David Gorton-‘Austerity Measures’ rehearsals and Performance. Wilton’s Music Hall June 12th 2013

But first-something to say about new music, players, and listeners…

Welcome back Chris! On stage (12-06-13) with the Kreutzers and master oboist and great friend,Chris Redgate. World Premiere of David Gorton’s ‘Austerity Measures’

Dress Rehearsal at Wilton’s Music Hall 12th June 2013Engineer-Jonathan Haskell (Astouding Sounds)

Preliminary Rehearsals

Full run through.11th June 2013

Extract (audio rip from videao) 9th June 2013

Kreutzer Quartet and Chris Redgate

March 1st 2012 (Nashvile TN)David Gorton and Chris Redgate:Taking shelter from the tornado touch-down. In the cellar…

 

David Gorton writes:Like all woodwind instruments the oboe is able to produce sounds called ‘multiphonics’. Really these are chords, the simultaneous production of more than one note, but most of the time it is very difficult to make out the individual pitches and they are heard instead as buzzing, rasping, honking noises, a long way from the pastoral ideal with which the oboe is often associated. Of the woodwind instruments the oboe is especially rich in its multiphonic capacity, with around 800 of these sonorities available to it./Austerity Measures II is written for string quartet and Howarth-Redgate oboe, the instrument developed by Christopher Redgate and Howarth of London, and launched in 2011. It is still an oboe, in the sense that a Ferrari and my Ford Fiesta are both ‘cars’, but along with an extended range and improved versatility it has a currently unknown capacity for multiphonics: at last count there were over 2500. Some of these were discovered by Christopher Redgate and myself while we were visiting the Blair School of Music in Nashville, Tennessee, and the most malleable, unpredictable, and unstable of the discoveries made their way into the piece./The oboe part of Austerity Measures II is the only autonomous aspect of the piece; the string quartet is actually playing a different piece, my 3rd String Quartet. This in turn, in the spirit of efficiency, is two separate pieces played simultaneously: Passacaglia for violin and cello; and Cadence for violin and viola. A performance of Austerity Measures II is therefore the simultaneous performance of four separate pieces: buy one, get three free.