Ensemble Court-Circuit visits the Center in March!

We at the Center for 21st Century Music are looking forward to a visit from acclaimed French contemporary music group Ensemble Court-Circuit next month, on Tuesday, March 19th, and Wednesday, March 20th, when they will visit us to present a concert of works by contemporary composers, as well as offer a master class to UB graduate composers where they will workshop and record their compositions. 

Ensemble Court-Circuit

Ensemble Court-Circuit was originally founded by Philippe Hurel and Pierre-André Valade in 1991, following an encounter with Barbara and Luigi Polla, one of the founders of the Analix Galery in Geneva, Switzerland.

They have been invited to give concerts at major international festivals and musical institutions around the globe, including IRCAM, Opéra, Radio-France and Cité de la Musique (Paris), Musica (Strasbourg), Aix en Provence Festival, 38e Rugissants (Grenoble), Manca (Nice), GMEM (Marseille), Whynote (Dijon), Warsaw Autumn, Ultrashall and Maerzmuzik (Berlin), Ultima (Oslo), Traiettorie (Parma), Roma Europa, Music Factory (Bergen), Gaïda (Vilnius), NYYD (Tallin), Alicante, Wien Modern, Darmstadt, and MNM (Montréal).

Ensemble Court-Circuit has also been involved in many interdisciplinary projects, including several Paris Opera ballet premieres (Le Songe de Médée, A. Preljocaj/M. Lanza - Le Souffle du temps, A. Lagraa/G. Grisey), and several ciné-concert performances (Paris qui dort, R. Clair/Y. Maresz and Metropolis, F. Lang/M. Matal). In 2011-2012, Court-Circuit began a collaboration with the Bouffes du Nord Theater (Paris) in order to perform a series of chamber operas, most recently The second woman, with music by F. Verrières and stage direction by Guillaume Vincent, inspired by the film Opening Night by John Cassavetes.

Court-Circuit also has an extensive discography, and has recorded works by Tristan Murail, Philippe Leroux, Thierry Blondeau, Gérard Grisey, Daniel D'Adamo, Philippe Hurel, Joshua Fineberg, Roger Reynolds, and Jean-Luc Hervé.

Our workshops with visiting ensembles are often a great way for composers to work on and perfect long-term projects, as UB graduate composer Matt Sargent is doing, “Court-Circuit is reading several fragments of a forthcoming work for a quartet of flute, cello, piano, and percussion. The piece will be presented in full at this year's June in Buffalo festival, and is being composed as a commission for the Vigil Ensemble (which includes Ensemble Signal members Bill Solomon, percussion and Kelli Kathman, flute), who will perform it in Fall of 2013.

“This music is a bit of a departure from my standard compositional methods, and in this way, my submission for Court-Circuit is a short series of etudes to expand the resources of my compositional toolbox in approaching the piece as a whole. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to workshop these ideas with such an outstanding ensemble: such engagement in the middle stages of a compositional process is a very rare gift and I am quite excited to hear out and incorporate the results of these exploratory etudes into the larger piece, which will be revealed in June.”

On the other hand, graduate composer Clint Haycraft will hear his piece for the first time at the workshop, “With the working title of Postcard From Hell, this microtonal etude for violin, cello, and computer is a meditation on what it means when humans emulate machines. The players will be guided in various ways by in-ear monitors, and the primary goal of this experiment is to find the best method possible for making extended just intonation more quickly and easily realizable. Hopefully, the work will also shed some poetic light onto humankind's seemingly indispensible, yet lackluster relationship with the computer.”

Stay tuned for many more upcoming events this March at the Center!

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