Chamber Music #7

James Weeks' Olympic Frieze for any number of pitched instruments (minimum 12).Composed and published 2014. Variable duration. First performed by participants at CoMA Summer School High Melton Doncaster on 21st August 2014. Olympic Frieze is conceived like an Ancient Greek frieze around the entablature of a temple: players should be placed along the walls of the performance space at regular intervals like figures in a bas-relief. Like visitors to a temple or museum the audience should be free to wander through the space and out again as desired and there should be no audible starting or stopping point - ideallythe music should be playing before the first audience member enters and continue after the last audience member leaves. Thus the piece functions as part of the decoration of the room and might be considered a descendant of Satie's musique d'ameublement; the difference being that Olympic Frieze is not intended as background music but to draw the listener's attention. It is also fundamentally audio-visual in nature. The piece explores the fundamental pleasure and beauty of physical exercise that underlie both ancient and modern manifestations of the Olympic games (as well as the Spartan gymnopaedia evoked in Satie's Piano pieces). The music consists of three elements: Exercises Actions and Disciplines. There are 84 short repeated Exercise motifs analogous to simple movements of the body or stretching exercises in performing which the players adopt stylised (musical) poses akin to those of Greek art. In between Exercises the players perform a number of silent physical Actions devised by themselves. Once stretched and loose each player is ready to attempt his or her own personal Discipline chosen from a list of 9 possibilities (running jumping javelin and trampoline).

Thomas Simaku's The Rose Of The World for Soprano SATB choir and Chamber Ensemble (9 players). A setting of the W. B. Yeats poem of the same name. Composed 2014-5. Published 2015.Instrumentation: Soprano SATB choir Flute Clarinet Bass Clarinet 3 Percussionists Piano Violin Cello.First performance: Rachel Nicholls (soprano) Philharmonia Chorus BBC Concert Orchestra Stephen Cleobury (conductor); Easter at King's Festival King's College Chapel Cambridge; 1st April 2015 with live BBC Radio 3 broadcast.

Balance Problems by contemporary classical composer Nico Muhly is a work arranged for Chamber Ensemble. This product includes the full score and parts for each instrument that is Flute Clarinet in B Trumpet in C Viola Violin (or Acoustic Guitar) and Violoncello. Balance Problems was commissioned by Linda and Stuart Nelson for yMusic an innovative ensemble that intersects the line between pop and classical music. Their debut album was named the number one classical album of the year by Time Out New York and this new Nico Muhly composition forms one track from their 2014 offering also titled 'BalanceProblems.' This work is in the key of C and lasts around 8 minutes.

Commissioned by the Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East. This piece was written for an amateur ensemble and is suitable for good high school age musicians and above. Instrumentation: Flute English Horn Clarinet Bassoon 2 Violins Viola Cello and Doublebass.

partition et partiesÉdité par Máriássy IstvánInstrument: Chamber Music for Mixed EnsemblesSérie: Music for BeginnersGenre: Pedagogical performance piecesLangue: Hungarian, English, German, FrenchPages: 52 ppDate du parution: Juillet 1973

Premiered by the Chicago Chamber Musicians. A Fromm Foundation Commission. On Centaur CD: CRC 3098 For Flute Oboe Clarinet Violin Viola Cello Horn Piano and Percussion

Piccola Musica is written for string trio and is in five short movements independent of each other apart from the ‘’tie-up’’ between numbers I and V. The texture is in the main contrapuntal though less consistently so than in Maconchy's Quartets and the mood is more relaxed. The five ‘’piccoli movimenti’’ are: I Allegro moderato II Andante III Moderato IV Poco lento V Allegro moderato- meno mosso-allegro moderato: in its end is its beginning.

Thomas Simaku's Solar for Trumpet Violin and Piano. This work is based on Philip Larkin’s poem of the same title. Part of the High Windows volume (Faber & Faber 1974) Solar is one of Larkin’s well known poems which have been described as a ‘piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent’. This was 'music to my ears' and having previously composed two other works - Plenilunio and Raggio Lunare - which ‘hover' on the same orbit as it were this particular poem immediately struck a chord with me: its astral celestial cosmological lunar stellar planetary anduniversal associations (not to mention the energy here) gave further impetus to my curiosity on both musical and extra-musical levels. - Thomas Simaku Duration: 9 minutes.