Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2019 starts tomorrow

Running for ten days, tickets can be viewed online at www.hcmf.co.uk.

THE Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2019 opens on Friday 16 November through to Sunday 24 November and offers one of the Festival’s subtlest and most curious programmes ever – 10 days of diverse musical exploration celebrating a multiplicity of voices – a chorus of artists, all playing at their own pitch. 

This year’s Festival comprises over 50 events – many of them free.  The 26 world premieres include works by Frank Denyer, Jürg Frey, Marcus Granberg, Georg Friedrich Haas, Hannah Hartman and Naomi Pinnock and there are a host of UK premieres.

The Festival presents composers and performers from as far afield as Georgia, Romania and Egypt and gives a platform to some out-of-the-way instruments, including an ice cello which melts as it plays, and the early electronic musical instrument, the onde Martenot, making surreal musical waves.

Hosted across an eclectic mix of traditional concert spaces, including a vast industrial mill, churches and bars, hcmf// is the UK’s leading platform for British and contemporary art forms, encompassing new, experimental and electronic music as well as visual art, sound art and improvisation. 

As always, the University is the Festival’s essential partner and BBC Radio 3 continues to be on hand to reflect hcmf//’s special atmosphere and many of its concerts.  The festival continues its international partnership programme with Sweden, Switzerland and Holland.

In building the programme around the work of Swedish Composer in Residence Hanna Hartman, the Festival features subtle, low-key innovations from many of modern music’s most daring artists – “…from those who dare to travel around the norm, into quiet, unexpected places where nuance lives on”.

Hanna Hartman’s music is concerned with domestic minutiae, reinventing the household objects and collected clutter of our lives as music waiting to happen. This approach to working outward from our environment is also reflected by hcmf// 2019’s featured composers. Ann Cleare builds her music around interactive spaces that audiences can become a part of (Friday 15 November, 9.30pm).  Naomi Pinnock ties sound to where, when and how we experience it (Friday 15 November, 7pm).  Frank Denyer combines melody and timbre as if they were pathways and places in a series of brilliantly coloured and emotionally rich compositions.  His ambitious 1990s work for 40 musicians, The Fish that became the Sun finally gets its long-delayed first public performance at hcmf// (Saturday 23 November, 5pm).

hcmf// highlights in 2019

• In a world that thrives on sensationalism, hcmf// embraces a more pluralistic approach to the experience of what it is to be human. Swedish Norwegian experimental pop musician Jenny Hval has spent her career asking a series of intertwining existential questions.  Her new music theatre work, The Practice of Love (Sunday 17 November, 7pm), considers our intimate relationship with language.  And American experimental musician and visual artist, Christine Sun Kim considers how music is held captive by capitalism (Friday 22 November, 7pm).
• As always, the Festival celebrates music without constraint: musical absurdist Charlotte Moorman lived on the fringes of the 60s experimental scene; American cellist Seth Parker Woods honours her legacy by performing an ‘ice cello’, recreated from one she played in 1967 (Saturday 16 November, 4pm). Understated drone musician Ellen Arkbro gives an organ concert that blurs time with its unique placement of sound and silence (Saturday 16 November, 1pm).  Manchester-based sound artist/improviser Kelly Jayne Jones continues her mission to discover and extract and to play sounds that exist beyond the human realm (Thursday 21 November, 10.30pm).
• London Sinfonietta returns to give the world premiere of a new, boundless work by Georg Friedrich Haas, written in homage to abstract painter Bridget Riley (Saturday 23 November, 7.30pm). There are also notable premieres of new works by Swiss master of wide, quiet sound spaces, Jürg Frey (Sunday 24 November, 4pm) and by one of the undisputed discoveries of hcmf// 2017, Swedish composer Magnus Granberg (Wednesday 20 November, 9pm).
• Improvisations are woven through the programme, including a concert from saxophonist Evan Parker on his 75^th birthday (Sunday 24 November, 7pm) – as well as a rare sighting on piano from legendary composer Heiner Goebbels, who time-travels back to his days making free-form music with longtime collaborator Gianni Gebbia (Sunday 17 November, 9pm). And founding member of German rock pioneers Can, Irmin Schmidt, performs the UK premiere of music from his album 5 Klavierstücke (Thursday 21 November, 7pm)
• The Festival’s multiplicity of voices also includes composers and performers from as far afield as Romania, Egypt and Georgia. Look out for a recreation of the Romanian/French neo-Dada-ist Isidore Isou’s Juvenal Symphony No 4 (Sunday 17 November, 11pm); a rare solo concert for voice and electronics by Nadah el Shazly (Tuesday 19 November, 9pm) who thrillingly amalgamates traditional Egyptian song with her own experimental takes on performance and instrumentation; and Mikhail Shugliashvilli’s Grand Chromatic Fantasy for 3 pianos (Friday 22 November, 12pm).
• This assembly of artists, all speaking with their own unique voices, also includes some notable curiosities: from Switzerland, Luigi Archetti’s monumental 7-hour electronic ‘noise’ marathon, Null, presented over the course of one day (Friday 22 November, 2pm and 9pm) and, from France, a concert of premieres by onde Martenot virtuoso Nadia Ratsimandresy, who has customised this most singular of 20^th century inventions to incorporate real-time electronics (Wednesday 20 November, 11pm).
• As part of hcmf//’s regular, free all-day ‘Shorts’ programme (Monday 18 November) pianist Philip Thomas is joined by dancer Hilary Elliott in a performance of some of Morton Feldman’s lesser known treasures. Unknown in most corners, and in some cases unpublished, these pieces make up an informal series of dance works, interpreted in a selection of improvised movements from Elliott.
• Weaving a surreal dimension into festival proceedings, the University of Huddersfield’s edges ensemble creates incidental theatre as its members perform choice pages from Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964), the artist’s collection of surrealist passing thoughts.
• The group’s ongoing performances begin with a launch event at Queensgate Market’s unique Temporary Contemporary gallery space. The gallery also hosts a selection of music and film works by Claudia Molitor, running throughout the Festival.  Molitor also returns to present the vinyl launch and a further performance of Decay (Saturday 16 November, 9.45pm), an evolving work commissioned by hcmf// in 2017.

To view the complete Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2019 programme and for online sales, go to www.hcmf.co.uk.