Fires of London

Last updated

The Fires of London, founded as the Pierrot Players, was a British chamber music ensemble which was active from 1965 to 1987.

Contents

The Pierrot Players was founded by Harrison Birtwistle, Alan Hacker, and Stephen Pruslin. [1] From 1967 it was under the joint direction of Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies. The ensemble was formed to play Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and new works, often with a theatrical element, for a similar scoring (usually with the addition of percussion). The instrumentation proved to be too limited for Birtwistle and he left in 1970. Maxwell Davies took over as sole director, renaming the group the Fires of London. It was disbanded after its 20th anniversary concert in 1987. Maxwell Davies subsequently endorsed a new group Psappha, based in Manchester.

During its existence, the Fires of London was particularly associated with Maxwell Davies' music, and gave first performances of many of his works, including Eight Songs for a Mad King , Vesalii Icones, The Martyrdom of St Magnus , Ave Maris Stella and Revelation and Fall. However it also premiered works by other composers, including Elliott Carter's Triple Duo, Birtwistle's Cantata, I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg and The Viola in My Life 1 by Morton Feldman, Ocean de Terre by Oliver Knussen, and Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer by Hans Werner Henze.

The group collaborated with the Early Music Consort of London on the soundtrack for the film The Devils.

Instrumentation and players

Maxwell Davies described the basic instrumentation as flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, keyboards, percussion. [2] Principal players in the formative years included Judith Pearce (flute), Alan Hacker (clarinet), Duncan Druce (violin), Jennifer Ward Clarke (cello) and Stephen Pruslin (piano).

The Fires of London was one of many ensembles created to play Pierrot Lunaire, and the presence of these ensembles led to many new works being written for the same instrumentation. This in turn led to the formation of yet more groups, leading to the establishment of the Pierrot ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano) as a standard instrumentation in contemporary music.

Related Research Articles

<i>Pierrot lunaire</i> Musical setting by Arnold Schoenberg of 21 selected poems by Albert Giraud

Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire", commonly known simply as Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Albert Giraud's cycle of the same name as translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work is written for reciter who delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Though the music is atonal, it does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921.

In music, instrumentation is the particular combination of musical instruments employed in a composition, and the properties of those instruments individually. Instrumentation is sometimes used as a synonym for orchestration. This juxtaposition of the two terms was first made in 1843 by Hector Berlioz in his Grand traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes, and various attempts have since been made to differentiate them. Instrumentation is a more general term referring to an orchestrator's, composer's or arranger's selection of instruments in varying combinations, or even a choice made by the performers for a particular performance, as opposed to the narrower sense of orchestration, which is the act of scoring for orchestra a work originally written for a solo instrument or smaller group of instruments.

Richard Emsley is a British composer, sometimes associated with the New Complexity school.

In music, a nonet is a composition which requires nine musicians for a performance, or a musical group that consists of nine people. The standard nonet scoring is for wind quintet, violin, viola, cello, and contrabass, though other combinations are also found.

Philip Grange is an English composer and academic.

The Nash Ensemble of London is an English chamber ensemble. It was founded by Artistic Director Amelia Freedman and Rodney Slatford in 1964, while they were students at the Royal Academy of Music, and was named after the Nash Terraces around the academy. The Ensemble has won awards from the Edinburgh Festival Critics and the Royal Philharmonic Society, as well as a 2002 Gramophone Award for contemporary music.

Pierrot ensemble Type of musical ensemble

A Pierrot ensemble is a musical ensemble comprising flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, frequently augmented by the addition of a singer or percussionist, and/or by the performers doubling on other woodwind/stringed/keyboard instruments. This ensemble is named after 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal work Pierrot Lunaire, which includes the quintet of instruments above with a narrator.

Radius is a London music ensemble founded in 2007 by the British composer Tim Benjamin. The ensemble specialises in the performance of new music from around the world written by living composers and 20th-century masters. The ensemble's artistic director is the British composer Ian Vine, a contemporary of Tim Benjamin at the Royal Northern College of Music from 1994 to 1997. Modelled on the 1960s ensemble The Fires of London,, the core instrumental line-up of Radius is flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion. To this instrumentation have been added trumpet, trombone, French horn, actors, and vocalists, as required for the performance of specific works.

David Horne is a Scottish composer, pianist, and teacher.

The Melos Ensemble is a group of musicians who started in 1950 in London to play chamber music in mixed instrumentation of string instruments, wind instruments and others. Benjamin Britten composed the chamber music for his War Requiem for the Melos Ensemble and conducted the group in the first performance in Coventry.

In music, a decet—sometimes dectet, decimette, or even tentet—is a composition which requires ten musicians for a performance, or a musical group that consists of ten people. The corresponding German word is Dezett, the French is dixtuor. Unlike some other musical ensembles such as the string quartet, there is no established or standard set of instruments in a decet.

Trumpet repertoire Set of available musical works for trumpet

The trumpet repertoire consists of solo literature and orchestral or, more commonly, band parts written for the trumpet. Tracings its origins to 1500 BC, the trumpet is a musical instrument with the highest register in the brass family.

Robert Duncan Druce was an English composer, string player and musicologist, noted for his breadth of musical interests ranging from contemporary music to baroque and early music, as well as music of India.

Psappha is an ensemble of contemporary classical musicians based in Manchester in the North West of England, specialised in the performance of works by living composers. Founded in 1991 by Artistic Director Tim Williams, the ensemble moved into a new home in 2015, St Michael's, Ancoats, Manchester.

Chamber Symphony No. 1 (Schoenberg)

The Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E major, Op. 9 is a composition by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg.

The Dr K–Sextett is a short, occasional composition for six instrumentalists, written in 1969 by Karlheinz Stockhausen and given the number 28 in his catalogue of works.

A Garland for Dr. K. is a set of eleven short compositions created in 1969 for the celebration of the eightieth birthday of Dr Alfred Kalmus, the director of the London branch of Universal Edition. It is also the title of an album containing these eleven pieces of music, recorded in 1976.

Kate Soper is a composer and vocalist, notable for her innovative treatment of the vocal mechanism. Her work as both a composer and performer explores the dramatic and affective qualities of the human voice, capitalizing on extended vocal and instrumental techniques. She was a recent Guggenheim Fellow as well as a 2012–13 fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her chamber opera, Ipsa Dixit.

<i>Incantations</i> (Waterhouse)

Incantations, subtitled Concerto da camera, is a composition for piano and ensemble by Graham Waterhouse, composed in 2015 and first performed in Birmingham.

References

  1. Who’s Who 1975, page 1302, (A&C Black: London)
  2. "The Devils". maxopus.com. Retrieved 21 March 2016.