Meet the Scream Star Composers
Matthew Shlomowitz, Johannes Kreidler & Jessie Marino
Speak Percussion commissions three wunderkind composers to fuse screen and sound, projection and percussion, rhythm and light into a remarkable live performance event. Meet Matthew Shlomowitz, Johannes Kreidler & Jessie Marino ahead of the premiere of Speak Percussion’s new work, Scream Star.
Matthew Shlomowitz
Matthew Shlomowitz is a London based composer who was raised in Adelaide, Australia. In recent years he has written Glücklich, Glücklich, Freude, Freude for keyboardist Mark Knoop and the SWR Symphonieorchester (for 2019 Donaueschinger Musiktage), and Graveyard Slot (with guest appearance) for Ensemble Nikel. In 2017, his opera Electric Dreams was produced by Kunstuniversität Graz in cooperation with ORF Musikprotokoll, as winner of the Johann Joseph Fux Opera Composition. The Norwegian Ensemble asamasimasa released a CD of his works on the all that dust label. Matthew has a number of compositional projects. Letter Pieces are open score works combining physical action and music. The pieces in his Popular Contexts series combine recognisable recordings with instrumental music. He has made a number of performance-lecture works addressing aesthetic issues, such as Lecture About Bad Music. In 2020 he started on a new series titled Explorations in Polytonality and other Musical Wonders; the first volume is a set of piano pieces for Mark Knoop (released on Bandcamp), and the second is for the Apsara recorder trio.
Matthew teaches at University of Southampton, co-directs the new music group Plus Minus, and runs a podcast called Soundmaking with Håkon Stene. He has taught on the Tzlil Meudcan Summer Course, Ensemble Offspring Hatched Academy and Luxembourg Composition Academy, and has written articles, such as “The Automaton Approach” (MusikTexte) and “Where Are We Now?” (Tempo)
Johannes Kreidler
Johannes Kreidler is a German composer, performer, conceptual and media artist. He is the principal theorist and exponent of the New Conceptualism movement in 21st-century music. Kreidler came to prominence with a series of politically charged pieces of musical performance art, beginning with 2008’s product placements: a 33-second recording containing 70,200 samples of other recordings, which the composer then attempted to register individually with the German copy- right authorities. Kreidler studied from 2000 to 2006 at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg, Germany where teachers included Mathias Spahlinger (composition), Orm Finnendahl (electronic music), and Eckehard Kiem (music theory). During this time he was also a Fellow of the European Union from 2004 to 2005 and a visiting student at the Institute of Sonology at the Koninklijk Conservatorium at The Hague in the Netherlands. He also attended seminars in philosophy and art history at the University of Freiburg. Since 2019, he is professor for composition at the Hochschule fuer Musik Basel/ Switzerland. Johannes Kreidler lives in Berlin. His work is described as conceptual music and usually employs multimedial elements.
Jessie Marino
Jessie Marino is a composer, performer, and media artist living and working in Berlin and currently Professor of Experimental Performance Practice, Stuttgart. Her work explores the repetition inside common activities, ritualistic absurdities, and uncovering nostalgic technologies. Jessie’s pieces score out sound, video, physical movements, lighting, and staging, which are then placed within organized temporal structures, fractured narratives and musical frameworks. Much of Marino’s interdisciplinary compositional work eschews conventional instrumentation, with scores that ask performers to use their bodies— using precisely articulated gestures, facial expressions, and quotidian physical movements both as an alternative and a complement to musical sounds. Her work maps out the way humans communicate with their bodies on a performative timeframe, revealing the musicality hidden within everyday gesticulations, signs, and demonstrations, transmitted both consciously and unconsciously. Marino finds humor and profundity in personal interactions and the way humans navigate physical space—an improvisational act that can invoke a ballet, a dinner party or a demolition derby. Her compositions and solo performances abstract ideas drawn from all stripes of popular culture and political discourse, girded by a definitively humanistic sensibility rife with equal doses of wit and pathos. Marino’s work employs video, lighting, performance art, and comedy, but it is rigorously constructed using musical time, even when a piece is utterly silent. She transcends the conventional materials of composition to help audiences locate music in the most commonplace activities and relations.
Scream Star by Speak Percussion
Thursday 18 – Sunday 21 August, 2022
Thu – Sat, 7.30pm
Sun, 5pm
