Closing Concert: PlusMinus Ensemble | West Court, Edinburgh College of Art

Plus-Minus brings to life Martin Parker’s mirror-shift , a new work which corrals a host of AI music creation, development and performance tools together and drags them through the wringer of contemporary experimental music. The piece explores the sonic identities that form when we shift the AI mirror from reflecting us head-on, to glancing side-long across our rapidly developing landscape of human-computer entanglements. Then two works that each do arranging in a different way. Like the many chamber versions of orchestral works made for Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna from 1918, we include Mark Knoop’s intimate arrangement of Laurence Crane’s orchestral piece Cobbled Section After Cobbled Section . The show concludes with the premiere of American composer Aaron Wyanski’s arrangement of Arnold Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra , the latest instalment in his Schoenberg in Hi-Fi series. Schoenberg in Hi-Fi is an ongoing series of albums that posit an alternate reality. In my speculative universe, Schoenberg lives a little longer — into the late 1950s: a time when a new commodity was reshaping the music industry, the stereo LP. As high-fidelity audio entered the homes of more and more middle-class Americans, record companies began producing and marketing albums around how unique the sounds on it were, whether that was in the exotica of Lex Baxter, the space music of Sun Ra, or the extreme eclecticism of Esquivel. Though mostly aimed at a wide popular audience, countless liner notes spun infinite variations of the same boast: you’ve never heard this before. Schoenberg had been living in Los Angeles for many years, and had he been alive when the Capitol Records building was completed in 1956, he would have been a stone’s throw away from one of the centres of mid-century pop music. What if an executive from Capitol had become taken with the idea of presenting Schoenberg’s works in the manner of the many “jazzing up the classics” albums produced in this period? — Aaron Wyanski About Plus-Minus Ensemble is a UK based ensemble committed to commissioning new work and placing it alongside recent and landmark modern repertoire. Formed in 2003, Plus-Minus is distinguished by its interest in performative, electroacoustic and conceptual pieces, and experimental open works such as Stockhausen’s 1963 classic, from which the group takes its name. Plus-Minus is directed by Matthew Shlomowitz, Vicky Wright and Mark Knoop. You can find out more at the following links: https://www.plusminusensemble.com/ https://www.tinpark.com https://www.aaronwyanski.com/schoenberg-in-hi-fi You can read more about the Week of Sound here. Access Please email eca.events@ed.ac.uk if you have any access requirements. Please see ECA's privacy notice for more information on how your personal details provided will be used and stored.

Information Source: Edinburgh College of Art | eventbrite