Newborns – Catchpenny Ensemble

The adventurous Catchpenny Ensemble from The Hague is one of our Award Ensembles this year: together with the nominees for the Gaudeamus Award 2019, they are developing brand-new work especially for the Muziekweek. Catchpenny took up the challenge together with two young music pioneers, both of whom explore and question the boundaries of music: Scott Rubin and Nicholas Morrish.

Rubin has been working for years on increasingly sophisticated collaborations between musicians and dancers. In this work commissioned by Gaudeamus, dancers Yuri Shimaoka and Tatiana Matveeva – kitted out with motion sensors – enter into dialogue with Catchpenny’s  musicians.

Morrish is a media archaeologist who is fascinated by the specific sound worlds of media which has fallen into disuse, such as phonographs. For this piece Morrish drew his inspiration from texts by culture critic K-Punk (Mark Fisher), the electronic music of Burial, and parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive’s Electronic Voice Phenomenon experiments, during which a recording was said to capture supernatural voices or sounds on tape.

Finally, Catchpenny plays the work of the young Mexican Jacques Zafra, a talented composer who has made his mark within the European Ulysses Network. The title of Zafra’s einmal ist einmal explains the content of the piece fairly literally: once is once; each event is unique and occurs only once. Nothing is repeated literally.

PAY ATTENTION: This performance contains flashing lights that can be challenging for people with epilepsy.