Chris Swithinbank

Back in May, en­sem­ble mo­saik gave a beau­ti­ful live-stream per­for­mance of union|haze as part of forma Leipzig’s 10th an­niver­sary fes­tiv­i­ties along­side works by Al­berto Posadas, Kel­ley Shee­han, Kai Jo­hannes Polzhofer, and Liza Lim. union|haze as well as the pieces by Kel­ley and Kai are still avail­able to watch on YouTube.

“I bought a fog”
to con­ster­na­tion say

Across the lab a per­plex gaze
But

He can’t tell
If it was me or some­thing fat­ter
That bro­kered lan­guage to this point

I hear that they are ced­ing rain over Siberia
And at the lake
Hourly clouds draw crowds

All I wanted was to brew tea

and speak my joy
But
A wait of coin is falling from the sky

I have just ar­rived at the Fon­dazione Orfeo in Posi­tano, Italy, for a four-week res­i­dency where I will be work­ing on music for en­sem­ble mo­saik to be pre­miered in Sep­tem­ber. If I can stop star­ing at the sea, I might ac­tu­ally get round to doing some work.

It was a lovely sur­prise last year to re­ceive a phone call from en­sem­ble mo­saik’s Lisa Nolte, ask­ing if I would take part in their fel­low­ship pro­gramme Prog­etto Posi­tano in 2021. In a year marked by can­cel­la­tions and pro­fes­sional un­cer­tainty, hav­ing this pro­ject to look for­ward to was more im­por­tant than ever and I’m ex­cited to con­tinue our col­lab­o­ra­tion that last pro­duced I began the day in­side the world try­ing to look at it, but it was lying on my face, mak­ing it hard to see.

Since 2017, in part­ner­ship with the Ernst von Siemens Musik­s­tiftung, en­sem­ble mo­saik has been of­fer­ing com­posers the op­por­tu­nity to spend a month work­ing on their music at the Wil­helm Kempff Kul­turs­tiftung’s Casa Orfeo in Posi­tano, Italy, and to col­lab­o­rate with the en­sem­ble’s mu­si­cians, with the re­sults pre­sented in an au­tumn con­cert in Berlin.

mo­saik have worked flat out through­out these dif­fi­cult months to keep per­form­ing safely wher­ever pos­si­ble, so against the odds they were able to give their 2020 Prog­etto Posi­tano con­cert in Oc­to­ber, fea­tur­ing music by Wo­jtek Blecharz and Sara Glo­j­narić. It was a mag­i­cal con­cert — a magic only partly at­trib­ut­able to it being the first con­cert I had at­tended in six months — beau­ti­fully bal­anc­ing the two com­posers’ very dif­fer­ent mu­si­cal worlds, mak­ing full use of the spa­tial op­por­tu­ni­ties of­fered by the St. Elis­a­beth-Kirche, and fram­ing each piece with elec­tron­ics and video to draw my at­ten­tion flu­idly through the whole ex­pe­ri­ence.

To give a flavour, here is Sara Glo­j­narić’s phe­nom­e­nal #popfem 2, which cuts footage from the con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings of Brett Ka­vanaugh and Clarence Thomas with the same rapid-fire en­ergy that her music dis­plays, si­mul­ta­ne­ously de­ploy­ing the archive ma­te­r­ial as a means to bear wit­ness and sub­vert­ing it to make her own force­ful point.

It will be a chal­lenge con­tribut­ing to a con­cert as well put to­gether as Oc­to­ber’s, but I look for­ward to at­tempt­ing to do so and shar­ing this plat­form with fel­low com­poser Liisa Hirsch and all of en­sem­ble mo­saik’s mu­si­cians.