Primavera - Impulse

BIOGRAPHICAL HIGHLIGHTS


Julia Usher, M.A. PGCE RMTh(NR)	Enid Luff, M.A. M.Mus. LRAM
Educated Cambridge and York University. Lively interest in cross-media works. Music Theatre. Influenced by words and visual imagery. Great love of chamber and solo writing. Also works as music therapist, and is interested in research on the brain. Involved with community music projects, including COMA, especially based in Essex.	Education: Cambridge, Univ of Wales. Her music has been performed in a number of other European Countries. Many performances of dance works. Welsh-speaking, interested in poetry and literature, and setting texts in many languages. Appealing pieces for amateurs.
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NEWS
ENID LUFF:
Forth-coming performance - Tuesday 9th February
Enid's piece for solo viola, " . . . the horror of war and the pity of it . . .", will be played by Matthew Jones at his solo viola recital in the Weston Gallery, at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, at 6-30 pm on Tuesday February 9th next. The piece was written for Matthew at his request, and is destined to be recorded shortly for the next CD to be issued by Cyfansoddwyr Cymru/Composers of Wales. The disc will be played by the Bridge Duo (Matthew Jones, violin/viola, and Michael Hampton, piano).
Enid is looking forward to a creative time from now into the spring. She has a commission to write a solo guitar piece for Michael McCartney, and she also plans to explore composing for orchestra.
She looks forward also to the recording of a specially commissioned solo viola piece, to be played by the rising young violist and violinist Matthew Jones, to be included on the next disc issued by Conposer of Wales. Also, Ty Cerdd (the Music Centre for Wales in Cardiff) are shortly to issue a CD of Enid's music in their series of living Welsh composers. This disc will include a new short suite for solo Cello, “By the Waters of Babylon”, a dark and powerful piece haunted by the shadow of Iraq and the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
NEW CD RELEASE
Enid's "About the Wind", for flute and piano, is included in the recent CD release by Composers of Wales, "Ariel", featuring Catherine Handley, flute and Andrew Wilson-Dickson, piano, of works by members of Composers of Wales. (This disc received, by the way, a "rave review" in The Musician, who said: Heavenly album - Gorgeous duo flute and piano - pace and drive - melodic sweetness - Premier league status. Enquiries via www.composersofwales.org)
Recent performances of Enid's music include:
On Friday November 6^th 2009, Meister Eckhart's Flute was played by Nancy Ruffer at a concert during the London New Wind Festival at the Regent Hall, Oxford Street, London.
Enid's set of two songs, "The Water Diviner" for unaccompanied solo soprano (to words by Gillian Clarke), were performed on March 8th, 2009 by Frances Lynch, at an afternoon session hosted by Forum London Composers' Group called Role Play: Women and Music, at a small Arts Centre, the Red Hedgehog, in the North London borough of Highgate. www.youtube.com/electricvoicetheatre
On Friday November 21st, 2008, in an evening concert at 7-30pm, "Lamentation", for wind ensemble, was played by the New Wind Chamber Group at the Regent Hall, Oxford Street, London, as part of the London New Wind Festival. This was its second performance, exactly a year after the first, in the same hall, by the same ensemble. Enid was honoured that the London New Wind Festival chose to repeat her piece, and delighted at the warmth of its reception. The piece is rather dark and troubled, being a lament for our ailing planet - a theme which was echoed in the colouring of the other pieces throughout the programme.
Two of Enid's recent compositions follow a path marked out by this piece, towards the use of greater forces, with the richer textural possibilities offered by larger groups. One of these is "They that go Down to the Sea in Ships", for string orchestra, which follows step by step the kaleidoscopic images behind the text of the Biblical Psalm 107, forming a powerful narrative."

JULIA USHER: NEWS 2009/10
July 22 - August 5th: Julia Usher has two abstract watercolour paintings in an exhibition of Quaker Art, at the Colchester SlackSpace, Long Wire Street; July 22 - August 5th.
July 23rd: 7:30 - 9:00: Julia Usher with CoMA Firewire interacts with a performance artist-painter in a joint music and art improvisation. Colchester SlackSpace.
July 25th: 2:00 - 4:00: CoMA Firewire improvises music to the paintings in the SlackSpace Exhibition, and to artists of the Parnell Group painting live.
Julia Usher has developed a multicultural community music project in Colchester, which she started in January 2009, for Arts Action East. “ The Lullaby Project” sought to engage many people in the town to share songs and traditions from the background of their families. Songs from Home - principally lullabies - were donated and contributed by family members in a great variety of local open workshops, circle music times for children and parents, and also professionally - led workshop events. Mothers and Grandmothers are often people who pass on the melodies and words that are precious in the family; sometimes traditional folk melodies; sometimes individually created for one child, and then handed down.
Julia recorded, transcribed, and in some cases translated songs with the help of the contributors, to provide simple English versions; which allowed for the sharing of songs between different groups in Colchester. The project was finally be archived and donated to the Essex Records Office. The project encouraged parents and carers in the vital importance of singing to small children; and celebrated national and regional traditions. But it also brought together Colchester residents from very different ethnic backgrounds to meet each other, and to join in shared music - making; listening to each others’ song and rhythms. Music offers a direct and approachable way for people of diverse backgrounds to meet and share traditions, diminishing social exclusion and encouraging friendly understanding within this rapidly expanding community.
There have been two major sharing/ performance workshops since August: - A World of Song, led by Arts Action East Project leader Angela Dennis, focussed on Lullabies from Africa and elswhere, and included lullabies newly collected;
- “The Lullaby Effect”, a large scale workshop day was a significant event of Colchester Black History Month. Led by Zimbawean singer Anna Mudeka, and Gospel lead singer Grace Bedding, a large and very diverse audience experienced a wide range of African songs and lullabies. The audience also had a chance to contribute their own songs; some people singing in public for the first time.
The Lullaby Project will continue into 2010, in order to draw in contributors from South East Asia and China, as well as sharing British traditional rhymes and cradle songs with newcomers to the town from other countries.
Julia's latest work: *The Transit of Venus* is for Bb Soprano Saxophone and Bb Clarinet. This duet has been written for the ensemble Gemini, and will be premiered at St Botolph's Church, Colchester when Gemini lead the Colchester New Music Day on May 27th, 2009.
THE TRANSIT OF VENUS In this gentle duet, the two heavenly bodies sound their changing spatial relationship to each other. Venus drawn by the pull of the Sun’s gravitational force, approaches, passes and is ﬂung away again. Sometimes they reach an aural conjunction, at the Octave. Sometimes the two emerge from the depths of aural space like a radio signal, and fade away again into silence.
NEWS 2008
On May 14th, 2008, Julia was be the featured composer during the Colchester New Music Day. She was commissioned to write two new pieces, which were premiered by the Gemini Ensemble, with Sarah Leonard, Soprano.
*Il Pozzo di San Patrizio* was played at the evening concert at the Swinburne Hall, Colchester, at 7-30pm, in a programme including works by Harrison Birtwistle and Mark Bellis, among others. Julia's music was also featured at a presentation at 12-1pm at the Headgate Theatre, in a workshop which also included other new works.The whole event went under the vivid title of *Glass, Bells and Time.*
Recently Julia celebrated the launch of a new DVD; this was an exciting and unusual collaboration with an Italian graphic artist living in Berlin. Julia's prize-winning piece for Clavichord *CLAVICLE: a Touch - Piece for Clavichord* has been realized and performed for a DVD recording by the brilliant clavichordist Andrea Gregori. But this was only the beginning of the project. Andrea Gregori not only wanted to explore the sonorities of the piece, and the very extended techniques suggested by the score.He was further inspired to create a sequence of surprising and extraordinary graphic images, which cut and intercut in dramatic synchronization with the music. Andrea is a photographer and graphic artist; he has used images many of which are taken from the graffiti, the cracks and the weathering that were on the surface of the Berlin Wall.
This has been an exciting collaboration, starting with the composition of a piece in which Julia stretched the contemporary technique of clavichord playing with many unusual effects, including harmonics, use of double fretted unisons, and glissandi on the strings. Andrea's own interpretation of the score breaks new ground. Finally, his synchronized sequence completes a full circle: the new work is called *TOUCHING THE WALL.* Andrea has also designed a very striking sleeve cover for the DVD presentation.
The DVD disc has been released through various internet outlets, from Britain and from Europe. Julia and Andrea are also planning to release the DVD to Festivals, art galleries and other forms of diffusion and projection.
NEWS 2007
Julia was involved in co-directing a major dramatic production of Stuart Russell’s mini opera Tower of Babel just before Christmas. This was a collaboration between Firewire ( COMA EAST) and the Colchester Institute Music Department under Mark Bellis. Stuart’s terrifying fable of the collapse of an ancient city due to the overreaching ambition of its ruler struck many modern notes.
Julia’s latest work is another theatre piece - Malkin, for clari net, violin, cello and piano; it is the evocation of an East Anglian ghost story, where children playing in an old house are befriended by a spirit child, who learns to play with them before sharing a dreadful secret. The work receives its first performance by IXION in Colchester on May 5th.
Julia’s experimental Clavichord piece Clavicle has received two new interpretations. Micaela Schmitz gave a find performance of this taxing work, which involves drawing harmonics, double fretted effects and glissandi from the strings as well as playing on the keyboard of the instrument; this was in a concert in London held by the British Clavichord Society on March 31st.
On the same occasion, Clavicle was released in a new form on DVD (Primavera). Julia has been collaborating with clavichord player / artist Andrea Gregori from Berlin; Andrea recorded his own performance of Clavicle and then added stunning graphic images which are closely synched with the music; the abstract visions are taken from the walls of Berlin, and look as if they have been “scraped” by bare hands. This unique collaboration is called Touching the Wall, and can be ordered from tutti.co.uk from June, 2007.
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KEY WORKS
JULIA USHER		ENID LUFF
1980 A Reed in the Wind * (Solo Oboe) Wangford Festival Prize. A study of the winds of the world. On Ass. Bd. Syllabus Grade VIII, 1982-2000. Performer: Sylvia Harper, oboe. 1986: The Orford Merman (Music Theatre) performed at Arundel and Greenwixh Festivals in 1990. A folk-tale about a strange outsider who comes face to face with society. Dancer, Actor, and chamber ensemble. 1989: Marak (Piano Solo) 4 short abstract pieces evoking Moroccan decoration. Pianist: Gabriel Keen. 1993: Sacred Conversations (mixed ens) Written for Sounds Positive Ensemble. An unusual combination of instruments for an intense meditation. 1996: Genetic Code. A vivid orchestral piece of motor rhythms and evolutionary ideas. 2001: Before Light Ends (Piano Solo) 1st Performed by Anna Markland, Holywell Music Rooms. Also by Peter Lawson on Metier CD: Sacred Physic (Usher) 2002: Lost Icons Performed in Colchester by Vega Wind Quintet 2002: Magnificat Commissioned by Women in Music for Millennium Commissions. Nunc Dimittis performed in St Martin in the Fields Church. 2004: Clavicle (Clavichord). Won a prize in British Clavichord Society Comp. Performed in London 2007 by Micaela Schmitz. Performance with synchronised graphic imagery by Andrea Gregori on new DVD, Touching the Wall, March 2007. 2005: Periodic Table lll for cl, ob, va, pf 2005: Unruly Sun ( vn, vcl, harpsichord) Commissioned by Semley Festival, Dorset; performed by the Bande of Instruments. 2007: Malkin: Theatre Piece Chamber Ensemble 1st performance May 2007 by IXION, Colchester.		1986: Piano Sonata: "Storm Tide" An evocation of the storms of the North Sea, and the drowning of the land. "..a study in a kind of ...massive minimalism...a genuine skill in the pacing of textural change." (Independent). Premiered by Peter Lawson. 1989: Sleep, Sleep, February (Fl,Ob,Cl,Pno) a meditative piece, the lines "like coloured ribbons streaming out behind the piano part." Chosen by Sounds Positive Ensemble for their Tenth Anniversary Concert Series. 1992: Listening for the Roar of the Sun. (Solo oboe, Dancer, speaker, Slides). Eight movements reflecting spoken poems by Anglo-Welsh poet Gillian Clarke. Well received in a number of venues. 1997: The Glass Wall (three dancers, solo Cello, and electronic tape), a haunting story-in-music. Also Studies for the Glass Wall* for Solo Cello - three expressive pieces using the full technical range of the cello to colour a narrative. 1999 Telyneg ( Lyric), for Oboe and harp, gives the oboe a poignant expressive line against the shimmering tapestry of the harp.

* Asterisked works are included in the Music Tracks section of this webpage.

*TOUCHING THE WALL:* *A synchronised sequence of pictures and sounds* *performed and created by Andrea Gregori;* **based on a Clavicle, a piece for clavichord by Julia Usher DVD Issued by Primavera Duration: 13.20 Price from Tutti: £12.99**
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