pic.)

We had our open dress-rehearsal-concert yesterday evening for the Voiceworks. Went well and many interesting pieces on the programme. We should feel quite confident for the Wigmore Hall this wednesday.

I met with Ruth Hardwick yesterday as well to try out my Bassoon/MAX piece "Pan-dora". For the most part it seems to work quite well though we encountered a problem regarding a bar being to powerful so it triggered the last audio files too soon. That´s what workshops are for right? Gain was also an issue. The volume of the playback was to low and after a litle while searching online I found and downloaded these MDA plug-ins (http://mda.smartelectronix.com/effects.htm) to help with amplification. The dynamics plug made that problem a thing of the past.

As of today the patch looks like this.

1st ever working MAX patch

It´s true. I´m making my 1st ever working MAX patch. I did make some very basic ones in LHÍ (Iceland academy of the Arts www.lhi.is) but never to support a performance. This patch I´m making now is for my solo Bassoon piece, titled Pan-dora: The uncooperative machine. I´m very proud of myself if I may say so and I´ll share with you my patch once it´s ready.

For you who are familiar with MAX: In short, the concept is that the performer needs to trigger 3 different sound files at 3 different times during the piece by playing into a mic. At the end she triggers a random number generator where each number is allocated to a sound and a random beat is created.

The tricky part was to set the patch up so that each of the sounds is only played solo, each sound is only played once and to have them all triggered by the same input.

I seem to have managed that. Now we, me and the performer: Ruth Hardwick, need to do some leveling and balancing of the music to make sure everything runs smooth when it´s premiered June 1st.

On a more personal note, the weather in Hackney is lovely today so I´d better whip up some homemade lambburgers to BBQ tonight !

Have a good one

Best wishes
-Helgi

Voiceworks breakthrough + Chroma

My performers in the voiceworks project are kicking ass. We´ve managed to do a "crash-through" a few times, which was very important and last week would had been an impossible feat. Our piece "Ground" is very tricky so I´m very happy with my group. My score is now filled with technical corrections so I´ll be revising it for my final folder in august for sure and my group´s input has been invaluable. This project has also been very good for me to dust of and add to my conduction knowledge for my PG conducting exam the 21st. Loads of time signature changes, fermatas, numerous different entrances for each performer to name a few. Tomorrow we´re meeting Armin, head of the vocal department at Guildhall, so he can have a listen. It will be good to get some proper feedback. Now it´s only 2 weeks till our performance in the Wigmore Hall, London.
 
I have my PG conducting exam on the 21st of May and there are 4 pieces we have to prepare, me and the rest of the conduction elective students.

• Beethoven´s 6th symphony, 1st movement
• Ravel, La Valse
• Wagner´s Sigfried Idyll, overture
• Beethoven´s Die Weihe des Hauses, overture.

I must say that I enjony conducting Beethoven´s 6th and La Valse is also a wonderful piece, but Sigfried Idyll, although sweet, is a tad too long and the progression and development in Die Weihe des Hauses is not to my liking. Nevertheless, they need to be learned and conducted.

Regarding my piece for Chroma ensemble I´ve come up with a concept I´m very happy with and the piece has been titled Penelopeia. It features a Pierrot ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano) and a bowed piano. The bowed piano part seems to be a diffuclt thing for Guildhall administration to accept, which was to be expected, since they dont want anyone to fiddle with their pianos in the wrong way. But I hope to be able to speak to GSMD´s piano technician soon to find a solution to this problem. If a mutual solution is not possible, then it would present quite the discomfort, to say the least, when it comes to the recording in July, not to speak about the performance :

Here is our project´s advert from Chorma´s homepage:
http://www.chromaensemble.co.uk/calendar.html#pierrot

Fingers crossed

Best wishes
-Helgi

Our concert is drawing near / Tónleikarnir okkar eru á næsta leiti