University of Plymouth Contemporary Music Festival | |
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Genre | Contemporary |
Dates | February, annually. |
Years active | 14 |
Founded by | University of Plymouth |
Organised by | The Arts Institute |
Website | https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/students-and-family/arts-institute-public-programme |
The University of Plymouth Contemporary Music Festival is an annual event held in Plymouth, Devon, England at the University of Plymouth. The event is hosted by The Arts Institute and the University of Plymouth Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Research. [1]
It has a program of leading-edge orchestral, operatic, jazz, and electroacoustic performances, along with film, and music theatre. Composers and performers who have been part of the festival include BBC Singers, David J. Peterson, Michael Stimpson, Evelyn Glennie, Sally Beamish, liminal, Jem Finer, the Maggini string quartet, Dominic Murcott, Eduardo Reck Miranda, John Matthias, Plaid, Alexis Kirke and Jonty Harrison.
The festival is well known for its unusual ways of creating music. In 2015 a lecturer played a piano duet with a physarum polycephalum slime mould, [2] [3] in 2018 brain waves recorded during seizures were turned into music, [4] and in 2019 sounds sampled from seagulls were performed on a clarinet. [5]
Year | Theme |
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22 - 24 February 2019 | Multiverse |
2 - 4 March 2018 | Decoding Life [6] |
24 - 26 February 2017 | Voice 2.0 |
26 - 28 February 2016 | Frontiers: Expanding Musical Imagination [7] |
27 February - 1 March 2015 | Biomusic [8] |
Slime mold or slime mould is an informal name given to a polyphyletic assemblage of unrelated eukaryotic organisms in the Stramenopiles, Rhizaria, Discoba, Amoebozoa and Holomycota clades. Most are microscopic; those in the Myxogastria form larger plasmodial slime molds visible to the naked eye. The slime mold life cycle includes a free-living single-celled stage and the formation of spores. Spores are often produced in macroscopic multicellular or multinucleate fruiting bodies that may be formed through aggregation or fusion; aggregation is driven by chemical signals called acrasins. Slime molds contribute to the decomposition of dead vegetation; some are parasitic.
Sir George William John Benjamin, CBE is an English composer of contemporary classical music. He is also a conductor, pianist and teacher. He is well known for operas Into the Little Hill (2006), Written on Skin (2009–2012) and Lessons in Love and Violence (2015–2017)—all with librettos by Martin Crimp. In 2019, critics at The Guardian ranked Written on Skin as the second best work of the 21st-century.
Thomas Joseph Edmund Adès is a British composer, pianist and conductor. Five compositions by Adès received votes in the 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000: The Tempest (2004), Violin Concerto (2005), Tevot (2007), In Seven Days (2008), and Polaris (2010).
Bovey Tracey is a town and civil parish in Devon, England, on the edge of Dartmoor, its proximity to which gives rise to the slogan used on the town's boundary signs, "The Gateway to the Moor". It is often known locally as "Bovey". It is about 10 miles south-west of Exeter and lies on the A382 road, about halfway between Newton Abbot and Moretonhampstead. The village is at the centre of the electoral ward of Bovey. At the 2011 census the population of this ward was 7,721.
Carl Edward Vine, is an Australian composer of contemporary classical music.
Physarum polycephalum, an acellular slime mold or myxomycete popularly known as "the blob", is a protist with diverse cellular forms and broad geographic distribution. The “acellular” moniker derives from the plasmodial stage of the life cycle: the plasmodium is a bright yellow macroscopic multinucleate coenocyte shaped in a network of interlaced tubes. This stage of the life cycle, along with its preference for damp shady habitats, likely contributed to the original mischaracterization of the organism as a fungus. P. polycephalum is used as a model organism for research into motility, cellular differentiation, chemotaxis, cellular compatibility, and the cell cycle.
Dame Kay Elizabeth Davies is a British geneticist. She is Dr Lee's Professor of Anatomy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. She is director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) functional genetics unit, a governor of the Wellcome Trust, a director of the Oxford Centre for Gene Function, and a patron and Senior Member of Oxford University Scientific Society. Her research group has an international reputation for work on Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). In the 1980s, she developed a test which allowed for the screening of foetuses whose mothers have a high risk of carrying DMD.
The culture of Plymouth is a social aspect of the unitary authority and city of Plymouth that is located in the south-west of England. Built in 1815, Union Street was at the heart of Plymouth's historical culture. It became known as the servicemen's playground, as it was where sailors from the Royal Navy would seek entertainment. During the 1930s, there were 30 pubs and it attracted such performers as Charlie Chaplin to the New Palace Theatre. It is now the late-night hub of Plymouth's entertainment strip, but has a reputation for trouble at closing hours.
The Arts Institute operates from within the Faculty of Arts and serves as the Arts and Culture programming umbrella organisation for the University of Plymouth. The year round public programme includes exhibitions, music, film, talks and performing arts.
David Sawer, is a British composer of opera and choral, orchestral and chamber music.
Sam Richards, is an English writer, composer, improviser, jazz pianist and former folk music collector and performer. For most of his life he has lived in south Devon. His father was the writer and playwright Allen Saddler (1923–2011).
Seyed Mehdi Hosseini Bami is a Persian composer of contemporary classical music.
Alexis Kirke is a composer and filmmaker known for his interdisciplinary practice. He has been called "the Philip K. Dick of contemporary music". Alexis is British and lives in Plymouth, in South West England. Alexis says he takes his inspiration from both the Arts and from Science/Technology – and has two doctorates – one from each of those Faculties at Plymouth University. In particular, his highest profile work has been motivated by interests in quantum mechanics, marine science, stock markets, and artificial intelligence. Alexis is senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research at the Plymouth University, and is composer-in-residence for the Plymouth Marine Institute.
Charlotte Bray is a British composer. She was championed by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London Sinfonietta and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, BBC Symphony Orchestra. Her music has been performed by many notable conductors such as: Sir Mark Elder, Oliver Knussen, Daniel Harding, and Jac van Steen.
Andrew Adamatzky is a British computer scientist, who is a Director of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory and Professor in Unconventional Computing at the Department of Computer Science and Creative Technology, University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom.
Plymouth Arts Cinema is an independent cinema based at Plymouth College of Art. It screens new independent cinema from all around the world, classic films, along with festivals, special events, and Open Air Cinema.
Heather Barnett is an English artist and university professor working with natural phenomena and complex systems. Working with live organisms, imaging technologies and playful pedagogies, her work explores how we observe, influence and understand the world around us. Recent work centres around nonhuman intelligence, collective behaviour and distributed knowledge systems, including The Physarum Experiments, an ongoing 'collaboration' with an intelligent slime mould; Animal Collectives collaborative research with SHOAL Group at Swansea University where she is an Honorary Research Fellow; and a series of publicly sited collective bio/social experiments, including Crowd Control and Nodes and Networks. She is best known for her work with slime mould. and in 2014 gave a TED talk about slime mould. She is the founding member of SLIMOCO: The Slime Mould Collective, a group of scientists and artists who work with slime mould. She was also the 2014 "Artist-in-Restaurant" at the London restaurant Pied-a-Terre. For four years the restaurant has chosen an artist each year to spend time at the restaurant, eating and lingering in the working areas of the kitchen observing, and then to produce artworks reflecting the experience. She has exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Science Museum, London.
Joseph Phibbs is an English composer of orchestral, choral and chamber music. He has also composed for theatre, both in the UK and Japan. Since 1998 he has written regularly to commissions for Festivals, for private sponsors, and for the BBC, which has broadcast premieres of his orchestral and chamber works from the Proms and elsewhere. His works have been given premieres in Europe, the United States and the Far East, and he has received prestigious awards, including most recently a British Composer Award, and a Library of Congress Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation Award. Many of his works have been premiered by leading international musicians, including Dame Evelyn Glennie, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, Sakari Oramo, Vasily Petrenko, Gianandrea Noseda, and the Belcea Quartet.
Fernanda Aoki Navarro is a composer, multimedia artist and educator. Her music has been performed by major ensembles and soloist, her instrumental music, electronic works, and installations had been performed and exhibited in the United States, Latin-America, and Europe. Her works have been performed across the globe by many renowned ensembles including the New York Philharmonic and the International Contemporary Ensemble.
Atsushi Tero is a researcher, biologist, and associate professor of applied mathematics at Kyushu University. He is known for his research of slime molds, their ability to solve mazes and their practical uses.