Join us for an evening of new works celebrating 20 years of nonclassical.

Electronics, string instruments, installations, and DJ sets collide in Nonclassical at 20: Outside the Lines, celebrating two decades of work by the London-based events promoter, label and charity. Founded in 2003 by composer, producer and DJ Gabriel Prokofiev, the charity has supported hundreds of artists in the UK throughout its 20 year history, working across contemporary classical, experimental and electronic music. This concert, one of three celebrating their 20th anniversary, shines a light on six composers from their Artist in Residence programme, Nonclassical AiR, which offers four early-career composers commissions, performance and recording opportunities and mentorship to develop their creative voices.

A free pre-show installation, conceived and performed by Sam Longbottom, Tanguy Pocquet, and Ivors Classical Award nominee Simon Knighton (Artist in Residence for 2021-23) will explore ‘sound sculptures’ through producing physical sculptures that produce and interact with sound in some automated way.

Moving into the Purcell Room, pieces by Blasio Kavuma (AiR for 2019-21) and Simon Knighton are paired alongside new works from the four composers from the 2023-25 Artist in Residence programme – Beatrice Ferreira, Harry Górski-Brown, Kendra Chiagoro-Noel, and Nneka Cummins.

Following the concert in the Purcell Room, Nonclassical will host an After Hours in the foyer, featuring performances by cellist Cecilia Bignall, and AiRs Harry Górski-Brown and NWAKKE, with the latter supported by Abi Asisa.

Tickets

Pre-show installation: Free

Double-bill concert and post-show: £20

Just post-show: £10

programme notes

We start with Harry Górski-Brown’s Old Ally vs. Strange Morag, performed by Górski-Brown and saxophonist Norman Willmore: a silly song about the trials and tribulations of growing tatties and to what end someone would go.

NWAKKE’s Wonderings follows. Wonderings was originally made on an iPhone during lockdown as part of a songwriting workshop with Grounded Sounds ~ Now accompanied live by the beautiful Abi Asisa, it uses a metaphor of art-making and materials to talk about love and hesitation.

Blasio Kavuma’s Soundclash, for cellist Cecilia Bignall and live electronics, adapts the procedural and aesthetic attributes of Afro-diasporic electronic dance music, namely Jungle. Kavuma builds explicitly rhythmic and heavily syncopated loops, over which Bignall improvises, creating a regenerative sonic experience. The work is to be released on Nonclassical later this year.

Improvisation onPas de deux, Beatrice Ferreira’s work for voice and fixed electronics, was written for her friend, mezzo-soprano Alexandra Achillea Pouta. Alexandra performs an improvised vocalisation inspired by sheepdog herding calls based on a graphic score created by Ferreira, accompanied by drone and electronics co-created by Ferreira and Devon Gate.

Nneka Cummins’ new work, currently unnamed (and unburdened) is a sonic exploration of sampled woodwind entwined with live wind performance from the unexpected combination of tuba, flutes and clarinets. Within the piece, past energy is interconnected, woven into and inseparable from the sonic present.

Reimagining Rentarō Taki’s Japanese folk song Kōjō-no-Tsuki, Chihiro Ono’s 8 (Hachi) combines this folk song with influences from virtuoso violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini, portraying an imagined Japanese summer in the time of Rentarō Taki’s birth.

Ono follows this with her simplexity2022. Ono discovered that Dynamical Systems such as Chaos theory, periodicity, determinism, and emergent behaviour unexpectedly aligned with experiences of our everyday life and Japanese traditions. A part of the soundscape accompanying her live performance was created by using the AI facilities at the RNCM Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music (PRiSM). PRiSM’s technology reproduced recordings of her instruments, violin and viola, along with field recordings of everyday life, nature and trains in both Japan and the UK, and folkloric songs from Shodo-shima and Chiba in Japan. The resulting piece is a collaboration of AI and the human.

The evening ends with Simon Knighton's new Sound Sculpture no. 8. Knighton began work on this composition with an unconventional process: learning skills in metalwork in order to build a set of chime bells. His experimentations with different sizes and techniques created the harmonics and overtones which the piece emerged from. As well as forming part of the foyer installation at the beginning of this concert, the chime bells begin this piece and are placed across the front of the stage with mobile phone vibration motors attached to create an acoustic soundscape. The string trio then play chords, textures and melodies based on pitches 'within' the chime bells, accompanied by micro-tuned synth tones.