The Fox Chase

Started by bwv 1080, August 07, 2009, 07:54:12 AM

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bwv 1080

First heard Christopher Fox's piece Llik. Rellik on the Ian Pace CD Tracts.  It stands out from the rest with its strong metrical sense of rhythm.  The first part, Llick (like in Lick) is sort of a new complexity take on Jerry Lee Lewis, while the second part, Rellik leans more on electronic dance music.  Ian Pace also recorded an entire album of Fox's piano music entitled More Light which is well worth getting.


QuoteChristopher Fox is a composer. He was born in York in 1955, grew up in the north of England and now lives in London. He studied composition with Hugh Wood, Jonathan Harvey and Richard Orton at Liverpool, Southampton and York Universities and was awarded the degree of DPhil in composition from York University in 1984. In 1981 he won the composition prize of the Performing Right Society of Great Britain; since then he has established a reputation as one of the most individual composers of his generation. Between 1984 and 1994 he was a member of the composition staff of the Darmstadt New Music Summer School. During 1987 he lived in West Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berlin Artists Programme. In 1994 he joined the Music Department at the University of Huddersfield, eventually becoming Professor in Composition. Since April 2006 he has been Research Professor in Music at Brunel University. He lives in London with his wife, Susan McNally.

Fox's work has been performed and broadcast world-wide and has featured in many of the leading new music festivals, from the Amsterdam PROMS to the BBC Promenade Concerts and from St Petersburg to Sidney. In recent years he has established particularly close relationships with the Ives Ensemble in the Netherlands, for whom he wrote the evening-long ensemble installation, Everything You Need To Know (2000-1) and with Apartment House in the UK. Fox's music is widely available on CD, with a portrait CD on NMC, four portrait CDs on Metier and other recordings on Artifact, BVHaast and FMR.

His writings on music have also been published widely, in the journals Contact (of which he was an editor), Contemporary Music Review, Musical Times and Tempo, and deals principally with new music, in particular experimental, minimalist and complex tendencies in American and European music. He was co-editor of Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart (1996, DACO Verlag, Stuttgart), a history of 50 years of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and of Uncommon Ground, a book on the music of Michael Finnissy (1998, Ashgate Press, London).

Fox has been hailed by Andy Hamilton in The Wire as "a tantalising figure in British Music"; Paul Driver in the Sunday Times has described his music as "impressive, thoughtful, entertaining and extremely varied". Fox's work regularly extends beyond the conventional boundaries of the concert hall and includes the radio piece Three Constructions after Kurt Schwitters, commissioned by the BBC in 1993 and nominated for the Prix Italia, gallery works in collaboration with video artists and printmakers, and a number of extended ensemble works which defy categorisation. Paul Griffiths, writing in the Times, has said of Fox's work that "he takes simple ideas but he makes them sound quite wonderful".

http://www.foxedition.co.uk/text/biog.htm

snyprrr

So, he's in the Ferneyhough/Finnissy camp?

"More Light" is a FreeMason reference, I believe. Interesting.

bwv 1080

Been listening to this quite a bit



Hard to describe the music, Ian Pace and other new-complexity specialists like Kate Romano are the ones recording the music, but the works are full of ostinati and nods to minimalism and popular music



Amfortas

#5
If anyone wants Fox's KK and a commentary by Fox on use of the cowbell, I have them upped here in good audio

http://www.4shared.com/file/wKudUsfG/Fox_-_KK_-__May_2011_.html




http://www.4shared.com/audio/U_N_FxuS/Christopher_Fox_on_instruments.html
''Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.'' - James Joyce (The Dead)