Archive — lovemusic

Concert series 19-20 BNU

For the third year in a row lovemusic presents a cycle of concerts of new and exciting music - one of the highlights of the cultural season of the National University Library of Strasbourg.

Screen Shot 2020-02-25 at 12.07.11.png — **The object of my affection**
09.10.19 | 19h
Everyday objects as musical Instruments - musical Instruments as sound objects ... lovemusic explores a repertoire where sound itself is tested in all its dimensions, from a simple breath to a cry through a megaphone. The gestures and expressions from the performance create a music that embodies the full spectrum of human emotions, from comedy to violence, from sadness to tenderness... It is a music, as Fausto Romitelli states in the title of one of the pieces of the programme, on the periphery: the periphery of musical interpretation at the very place where it meets performance, noise and emotion ... The collective invites Raphaël Languillat to collaborate on a new quartet for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and video: Polyxena | Abduction (red)
Music by Raphael Languillat (commission /premiere), Natacha Diels (French premiere), Francesco Filidei, Malin Bång, Fausto Romitelli, Salvatore Sciarrino.

**Orologio di fuoco**
17.01.20 | 19h
"Time stands still with gazing on her face "
The concept of time is important in new music - it's today, it's now and with a tendency to look to the future. In Orologio di fuoco lovemusic proposes to stop for a moment and look to the past. The pieces in this programme are inspired by texts or music from the past, retro objects, ephemeral moments and even a score that reads time: the programme ends with a new piece by Maurizio Pisati written for lovemusic - *FireClock*. The inspiration for the piece comes from a sculpture built by Pisati himself over several years until he set fire to it. All that remains of this sculpture is the music it inspired and the filmed testimony of its disappearance. The programme is framed by an installation by The Poetic Mechanic which, in an increasing number of transformations, performs a primitive rotation ceremony, haunted by the relationships between human and non-human, mechanical and poetic .
Music by Maurizio Pisati (commission /premiere), Michele Abondano (commission / premiere), Jérôme Combier, Anna Thorvaldsdottir (French premiere), Philip Venables (French premiere), Cameron Graham.
Concert in collaboration with the Italian Institute of Culture Strasbourg.

**A room of one’s own**
08.03.20 | 15h
In a recent interview composer Betsy Jolas commented on the place of women in the world of musical composition: "... as Virginia Woolf said - the problem for the woman is that she has no room to herself ... I had a lot of trouble finding a room for myself! " For International Women's Rights Day 2020, lovemusic puts the spotlight on composers with whom they collaborate. On this occasion the collective commissioned a new piece specifically for this project from the Alsatian composer Claire-Mélanie Sinnhuber.
Music by Claire-Mélanie Sinnhuber (commission / premiere), Rebecca Saunders, Anna Pospelova (French premiere), Michelle Agnes Magalhaes, Naomi Pinnock (French premiere), Betsy Jolas.
This concert is part of the events programmed by the City of Strasbourg for International Women's Right’s day. The concert will be preceded by a round table produced in collaboration with the CDMC (Centre for the documentation of contemporary music).

**L’homme est un loup**
07.05.20 | 19h
This programme for flute, clarinet, cello and guitar is inspired by "Dog Eat Dog" by Jérôme Combier, with whom the collective collaborated in 2018 (for the project “Everything Starts Elsewhere”). In this piece the composer highlights the complex relationships between musicians who play together. Each piece in this programme is imagined as a scene with characters who seek, complement each other and put themselves in danger, each of them convinced to be right... How far are we willing to go to demonstrate it?
Sometimes violent, sometimes restraint or even directed against itself, this debate refers to the work by Sarah Nemtsov, RED: a testimony of a personal struggle against a sometimes cold, hard and hypocritical society.
Music by Hugo Vasco Reis (premiere), Jérôme Combier, Sarah Nemtsov, Matías Fernández Rosales (premiere), Jaime Reis .

**Carnet de voyage**
04.07.20 | 19h
The main theme of the Bnu's cultural season this year is the Odyssey. As closure to their cycle and to close the cultural season of the Bnu, lovemusic proposes a voyage where an anticipated return is premeditated (that of Ulysses to Ithaca) but whose outcome will perhaps not be as expected.
As last year, the collective ends the season as a wind trio, for which lovemusic has commissioned an electroacoustic piece from the American composer David Bird. This new trio is conceived by the composer as a meta-instrument; the sound produced is echoed by the electronics taking the audience on a long auditory and sensory journey. The rest of the programme is imagined as an intimate diary of this trip: the warm colours of the landscapes, the steps on the trail, the whistling of the wind on the sea ...
Music by David Bird (commission / premiere), Malika Kishino, Carola Bauckholt, Mark Andre, Malin Bång.

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Concert series 18-19 BNU

For the second year in a row, lovemusic to presented a series of contemporary music concerts in the auditorium of the Strasbourg National University Library.

lovemusic espaces divers — **Espaces Divers**
17.11.18
This programme was constructed from three ideas: multiple spaces, real or imagined, the perception of sound and the different feelings of the passage of time ... lovemusic invites the English composer John Croft to collaborate with them again, commissioning a new piece for flute, clarinet and guitar.
This concert is *in memoriam* of the Swiss composer Klaus Huber who passed away last year in October. The collective will perform one of his most beautiful chamber works *Plainte - Lieber spalten mein Herz II*. Music by Omri Abram John Croft , Nadir Vassena, Klaus Huber, Annette Schlünz.
photo©Violetta Mazzoleni

lovemusic_PATRICK LAMBIN_a011919_21.jpg — **Everything starts elsewhere**
18.01.19
This concert was the French premiere of the programme Everything Starts Elsewhere which was performed during lovemusic's tour in the UK in February 2019, including a commission by the French composer Jérôme Combier.
photo©Patrick Lambin

lovemusic arsmondo — **Nueva refutación del tiempo**
02.04.19
New refutation of time is the title of an essay by Jorge Luis Borges which proposes that the continuity of time is an illusion and that time exists without succession, where each moment contains all eternity, thus negating the notion of "newness". This "new" music program plays with our notion of time - objective time can be accelerated or slowed down according to musical construction. Music by Nicolás Medero Larrosa (commission), Ezequiel Netri, Santiago Diez-Fischer, Luis Naón, Daniel d’Adamo, Alberto Ginastera.
This concert was part of the festival Arsmondo of the Opera National du Rhin.
photo©Gregory Massat

lovemusic ime flies — **Time flies…**
24.05.19
Some of the pieces in this programme are inspired by works of art that are fixed in time, a snapshot of a specific moment. These "immobile" works are brought to life for the duration of the musical performance. Other pieces "accompany" musically, for a specific moment, an art installation with movement of its own. Thus certain musical works give life and movement to the fixed images whilst others become an ephemeral snapshot during the "life" of the works of art. Music for flute, clarinet and oboe by Annette Schlünz, Peter Ablinger, Franco Donatoni, Samuel Andreyev, Salvatore Sciarrino and the premiere of a piece by Nicolas Marty.
photo©Gregory Massat

lovemusic Outside of you — **Outside of you... including me**
12.07.19
“One day, you’re there. And then, all of a sudden, there’s less of you. And you wonder where that part went? If it’s living somewhere outside of you? And you keep thinking… maybe you’ll get it back? And then you realize: it’s just gone.” From AMC’s Television Series Mad Men, *Meditations in an Emergency* [2.13]
lovemusic explores the idea of internalised and externalised experiences - when does listening to music becomes a part of ourselves?
Music by Davíð Brynjar Franzson (commission) Ann Cleare, Misato Mochizuki, Jean-Patrick Besingrand (French premiere), Clara Iannotta, J.S Bach.
photo@Gregory Massat

Concert series 17-18 BNU

lovemusic's first series of concerts in Strasbourg took place at the auditorium of the Strasbourg National University Library (BNU). This season, called Perspectives included in each programme a new piece commissioned by the collective as well as a piece of classical repertoire in order to offer a new and original viewpoint of music written today. lovemusic's scenographers Clement Debras and Mathilde Melero created a mise en scène for each concert.

Screen Shot 2018-08-02 at 11.20.02.jpg — **Far Est/Far Ouest**
10.3.18
To the east Japan, to the west Mexico ... despite the distance, their music finds a common ground: a different perception of temporality, a special place for wind instruments and a clear identity despite European influence…
And the accordion, wandering instrument, bringing together the two cultures as well as the timbres of the flute and the clarinet, uniting the three instruments in one same breath.
Music by Arturo Fuentes (commission), Keiko Harada, Mario Lavista, Dai Fujikura, Jorge Torres Saenz, Toshio Hosokawa and Joji Yuasa.

**Ceci est [une extension de] mon corps**
8.6.18
When we play an instrument, it becomes an extension of our body, allowing us to express ourselves though sound. In this programme the third performer - the electronics - plays an extraordinary role, because it plays a dual role: one that extends this bodily extension even more by picking up and prolonging the sounds we produce, but also one which transforms and dissects what has already been heard, and in this way it becomes an interpreter of interpreters ...
This programme explores the influence of technology on acoustic music: a soundtrack of daily sounds recorded by Cage, sound processing in real time, a computer as a musical instrument and apps and gadgets on stage!
Music by Michelle Lou (French premiere), Sarah Nemstov, John Cage, John Croft (French premiere), Sohrab Uduman and a new piece by Marcello Messina (commision).

Mexican tour

September 2017

2.9.17 - Concert - Sala Carlos Chávez, UNAM

4.9.17 - Concert - Fonoteca National

5.9.17 - Concert - Casa de Francia

6.9.17 -Concert and workshop- Escuela Superior de Musica, CENART

In September 2017 lovemusic were invited to perform in several venues in Mexico City, presenting two different programmes: Estados del alma with music by Maurizio Pistati, Doina Rotaru (premiere), Jérôme Combier, Toshio Hosokawa, Samuel Andreyev, Mario Lavista, Dai Fujikura and Betsy Jolas; and Esprit Français a programme of French music from the beginning of the 20th century.

We also had the opportunity to do a workshop with students from the Escuela Superior de Musica.

Lovemusic performs Ibert at Casa de Francia, Mexico

Umbral del Abismo

Music for the end of Time for solo clarinetist

“Acaso el ocaso nos haga caso y entonces habréis comprendido los signos de la noche. Habréis comprendido los inventos del silencio. La mirada del sueño. El umbral del abismo.”

-Vicente Huidobro

In Messaien’s seminal work Quatuor pour la fin du temps the clarinetist, alone, describes the abyss in the famous third movement “Abîme des oiseaux”. Messaien counterbalances the abyss “avec ses tristesses, ses lassitudes” with transcriptions of jubilant birdsong. Life and the abyss are presented as antipodal. In the same way this programme proposes a journey beginning with The Creation and finishing at the end of Time.

This programme includes music by Jesse Broekman, Mic Spencer, Richard Barrett, Eric Skytterholm Egan and Samuel Andreyev.