Field Notes

New music and textile art - an intriguing combination. Field Notes by composer Howard Skempton and artist Matthew Harris is a performance featuring specially commissioned new music and textile art. Using old maps of Shropshire and graphic scores as starting points, Skempton and Harris's lively creative exchange has resulted in complementary new work. Harris's freestanding combination of textiles and drawings will frame the performance area where four musicians from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG) will perform Skempton's music. The programme is being presented jointly by BCMG, Craftspace from Birmingham and Arts Alive from Shropshire and Herefordshire, and the programme will be touring to village halls in Shropshire, Herefordshire, Cheshire, Gloucestershire and beyond, with the premiere on Saturday 8 March 2014 in the Town Hall, Wem, Shropshire.

The musical programme includes Skempton and Harris's Field Notes plus music by Oliver Knussen, Judith Weir and a rare performance of extracts from Cornelius Cardew's Treatise, an exquisite graphic score which has been realised by Skempton. The programme also includes Chris Smart's film Field Notes which charts the progress of Skempton and Harris's collaboration.

Arts Alive is a charitable trust devoted to providing local people in rural areas with the opportunity to choose and promote professional arts events, and the tour is a way of introducing challenging and stimulating new work to audiences away from metropolitan centres. Craftspace is a crafts development organisation and the tour is a way of taking innovative visual arts to areas lacking gallery infrastructures. BCMG had their own highly regarded rural touring programme which rand from 1998 to 2008.

The Field Notes website has a fascinating series of videos from the two artists charting the development of the work.

Elsewhere on this blog:

• Pimlico Opera in Prison: Sister Act
• Fallen Women at WNO: Henze's Boulevard Solitude
• Handel's Rodelinda at the London Coliseum
• Fallen Women at WNO: Verdi's La Traviata
• Fallen Women at WNO: Puccini's Manon Lescaut
• Dramatic intensity: Lieder by Brahms and Wolf from Alastair Miles
• Happening at the Barbican: Circa and Quatuor Debussy in Opus
• Delight and charm: Paul Bunyan at ETO
• Total Immersion: Thea Musgrave at the Barbican
• Cantus Cölln at the Wigmore Hall
• Powerful performance: Rigoletto at ENO
• See it if you can: ETO in Tippett's King Priam
• Mei Yi Foo: Lunchtime recital at Wigmore Hall
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