Tag Archives: piano

Icebloom

Taking ‘Frühlingstraum’ from Schubert’s Winterreise as its starting point, Icebloom is a mini­ature that at­tempts to ad­dress some of the re­la­tion­ships de­tailed in the song’s text. Wilhelm Müller’s poem presents a vign­ette of ab­sence, ima­gin­a­tion and memory, and it is the re­la­tion­ship between ab­sence and pres­ence that is glanced at in Icebloom’s brief mo­ments: lim­inal sounds […]

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Small Atlas

Recently I have been in­ter­ested in car­to­graphy and the im­portant role it plays in how we com­pre­hend the spaces we in­habit. An atlas is a col­lec­tion of maps, often sev­eral maps show the same area but map dif­ferent de­tails and data, each time re­vealing an­other facet of the land’s geo­graphy. Small Atlas lays out a […]

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Wege & Waldstille

Driven by an urge to find ways of com­bining the quiet, tactile spaces I have been be­coming in­creas­ingly fond of with some­thing more forceful and volatile, Wege & Waldstille in some ways com­bines ideas from various strands of my work from the last couple of years. In trying to frame lim­inal, del­icate sound­worlds with more […]

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Three Sky Studies

Chant-cris Notturno/Abschiedslied I Aubade/Abschiedslied II Three Sky Studies, for solo piano, were com­posed over the course of 2009, with ‘Chant-cris’, a vir­tu­osic scat­tering of notes in­spired by bird­song and Elliott Carter’s Caténaires, acting as a kind of short pre­lude to the second and third move­ments, which were written with pi­anist friends in mind. The first […]

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Mikrokonzert: I Swear I Saw the Sun Falling

For a while now, I have been in­ter­ested in the edges of things: where things start and stop being, where they vanish, where one idea bleeds into an­other. This piece at­tempts to com­bine found sounds and streams of ‘noise’ that we carry with us in the back­ground of our lives  —  ra­dios, pop music, con­ver­sa­tions, re­membered places  —  only […]

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  • Microbiography

    Chris Swithinbank is a British-Dutch com­poser who works with both acoustic in­stru­ments and elec­tronic sounds. He is cur­rently a stu­dent at Harvard University with Chaya Czernowin.
    Full Biography »

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