Part of the Sacconi Residency Weekend: 4-6 Oct
Date: Friday 4th October 2024 Time: 2:00 - 5.00pm

Experimental Workshop with Terry Smith and Ian Dearden

Decomposing selections from Bach’s Art of Fugue number 1 and 6

Context, form, movement and time – music is a time-based art form that has a start and an end. Its relationship to film and theatre and dance is that it shares this narrative that in the end it will end.

This is a first stage of a collaborative project between The Saconni Quartet and the artist Terry Smith. Uniquely the project is launched at the first meeting between the artist and the Sacconi Quartet.

Terry invited Ian Dearden a composer and sound designer who has worked with Steve Reich, Stockhausen and for many music and performance projects worldwide. Ian has worked with Terry on a number of international performance works, including Broken Voices and The Foundling.

The idea was to make an open workshop where together they will play with ideas from Bach’s ‘Art of Fugue’ looking at works 1 and 6.

The project is leading towards a new performance work for theatre and other places.

 Terry Smith is an artist from London, now based in Folkestone’s Creative Quarter. Developing an impressive practice over forty years, Smith has been the recipient of numourus awards and fellowships – including the Henry Moore Fellowship at the Byam Shaw School of Art, The Sargent Fellowship in Rome and receiving The Paul Hamlyn Artist Award in 2008.

Smith’s most recent work, Walk Stand Still, is a performance piece in development produced with performers, Ash McNaughton and Lise Boucon, composer, John Woolrich and jazz flutist, Paul Cheneour, at the Quarterhouse Auditorium, Folkestone.

OPEN WORKSHOP SESSION

This project explores a new live performance combining music and dance, with the soundtrack and movements stemming from the same musical score, albeit interpreted differently. It launches at the artist's studio/gallery during the first meeting with the Secconi Quartet on October 4, 2024, from 2-5 PM. The open music workshop is free, allowing the audience to witness the initial stages of development, experiencing first hand how a project begins and evolves.

Other projects by Secconi

Heartfelt

What does it feel like to be a musician? The Sacconi Quartet put their own feelings, quite literally, in the hands of the audience.

HEARTFELT is fully immersive performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132 that combines sound, light and touch.

HEARTFELT sees the Sacconi Quartet push the boundaries of chamber music performance in a unique collaboration with robotics designers Rusty Squid and interactive lighting designer Ziggy Jacobs-Wyburn.

Combining live musical performance with robotics and responsive lighting, HEARTFELT is a radical re-interpretation of this iconic Beethoven quartet. Enter a space where the boundaries between performer and audience are dissolved; connect with a performer’s heartbeat through light and haptic technology.

The concept for HEARTFELT grew out of Hack the Quartet, a two day hackathon produced and hosted by Watershed in July 2013 in association with The Sacconi Quartet, Bristol Old Vic and Universal Music Arts and Entertainment as part of Bristol Proms.

Recent opera engagements: Monteverdi’s Orfeo and The Return of Ulysses (ROH at the Roundhouse, 2015/18), Turnage’s Coraline (ROH at the Barbican Theatre, 2018) and Higgins’s The Monstrous Child (ROH at the Linbury, 2019).

With David Sheppard he formed Sound Intermedia in 1996. Together they have created sound designs for Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet (Birmingham Opera Company, 2012), Britten’s Peter Grimes on the Beach (Aldeburgh Productions, 2013), Francesconi’s Quartett (ROH, 2014), Dusapin’s Passion (Music Theatre Wales and London Sinfonietta, 2018), Opera: Passion, Power and Politics (V&A exhibition, 2017), Beyond the Deepening Shadow: The Tower Remembers (Historic Royal Palaces, 2018). They work regularly with the Colin Currie Group performing the work of Steve Reich and have produced two highly acclaimed albums of his music.

Ian Dearden has worked on Birtwistle’s operas Gawain (ROH, 1991), The Second Mrs Kong (Glyndebourne Touring Opera, 1994), The Last Supper (Berlin State Opera, 2000) and was part of the original sound design team for the premiere of The Mask of Orpheus at ENO in 1986.