LCMF 2024
17 January 2025:
Éliane Radigue /
The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners
Wigmore Hall
This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show. Sign up to our mailing list and we’ll let you know the exact date as soon as we do.
Pauline Oliveros
Waking the Noise Intoners (2009)
(UK premiere)
Paolo Buzzi
(realised by Luciano Chessa)
Pioggia nel pineto antidannunziana (1916)
(UK premiere)
Brian Sheridan / Toshiro Sawa
BHAIDHLUGAENG (c.1921)
Chris Newman
People (2025)
(world premiere)
Margareth Kammerer
Blues or Woman in the Mind at Night (2010)
(UK premiere)
Pablo Ortiz
Tango Futurista (2009)
(UK premiere)
Dermot O’Reilly
Foldada Dorchada (c.1921)
Dermot O’Reilly
An Péist (c.1922)
Jennifer Walshe / Tony Conrad
Fancy Palaces (2009)
(UK premiere)
Teho Teardo
Oh! (2010)
(UK premiere)
Peter Ablinger
Weiss/Weisslich 17s Intonarumori und Rauschen (2024)
(UK premiere)
Luigi Russolo
(realised by Luciano Chessa)
Fragment from Risveglio di una città (1913)
(first UK performance since 1914)
INTERVAL
Éliane Radigue / Carol Robinson
OCCAM DELTA XXIII (2025)
(world premiere)
(LCMF / Wigmore Hall / Ensemble Klang co-commission)
Performers:
New Music Society of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama performing The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners: Alexander Cann, Angel Wong, CJ Brooke, Darius Paymai, Efe
Luciano Chessa conductor
Margareth Kammerer voice
Jennifer Walshe voice (Walshe / Conrad, Sheridan / Sawa, O’Reilly)
Neil Luck noise intoners (Walshe / Conrad)
Ensemble Klang (Radigue / Robinson):
Erik-Jan de With baritone saxophone
Anton van Houten trombone
Joey Marijs percussion
‘Would you allow your daughter to marry a Futurist?’ asked the Daily Express on 13 June 1914. When the futurists Luigi Russolo and F.T. Marinetti arrived in London – that same month – primed to unleash noise music onto the British public, the country was in the grip of a Futurist mania. You could buy Futurist socks, Futurist pyjamas, Futurist pillowcases, Futurist cat figurines.
Much of this was down to Marinetti himself, a shamelessly great publicist. He had introduced the bracing tenets of Futurism to a rapt, packed Wigmore Hall in 1912, and denounced ‘the worm-eaten traditions’ of England – a lecture he delivered in French. The press lapped it up. Just as they did Russolo’s 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises, where many of the ideas that would become foundational to post-war experimental music and sound art were all laid out for the first time.
That same year the Pall Mall Gazette ran a vivid report of a private concert in Milan. Russolo’s orchestra of intonarumori (or 'noise intoners') – a bizarre set of homemade instruments that could conjure up ‘all the noises of the street and factory’ in a ‘gigantic roar’ – had entered the world.
The ensemble was made up of 16 large boxes, each of which had a duck-like megaphone on the front and a unique method of sound generation. The ululatori ('howlers'), rombatori ('rumblers'), crepitatori ('cracklers') and stropicciatori ('scrapers') all had discs of various materials/shapes that bowed strings attached to drumskins. The ronatore ('buzzers'), gorgogliatore ('gurglers') and scoppiatori ('combusters'), meanwhile, contained electric motors that excited strings/drumskins. The sibilatore (whistlers) combined the two approaches.
Russolo and Marinetti set up camp with these beasts at the London Coliseum for over a week in June 1914. It was their third public outing – after scandalising Milan and Genoa. That they were debuting at Britain’s foremost music hall would have thrilled Marinetti, who had written an article for the Daily Mail the year before extolling the genius of the variety theatre. In seeking to destroy ‘all that is solemn, sacred, earnest, and pure in Art’, the music hall was Futurism’s greatest ally.
In the end the concerts were a disaster. For all the fanfare, the one thing these noise intoners couldn’t do in this impossibly vast space was make a decent racket. ‘It could have been drowned easily by a good tympanist,’ noted Musical Opinion. Hecklers forced the venue to cut short the first performance. The next night the Italians wheeled out a gramophone to play Elgar to deal with the haters.
It didn’t put off Stravinsky, however, who visited Russolo in Milan to assess the viability of composing for them. Or Ravel, who considered including the croakers in his opera Les Enfants et les sortilèges. Mondrian, meanwhile, wrote about how he saw in the intonarumori the very future of music. And for Cage it all began with Russolo. With the advent of electronic instruments in the 1920s, however, the ambitions of the intonarumori were soon overtaken and the instruments abandoned. Then during the Second World War they completely disappeared.
In 2009, to mark the 100th anniversary of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, and under the auspices of artist and noise aficionado Mike Kelley, Performa invited the composer Luciano Chessa to recreate these fabled instruments. Tonight, in their reconstructed form – in association with Performa, Wigmore Hall and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery – they receive their British debut.
The nine works on tonight’s programme – all conducted by Chessa, and performed by the New Music Society of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama – show the range of what these instruments can do.
The full menagerie slowly reveals itself in the opening work, Pauline Oliveros’s Waking the Noise Intoners (2009)– ‘dedicated to the next Futurists’ – in which we hear each creature creeping in and unfurling its plumage one by one. We hear them dance in Pablo Ortiz’s Tango Futurista (2010) and drunkenly march and chant in Chris Newman’s People (2025) – and perhaps dream in Jennifer Walshe and Tony Conrad’s Fancy Palaces (2009) (performed by Walshe and Neil Luck). The inspiration for Russolo’s orchestra came from the noises of the city, from the gurglings of ‘water, air and gas inside metallic pipes, the rumblings and rattlings of engines breathing with obvious animal spirits, the rising and falling of pistons, the stridency of mechanical saws.’ But imitation was not his aim; sonic liberation was. What might a piston fantasise about if it were freed from toil? Walshe and Conrad offer one answer.
In Margareth Kammerer’s Blues or Woman in the Mind at Night (2010), we get an impression of what a piston’s nightmares might be like, the work climaxing on wave upon unnerving glissandi wave. Around this swirling industrial subconscious, Kammerer sings her own unsettling visions:
‘In the fog
there runs the six-legged dog
with a bone in his mouth
and he looks back to me’
So vivid are the sounds – and names – of the intonarumori it’s hard not to enlist them to the cause of illustration. Chessa brings to life the scents, sounds and drizzle of Paolo Buzzi’s 1916 word-image Pioggia nel pineto antidannunziana, a multimedia riff on Gabriele D’Annunzio's poem La pioggia nel pineto ('The rain in the pinegrove'), in which a score – for gurglers, cracklers and howlers – runs up one side of the page. And don’t miss the only remaining fragment from Russolo’s Risveglio di una città ('Awakening of a city'), which elicited such precise images in the mind of the writer from the Pall Mall Gazette in 1913. Here we get a glimpse of the kind of petrol-and-steam symphony that greeted those first listeners.
From Teho Teardo and Peter Ablinger, on the other hand, we get noise not as metaphor or musique concrète but as stark abstraction. Limiting himself to the scrapers alone, Ablinger sets the specific against the general, white against whitish, scratching unruly lines into snowy beds of electronic white noise in WEISS/WEISSLICH 17s Intonarumori und Rauschen (2024), an intense lesson in listening. In Oh! (2010), meanwhile, Teardo immerses us in fields of noise colour, an exercise in block composition.
Interspersed between the works for intonarumori, Walshe also presents several sound poems (a form invented by Marinetti in 1912) by Brian Sheridan, Toshiro Sawa and Dermot O’Reilly, three pioneering, if rather mysterious Irish ‘Guinness’ Dadaists – so-called because the most active members of the group worked at the Guinness brewery:
‘The Guinness Dadaists’ sound poetry is notable because it is written mostly using the Irish alphabet, following Irish rules of pronunciation. The group used Irish as a medium rather than a symbol, seemingly seeking to weaponise it against the political turmoil of the times they lived in, Dermot O’Reilly writing in one manifesto how “the Irish language is a material which can be broken into fragments which can be mobilised against all sense and meaning”.’
The presiding spirit of this year’s London Contemporary Music Festival, LET’S CREATE, is the figure of the trickster, one of whose main mythic roles – if we think of Hermes or Coyote or Èṣù – is to open the door to what is forbidden. Just as Russolo opened us up to the world of noise, Éliane Radigue turned our attention to the riches that lie within long sustained tones. Both changed music forever.
What would come to be called ‘drone music’ came to Radigue while she was sunbathing on a beach in Nice in 1954, her mind prompted by watching the planes coming in to land at the nearby airport or – depending on which story you believe – from playing a Lettrist game with artist Yves Klein.
Radigue’s way of composing in the closest collaboration with performers and transmitting scores orally – ‘heart to heart’ – opened up another locked door within music. To end the final night of LCMF 2024 we present a new collaborative work by Radigue, Carol Robinson and Ensemble Klang, OCCAM DELTA XXIII. Like so many of Radigue’s works, the piece began with an image gathered by the musicians – and by co-composer Robinson – looking out to the North Sea: ‘observing wave formations, cycles, currents and colour shifts’.
From this, sounds were explored and a verbal ‘memory score’ emerged: ‘Unlike sections in classical music, there are no clear beginnings or endings, rather, qualities of sonic interaction that gently emerge and evolve. The images communicate expressive states to the musicians and are not meant to be decipherable or descriptive’ (Robinson).
As with all Radigue and Robinson’s work together, the interest is as much in the secondary resonances as the primary sounding tones – as much about the smoke that rises up from the fire as the fire itself. Which means, in the end, yet another collaboration: ‘The result is music that takes its time, is demanding on the listener, and will not forgive only one thing: that you do not listen to it!’ (Radigue).
Chris Newman's People (2025)
I always feel very moved
When looking online at Sky News
People live as if in tribes
Which gives our world such bad vibes
It's true also of Berlin
It's as tribal as hell this town we're in
It means that nothing is thought through
The consequences of what they do
People might have bold ideas
But the contextual side does not appear
It's certainly true of my neighbours
And their limited behaviours
It's certainly true of the Middle East
Where the bosses don't want in the least
A situation which could transcend
So this war could have an end
But this war will have no end
I always feel very moved
When looking online at Sky News
People live as if in tribes
Which gives our world such bad vibes
It's true also of Berlin
It's as tribal as hell this town we're in
It means that nothing is thought through
The consequences of what they do
People might have bold ideas
But the contextual side does not appear
It's certainly true of my neighbours
And their limited behaviours
It's certainly true of the Middle East
Where the bosses don't want in the least
A situation which could transcend
So this war could have an end
But this war will have no end
Margareth Kammerer's Blues or Woman in the Mind at Night
(2010)
In the rain
I've seen a plane
It was up side down
Hidden behind a wall
Hidden behind a wall
Hidden behind a wall
In the dark
Lonesome walk
In the middle of the sleeping town
And nothing on the stove
And nothing on the stove
And nothing on the stove
In the thunder
I've seen desert and plunder
People pushing their life in front of them
Eyes shut eyes open
Eyes shut eyes open
In the fog
There runs the six-legged dog
With a bone in his mouth
And he looks back to me
And he looks back to me
And he looks back to me
In the rain
I've seen a plane
It was up side down
Hidden behind a wall
Hidden behind a wall
Hidden behind a wall
In the dark
Lonesome walk
In the middle of the sleeping town
And nothing on the stove
And nothing on the stove
And nothing on the stove
In the thunder
I've seen desert and plunder
People pushing their life in front of them
Eyes shut eyes open
Eyes shut eyes open
In the fog
There runs the six-legged dog
With a bone in his mouth
And he looks back to me
And he looks back to me
And he looks back to me
BIOGRAPHIES
Peter Ablinger is a prolific composer and musician who started life in the graphic arts. Since 1982 he has lived in Berlin, where he has initiated and conducted numerous festivals and concerts. In 1988 he founded the Ensemble Zwischentöne. He has been guest conductor of Klangforum Wien and the Insel Musik Ensemble. Since 1990 Peter Ablinger has worked as a freelance musician. In 2012 he became a member of the Academy of Arts Berlin. From 2012-2017 he was research professor at the University of Huddersfield.
Paolo Buzzi (1874-1956) was an Italian poet, playwright, and journalist, and one of the early proponents of Futurism. Born in Milan, Buzzi became associated with the movement in 1909. He contributed to the movement's literature, writing poetry that embraced the movement’s fascination with speed, machines, and the rejection of traditional forms. Buzzi's work was characterized by its experimental language and typographical innovation. He remained a significant figure in Italian literary circles until his death.
Luciano Chessa is an artist and historian. His works include A Heavenly Act, Piombo and Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago, a 60-hours opera installation. He has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial. In 2014 he presented three events at the Guggenheim Museum as part of Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe. Artist in residence at Monaco’s Direction des Affairs Culturelles, he created Monaco Veloce, a new performance produced by the Théâtre Princesse Grace. He is the author of Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (2012). He has presented his Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (OFNI) across the US and internationally in Berlin, Singapore and Lisbon.
Tony Conrad and Jennifer Walshe first began working together as Ma La Pert after they ran from service as servants of King Pepy I at the end of Old Kingdom Egypt. They were subsequently monks in Carolingean Gaul, Venetian courtesans at Pope Eugene’s court, and prisoners on what was then Van Diemen’s Land, where Walshe tried to secure Conrad’s escape using remote viewing techniques. The unfortunate outcome of the latter incident resulted in Conrad’s work as a stage magician in Australia, where they both accidentally ingested leprosy vectors and subsequently lost three legs and two arms between them.
Ensemble Klang was founded in The Hague in 2003. Projects have been staged with Heiner Goebbels, David Lang, Tom Johnson, Julia Wolfe, Michael Hersch and Peter Adriaansz. Performing without a conductor, a typical Ensemble Klang programme combines complex music requiring virtuosic accuracy and breathtaking musical risk. They are born collaborators, and participate in music theatre, site-specific and dance projects almost every season.
Brian Sheridan, Toshiro Sawa and Dermot O’Reilly, three pioneering, if rather mysterious Irish ‘Guinness’ Dadaists are so-called because the most active members of the group worked at the Guinness brewery. The Guinness Dadaists’ sound poetry is notable because it is written mostly using the Irish alphabet, following Irish rules of pronunciation. The group used Irish as a medium rather than a symbol, seemingly seeking to weaponise it against the political turmoil of the times they lived in, Dermot O’Reilly writing in one manifesto how “the Irish language is a material which can be broken into fragments which can be mobilised against all sense and meaning”.
Margareth Kammerer is a singer, composer and musician. She is interested in the genre of the song and the expansion of its form. Her songs are shaped by various influences: early blues, folk, lied and electronics. She performs both as a soloist and in bands such as The Magic I.D. (Christof Kurzmann / Kai Fagaschinski / Michael Thieke) and Rubyrubyruby (Derek Shirley / Steve Heather). As well as playing concerts in Europe and North America, she writes for film, theatre, dance and radio.
Neil Luck is a composer and musician, and founder and director of the experimental music ensemble ARCO. Neil has presented work at Tate, BBC Proms, Aarhus and Vilnius European Capital of Culture festivals (2017, 2009), V&A, Tokyo Experimental Festival, LCMF, BBC Radio 3, Venice Biennale, ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, MATA Festival (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Klangforum Wien, and with Apartment House, and Explore Ensemble. Neil also performs with artist Jennifer Walshe in the duo WACK, touring internationally.
Chris Newman is a Berlin-based composer and artist. He studied music at King's College, London and with Mauricio Kagel at the Musikhochschule in Cologne. His music has been performed at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, LCMF and ICA (London) and broadcast by, among others, Bayrischer Rundfunk and Hessischen Rundfunk; it includes a large repertoire of songs for voice and piano which he frequently performs himself.
Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) was an American composer and accordionist. She was a central figure in the development of experimental and postwar electronic music. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, and served as its director. She taught music at Mills College, the University of California San Diego and Oberlin Conservatory of Music. In 1988, as a result of descending 14 feet into an underground cistern to make a recording, Oliveros coined the term ‘deep listening’, a pun that has blossomed into an aesthetic based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation.
Pablo Ortiz is an Argentinean composer, now resident in the USA. He is a professor of composition at the University of California, Davis. Prizes and commissions include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), the Charles Ives Fellowship (1996) and Academy Award (2008) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent premieres include his opera, Kassandra (Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, 2024), Suomalainen tango for orchestra (Orquestra Nacional de Catalunya) and Notker for Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices, Copenhagen.
Éliane Radigue (b.1932) is one of the most important composers of her generation. For decades she worked almost exclusively with the ARP 2500 synthesiser to produce long-form works. Since 2001 Radigue has only collaborated with instrumentalists. Her method of composition resembles the oral transmission of traditional music. These include Naldjorlak and the monumental OCCAM OCEAN series, performed by some of the most esteemed musicians of our time. This cycle (still in progress) already comprises more than 70 pieces for instrumental forces ranging from solo to orchestral.
Dermot O’Reilly (see: Guinness Dadaists)
Carol Robsinon is Franco-American composer and clarinetist, who has performed at festivals the world over, including Festival d’Automne à Paris, MaerzMuzik, Archipel, Wien Modern, Huddersfield. Recent compositions include: Can You See, Blanc de Neige, Forest Gazing, L‘illusion des étangs for Philharmonie de Paris and the opera Mr Barbe bleue for Opéra de Reims. She has recorded the work of Scelsi, Nono, Feldman, Berio, Niblock, Frey. Since 2006, she has worked closely with Éliane Radigue, premiering Naldjorlak and twenty pieces from OCCAM OCEAN.
Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) was an artist, theorist, composer and instrument-maker. As a young man he helped in the restoration of Leonardo’s Last Supper and the frescoes of Castello Sforzesco. In 1909 with Boccioni, Carrà and Marinetti he founded futurism. In 1913 he published The Art of Noises and created the intonarumori. His activities were interrupted by the outbreak of the first world war, in which he was seriously injured. During the 1920s and 1930s he spent much time inventing a range of other instruments, such as the Russolophone – a keyboard capable of combining the sounds of individual intonarumori. He continued to paint for the rest of his life, exhibiting alongside other futurists at the 1930 Venice Biennale, and developed a profound interest in the occult.
Toshiro Sawa (see: Guinness Dadaists)
Brian Sheridan (see: Guinness Dadaists)
Teho Teardo is a musician, composer and sound designer. He created the soundtracks for several movies by Oscar-winning directors Paolo Sorrentino and Gabriele Salvatores. He won various prizes for his music, such as the Ennio Morricone and David Di Donatello Prizes.
Jennifer Walshe is an Irish composer and performer. Recent projects include the opera TIME TIME TIME (co-commissioned by LCMF) and the orchestral work THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION (commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland). ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history.
Peter Ablinger is a prolific composer and musician who started life in the graphic arts. Since 1982 he has lived in Berlin, where he has initiated and conducted numerous festivals and concerts. In 1988 he founded the Ensemble Zwischentöne. He has been guest conductor of Klangforum Wien and the Insel Musik Ensemble. Since 1990 Peter Ablinger has worked as a freelance musician. In 2012 he became a member of the Academy of Arts Berlin. From 2012-2017 he was research professor at the University of Huddersfield.
Paolo Buzzi (1874-1956) was an Italian poet, playwright, and journalist, and one of the early proponents of Futurism. Born in Milan, Buzzi became associated with the movement in 1909. He contributed to the movement's literature, writing poetry that embraced the movement’s fascination with speed, machines, and the rejection of traditional forms. Buzzi's work was characterized by its experimental language and typographical innovation. He remained a significant figure in Italian literary circles until his death.
Luciano Chessa is an artist and historian. His works include A Heavenly Act, Piombo and Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago, a 60-hours opera installation. He has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial. In 2014 he presented three events at the Guggenheim Museum as part of Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe. Artist in residence at Monaco’s Direction des Affairs Culturelles, he created Monaco Veloce, a new performance produced by the Théâtre Princesse Grace. He is the author of Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (2012). He has presented his Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (OFNI) across the US and internationally in Berlin, Singapore and Lisbon.
Tony Conrad and Jennifer Walshe first began working together as Ma La Pert after they ran from service as servants of King Pepy I at the end of Old Kingdom Egypt. They were subsequently monks in Carolingean Gaul, Venetian courtesans at Pope Eugene’s court, and prisoners on what was then Van Diemen’s Land, where Walshe tried to secure Conrad’s escape using remote viewing techniques. The unfortunate outcome of the latter incident resulted in Conrad’s work as a stage magician in Australia, where they both accidentally ingested leprosy vectors and subsequently lost three legs and two arms between them.
Ensemble Klang was founded in The Hague in 2003. Projects have been staged with Heiner Goebbels, David Lang, Tom Johnson, Julia Wolfe, Michael Hersch and Peter Adriaansz. Performing without a conductor, a typical Ensemble Klang programme combines complex music requiring virtuosic accuracy and breathtaking musical risk. They are born collaborators, and participate in music theatre, site-specific and dance projects almost every season.
Brian Sheridan, Toshiro Sawa and Dermot O’Reilly, three pioneering, if rather mysterious Irish ‘Guinness’ Dadaists are so-called because the most active members of the group worked at the Guinness brewery. The Guinness Dadaists’ sound poetry is notable because it is written mostly using the Irish alphabet, following Irish rules of pronunciation. The group used Irish as a medium rather than a symbol, seemingly seeking to weaponise it against the political turmoil of the times they lived in, Dermot O’Reilly writing in one manifesto how “the Irish language is a material which can be broken into fragments which can be mobilised against all sense and meaning”.
Margareth Kammerer is a singer, composer and musician. She is interested in the genre of the song and the expansion of its form. Her songs are shaped by various influences: early blues, folk, lied and electronics. She performs both as a soloist and in bands such as The Magic I.D. (Christof Kurzmann / Kai Fagaschinski / Michael Thieke) and Rubyrubyruby (Derek Shirley / Steve Heather). As well as playing concerts in Europe and North America, she writes for film, theatre, dance and radio.
Neil Luck is a composer and musician, and founder and director of the experimental music ensemble ARCO. Neil has presented work at Tate, BBC Proms, Aarhus and Vilnius European Capital of Culture festivals (2017, 2009), V&A, Tokyo Experimental Festival, LCMF, BBC Radio 3, Venice Biennale, ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, MATA Festival (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Klangforum Wien, and with Apartment House, and Explore Ensemble. Neil also performs with artist Jennifer Walshe in the duo WACK, touring internationally.
Chris Newman is a Berlin-based composer and artist. He studied music at King's College, London and with Mauricio Kagel at the Musikhochschule in Cologne. His music has been performed at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, LCMF and ICA (London) and broadcast by, among others, Bayrischer Rundfunk and Hessischen Rundfunk; it includes a large repertoire of songs for voice and piano which he frequently performs himself.
Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) was an American composer and accordionist. She was a central figure in the development of experimental and postwar electronic music. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, and served as its director. She taught music at Mills College, the University of California San Diego and Oberlin Conservatory of Music. In 1988, as a result of descending 14 feet into an underground cistern to make a recording, Oliveros coined the term ‘deep listening’, a pun that has blossomed into an aesthetic based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation.
Pablo Ortiz is an Argentinean composer, now resident in the USA. He is a professor of composition at the University of California, Davis. Prizes and commissions include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), the Charles Ives Fellowship (1996) and Academy Award (2008) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent premieres include his opera, Kassandra (Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, 2024), Suomalainen tango for orchestra (Orquestra Nacional de Catalunya) and Notker for Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices, Copenhagen.
Éliane Radigue (b.1932) is one of the most important composers of her generation. For decades she worked almost exclusively with the ARP 2500 synthesiser to produce long-form works. Since 2001 Radigue has only collaborated with instrumentalists. Her method of composition resembles the oral transmission of traditional music. These include Naldjorlak and the monumental OCCAM OCEAN series, performed by some of the most esteemed musicians of our time. This cycle (still in progress) already comprises more than 70 pieces for instrumental forces ranging from solo to orchestral.
Dermot O’Reilly (see: Guinness Dadaists)
Carol Robsinon is Franco-American composer and clarinetist, who has performed at festivals the world over, including Festival d’Automne à Paris, MaerzMuzik, Archipel, Wien Modern, Huddersfield. Recent compositions include: Can You See, Blanc de Neige, Forest Gazing, L‘illusion des étangs for Philharmonie de Paris and the opera Mr Barbe bleue for Opéra de Reims. She has recorded the work of Scelsi, Nono, Feldman, Berio, Niblock, Frey. Since 2006, she has worked closely with Éliane Radigue, premiering Naldjorlak and twenty pieces from OCCAM OCEAN.
Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) was an artist, theorist, composer and instrument-maker. As a young man he helped in the restoration of Leonardo’s Last Supper and the frescoes of Castello Sforzesco. In 1909 with Boccioni, Carrà and Marinetti he founded futurism. In 1913 he published The Art of Noises and created the intonarumori. His activities were interrupted by the outbreak of the first world war, in which he was seriously injured. During the 1920s and 1930s he spent much time inventing a range of other instruments, such as the Russolophone – a keyboard capable of combining the sounds of individual intonarumori. He continued to paint for the rest of his life, exhibiting alongside other futurists at the 1930 Venice Biennale, and developed a profound interest in the occult.
Toshiro Sawa (see: Guinness Dadaists)
Brian Sheridan (see: Guinness Dadaists)
Teho Teardo is a musician, composer and sound designer. He created the soundtracks for several movies by Oscar-winning directors Paolo Sorrentino and Gabriele Salvatores. He won various prizes for his music, such as the Ennio Morricone and David Di Donatello Prizes.
Jennifer Walshe is an Irish composer and performer. Recent projects include the opera TIME TIME TIME (co-commissioned by LCMF) and the orchestral work THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION (commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland). ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history.