Tag Archives: georgia rodgers

Georgia Rodgers wins Oram Award

Georgia Rodgers has been named as one of five winners of the 2018 Oram Award.

The award build on the legacy of Daphne Oram — one of the founding members of the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oram played a vital role in establishing women at the forefront of innovation in newly emerging audio technologies in the UK and around the world.
Georgia comments:
I’m really pleased to have been selected as one of five winners of this year’s award, which celebrates innovation in music, sound and technology by women. The award is named after composer and founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram. Oram has always been a hero of mine so I’m proud to receive an award in her name and looking forward to hearing a rare performance of her piece Still Point for Orchestra + electronics (1949) at Prom 13 on Monday 23rd July.

Thanks to everyone involved in organising the awards and to everyone who has supported me in getting to this point. I’m looking forward to meeting members of the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop and continuing to develop my music for acoustic instruments and electronics.

The awards were presented at a ceremony at Blue Dot Festival in Jodrell Bank, on Friday 20th July.

A Riot in Helsingborg

Two members of the City Music department recently travelled to Sweden for world premieres of new works commissioned by the London based Riot Ensemble.

PhD student Georgia Rodgers and Senior Lecturer Dr. Aaron Einbond were selected to take part in the project during the Riot Ensemble’s 2017 Call for Scores, which received nearly 300 applications. An open workshop with the ensemble followed in September 2017, taking place at London’s Southbank as part of the Nordic Music Daysfestival. Six composers took part in total – Aaron, Georgia and Donghoon Shin based in the U.K, and Ansgar Beste, Marcella Lucatelli and Asta Hyvärinen from Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

Each composer then had around six months to complete their new piece before meeting in Helsingborg, Sweden, for a concert of premieres by the Riot Ensemble, given as part of the Swedish Society of Composer’s centenary celebrations (#FST100) on 14thApril.

The concert was really successful and Aaron and Georgia’s pieces were very well received. Georgia’s pieceMaeshoweis based on the resonant frequencies of an ancient site on Orkney. The instruments approximate these ‘room modes’ in various ways, and are overlaid with sine tones at the exact frequencies. Aaron’s piece Kate Frankensteinlooked into his family’s history, using video projection, live and pre-recorded sound to explore the story of one of Jack the Ripper’s victims.

It was fantastic to have the opportunity to work with the brilliant Riot Ensemble, who were: Ausiàs Garrigos (clarinet), Andy Connington (trombone), David Royo (percussion), Fontane Liang (harp), Neil Georgeson (piano), Louise McMonagle (cello) and Aaron Holloway-Nahum (director). We thank them very much and hope to collaborate with them again in future, and with our new Scandinavian friends!

—Georgia Rodgers

 

Georgia Rodgers on the Next Wave Project

PhD student Georgia Rodgers is profiled in a recent entry on the  NMC Recordings website highlighting her involvement in the Next Wave Project. Georgia is one of twelve composers from higher education institutions across the country to be selected for the project, which stems from a collaborative partnership between Sound and Music and NMC. The project has allowed Georgia to develop a new work for tuba and live electronics in close collaboration with tubist Oren Marshall and Sound Intermedia. The work — titled ‘partial filter’ — will be premiered at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and released on a dedicated Next Wave Album by NMC. An extract from the work can be found below, along with an interview with Georgia on her experiences as part of Next Wave.

Georgia Rodgers awarded Mercers’ Prize

georgia-17aplwtPhD student Georgia Rodgers has been awarded the Mercers’ Prize for 2013-14.

Georgia specialises in music composed for acoustic instrument and electronics, with a particular interest in the perception of sound and the human experience of listening. She is interested in using electronic techniques as a ‘sonic microscope’, helping us to hear musical instruments in new ways. She is in the second year of a PhD in Music Composition at City University, studying under the supervision of Dr Newton Armstrong.

Earlier this year Georgia won a place on the Sound and Music Higher Education Programme, a scheme which provides twelve young composers with an opportunity to work with the London Sinfonietta and soloists. Her new work will be premiered at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November.

The Mercers’ Company is the Premier Livery Company in the City of London.  The company and its associated charitable trusts make substantial grants to support education, general welfare, church and faith and arts and heritage. More information can be found here: http://www.mercers.co.uk.

 

London Contemporary Music Festival: The Music of Bernard Parmegiani, 20-23 March

131122-bernard-parmegianiThe Department of Music is happy to be supporting a major event organised by the London Contemporary Music Festival, themed around the music of Bernard Parmegiani.

The Department enjoys close ties with the festival via the involvement of several of its staff and students: among the performers are Professor Emeritus Denis Smalley, lecturer Diana Salazar, and former PhD students Peiman Khosravi and Ambrose Seddon. The festival is co-directed by PhD student Sam Mackay, and the acoustic consultant is PhD student Georgia Rodgers. As with the inaugural edition of LCMF in 2013, the Department is making available some of its cutting edge sound equipment.

The upcoming series marks the UK’s first major retrospective of the music of Bernard Parmegiani, the legendary French electro-acoustic composer who died in November 2013. For this series LCMF takes over a 20,000 sq ft former carpet factory near Brick Lane.

Parmegiani’s rich body of work, spanning nearly 50 years, stands as among the most important in electronic music, influencing generations of artists within the academy and beyond. Colleagues from the renowned Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) will be among those diffusing his music, rendering it in vivid sonic detail and demonstrating what Parmegiani meant when he said sound was “like a living being”. Alongside his acclaimed acousmatic pieces such as ‘La Création du Monde’ and ‘Dedans dehors’, the three-day series features guest performances from artists touched by Parmegiani’s broad influence, including Florian Hecker, Rashad Becker, and Vessel.

20 -23 March: The Music of Bernard Parmegiani
Britannia House, 68-80 Hanbury Street , E1 5JL
http://lcmf.co.uk/

City Summer Sounds: Five minutes with Georgia Rodgers

In the final of our series of five minute interviews, we spoke to Georgia Rodgers, an Islington based composer pursuing a PhD in Music at City University.

This piece has come after a year long collaboration with cellist Séverine Ballon. How did that come about, and how has it been working with her?

I was introduced to Séverine by my supervisor Newton Armstrong last October, and she was kind enough to agree to work with me on this piece. It has been an absolutely brilliant experience and a real privilege. Séverine is a fantastically talented cello player. She plays with several renowned ensembles and is also pursuing a PhD in extended cello technique. Not only that but she is a great teacher; she showed me what is possible on the cello, what works and what doesn’t. She helped me to focus on the sounds I was interested in, to concentrate on what was important in the composition, and to communicate my ideas. She is also very patient! I’ve learnt so much from her and I’m very grateful.

Your piece combines electronics with the solo cello. How are these two aural aspects interacting with each other?

Ah, well that’s the million dollar question! The electronic sounds are derived entirely from simple processing of the live cello. Everything coming out of the loudspeakers is a slightly delayed or layered version of the live sound from the stage. In fact, the question you ask – how do the electronics and live sound interact with each other – is one of the key concerns of the composition. I’m interested in how our perception of the sound of the cello is altered when we hear a mix of live and electronic versions of it. I think by actively considering what we are hearing in this way, we may learn something about our own perception, what sound is and how it behaves. So, how do the two parts interact? I’d be interested to know what the audience thinks after hearing it!

You recently had a performance of your piece ‘A to B’ which is for acoustic percussion and electronics. How does this piece relate to the upcoming piece?

Yes, ‘A to B’ was performed at City in May this year by Serge Vuille. He did a really great job. The two pieces are quite similar in terms of their fundamentals: both have a solo instrumentalist playing on stage and four loudspeakers positioned around the audience. In both pieces the electronic part is derived entirely from the live instrumental sound using simple delays, layering and some transposition. In ‘A to B’ I investigated a range of extended playing techniques, a literal hands-on exploration of the percussion instruments, exploring the different sonic textures and spaces that could be created. In this new piece I think I have narrowed the range of instrumental material and electronic processing in order to concentrate on very small changes in the sound, trying to isolate thresholds in our perception, for example when does a noise become a pitch? When does a discrete sound become continuous? When does the space shift from front to back, left to right, near to far?

On Monday, your new piece is going to be performed alongside Morton Feldman’s ‘Patterns in a Chromatic Field’. How does your work fit in with this work? Are there any direct influences?

‘Patterns in a Chromatic Field’ is a fantastic piece; I’m really happy to be programmed along side it and am looking forward to hearing Séverine and Mark perform it. I don’t think there are any direct influences from it in my piece, but I am very interested in Feldman as a composer, in particular his approach to time. Feldman said that he was interested in getting at time “in its unstructured existence…before we put our paws on it” – our perception of time as a phenomenon, before we divide it into minutes and seconds. In ‘Patterns…’ he uses slightly varying repetition, a large time scale, and other techniques to approach this. My piece inhabits a very different world sonically but one of my concerns whilst composing it was accessing the present moment, by enabling us to consider our perception of sound.

Finally, “Listen to yourself listen” is a term you have applied to some of your research. What does this mean, and how does this come into play in the new work?

Listen to yourself listen is a phrase I’m using (with some poetic license) to imply a duality of listening – listening whilst at the same time understanding what it means to listen. This is why I’m interested in exploring our perception of sound and how it changes, where the thresholds of perception happen, at what point we hear one thing as opposed to another. I think it’s important to be conscious of our perception of sound in order to approach the sound itself, to learn more about what sound is and how it behaves, as well as learning more about ourselves perceiving it.

You can hear more of Georgia’s music here: https://soundcloud.com/georgiarodgers

Her new composition will be performed by Séverine Ballon on Monday 24th June at 7pm, alongside a performance of Morton Feldman’s Patterns in a Chromatic Field.

For more information about City Summer Sounds head to: http://www.city.ac.uk/city-summer-sounds

Or follow us on facebook: http://facebook.com/CitySummerSounds