Jeremy Thurlow-‘Self-Ablaze’

My performing materials for ‘Self Ablaze’

The composer, with Peter Sheppard Skaerved and Roderick Chadwick, in rehearsal, London 24-4 14. This piece will be premiered at Kettles Yard, Cambridge, on the 27th April. This is the second major work which Jeremy Thurlow has written for Peter Sheppard Skaerved. For more information on the first project,’Ouija’, follow, the link.

Jeremy Thurlow with Roderick Chadwick. 28 0 314

As the introduction to this extradordinary new work, Jeremy used and quote from Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places. (the piece is dedicated to Macfarlane, the composer Richard Causton, and Chadwick and Sheppard Skaerved):

‘There is a history that tells of wildness as an energy both exemplary and exquisite. Such a love for the wild can be found in the Chinese artistic tradition  know as shan-shui or ‘rivers-and-mountains’. Shan-shui  orginiated in the early fifth century BC and endured for two thousand years. It practitioners lived in the mountain lands of China, and wrote about the wild world around them. Their art sought to articulate the wondrous processes of the world, its continuous coming-into being. To this quality of aliveness the shan-shui  artists gave the name zi-ran, which might be translated as ‘self-ablazenesss’, ‘self-thusness’ or ‘wildness’.'(Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places)

A painting by Northern Song Dynasty painter Guo Xi (c.1020–c.1090),

Today was the second in-depth session with the composer. The first was just over a month ago. That session was fascinating for the players, as it established the colour and technical paradigms for the piece. Interestingly the first session also led to Thurlow embarking on a major rewrite of the centre of the piece. The second session, he observed that this rewrite

The workshop is divided into the three sections, working on the various parts of the piece. It’s probably a little nerdy, but some interesting issues come up: questions of prolepsis, pacing, voicing, pulse, momentum, orchestral versus chamber/solo dynamics etc.

Bars 1-157

Bars 157 to end