University of York Music Press

A new CD consisting of five solo works written for the EIC soloists will be released in September 2023 on the British label NMC. The project is supported by an internal funding grant of the University of York.

A comprehensive interview by Thomas Simaku with the French critic Jéremie Szpirglas has been published by the Ensemble Intercontemporain in their November Magazine. Here is an extract in English.

What does the EIC represent in your eyes? And what about this particular collaboration?

My first ‘encounter’ with the EIC goes back many years; when I was a student at York, I heard the Ligeti concerti on the Deutsche Gramophone CD conducted by Boulez, and I have admired the impeccably high level of performance of EIC ever since. To have started this collaboration with the world’s flagship of contemporary music means a lot more to me than the words can say!

When and how did this collaboration begin?

It all began in 2018 when I heard on YouTube Jérôme Comte performing pieces by Stravinsky and Bruno Mantovani, and I wrote to him saying ‘how much I enjoyed his fabulous performances’. I also sent him the recording of my Soliloquy V – Flauto Acerbo and offered to write a piece for him.  Since then, well, here we are now!

So the first impulse for composing Soliloquy VII for Clarinet & Resonant Piano was Jérȏme Comte, but there is another ‘French connection’ here, in that in September 2019 I was awarded a residency at Dora Maar House in Provence, supported by The Brown Foundation in Houston, USA, and was working in earnest on the clarinet piece, sending sketches to Jérôme, who would look at them and send me back audio files and suggestions on multiphonics. We then met and worked together during the first ever Composition Academy for Young Composers, supported by the Ministry of Culture and the French Embassy in Tirana. Later on, Jérôme came to York and work-shopped and performed a number of pieces by composition students. I would make little changes and add something here and there each time we worked together; and we recorded the piece just before the first lockdown in February 2020. Hence the world premiere is taking place at the 2022 Huddersfield Contemporary Festival – it’s been worth the wait!  

The collaboration with Jérôme was very fruitful and inspiring to me, to the extent that we later put together a CD project involving other soloists. I was commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Franco-British Foundation in London Diaphonique to write a piece for trumpet for Clément Saunier. We have now recorded all the works, which include Dimitri Vassilakis with two works for piano, and Aurélien Gignoux with Soliloquy VIII for Marimba plus. Thanks to an award by the University of York supporting this project, all five works will be released on CD by the British label NMC in 2023.

What will this brief residency consist of?

To work with, and hear your music performed by the soloists of the Ensemble Intercontemporain is a dream come true for any contemporary composer, and I can only imagine how exciting this must be for our composition students.  As far as I am aware, York is the first university in the UK to have initiated collaboration with this world-class ensemble! Not surprisingly, there has been such an enthusiastic response from students at York: 10 new works will be work-shopped by six soloists of the ensemble during this residency, followed by a lunch-time concert with the students’ pieces and an evening concert on the final day.

Alongside Boulez’s Derive I, I am so delighted that the UK premiere of my Klang Inventions for six players, which employs the same instrumentation, will take place in this concert. Another work in the programme, with another ‘French connection’, is ENgREnage for Violin & Piano. This piece has a special place in my output; it reminds me of my encounter with Xenakis at the Huddersfield festivals many years ago: the very idea for this music was ‘born’ during a live performance of Xenakis’s Dikhthas by Carolin Widmann and Simon Lepper at Wigmore Hall in London.  The title of the piece could well be its ‘nickname’; the full name is certainly Engrenage en Ré.

There is a section in Dikhthas, which emphatically lands on a microtonally inflected D4 double-stop. The Xenakis ‘effect’ was certainly the starting point here, and the idea for a new piece based on this gripping friction between the two Ds (the two toothed wheels of an engrenage?) developed gradually – hence the title. Written for the London-based musicians Peter Sheppard-Skaerved and Roderick Chadwick, with whom I have collaborated for many years, this piece was in fact premiered in November 2020 just after the first lockdown, which sadly I could not attend – so, this one in November 2022 performed by Jeanne-Marie Conquer and Dimitri Vassilakis is a ‘world premiere’ for me!

The interview in French can be read in full in here:

https://www.ensembleintercontemporain.com/fr/2022/11/un-sentiment-de-liberte-entretien-avec-thomas-simaku-compositeur/