CODA Festival 2019

Join us for a two-day festival of ground-breaking new music as CODA returns to Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Echoing our brand new, state-of-the-art venue, artists will perform both inside and out of conventional performance spaces; CODA invites you to expect the unexpected.

Wed 19 Jun

World Music Showcase - 11am

World Music! We tend to forget about the non-western side of music and this concert is specifically dedicated to showcasing all different types of music. Ranging from: Indian, African, Asian, Middle-Eastern, Central and South American, Oceana, Afro-Cuban music and Klezmer.

Blush & Name by Monday - 1pm

Alex Collett-Sinfield and Cam Athanasiades have put two interdepartmental groups of performers and composers together. They would like to unite them to produce beyond songs, a concert consisting of a variety of quasi-improvised music accompanied by visuals, playing heavily with texture and structure. The group will be a very diverse mix of acoustic and electronic instruments, and their interplay will be central to the composition of beyond songs. The groups would also like to explore means of alternative notation and visuals to accompany the music during the performance.

City Lights - 3pm

Composer Paul Taylor
Orchestra in the Shape of a Pair (cond. Yannick Mayaud)

Counterculture of the West Coast USA has inspired a unique experimental tradition in art and music. City Lights is an immersive mixed media work that will explore sonic landscapes of the city of San Francisco through live performance, field recordings and recorded text.

She Plays Angel Music (Where People Might Die) - 5pm

'She Plays Angel Music (Where People Might Die)' is a concert installation by Michael Wolters and Paul Norman involving a number of female harpists dragging their harps on trolleys across a virtual map of Europe, while telling the biographies of male harp composers.

Circles - 6pm

Circles is a new EP release by violinist and composer Anna Olsson. Themed around the circulation of time and space and the cyclic nature of our universe, the short album features five pieces for multitrack violin. This concert will present the compositions in a live context, using live looping, electronics and surround sound to create an immersive aural experience.

Analysis - 8pm

By Susannah Self
Abhishek Shivakumar technology
Meghan Blaszczyszyn video artist

Analysis explores turning points in the composer’s life through the prism of a 10 year Jungian analysis. It is dark, witty, revealing and outrageous: ‘I remove all my clothes’. Nothing is off-limits! The analyst listens, reflects: ‘I have been waiting for this moment all my life’. The work ‘plays’ within an interactive installation consisting of a complex 3 dimensional labyrinth, in which everyone is invited to participate.

RM2: Fragmentary - 9.45pm

Artist/composer group RM2 present Fragmentary. A continuous 45-minute mixed media performance comprising short fragments of material amongst moments of improvisation. Come along expecting a cosy evening of tape loops, found objects, video, singing and small acoustic instruments.

RM2 is comprised of Birmingham based composers Dan Cippico, Tom Earl, Oliver Farrow and Peter Bell.

arr. - 10am

This all day installation is the product of a year’s toil of bin diving and arranging wasted sheet music into a mix of visual art, interactive workshops and happenings. arr. forces the audience to confront the wasteful attitude of society in various practical activities.

Thu 20 Jun

Jawbreaker - 11am

Short and to the point, Jawbreaker is a 7 part suite of music that aims to cut out the nonsense and get straight to the point. Each part revolves around a single simple idea that is quickly developed, experimented with, and then thrown away! Each layer of the suite offers a new flavour to be enjoyed, sometimes pleasant and palatable, but sometimes raw and aggressive as well.

Creative Ensemble - 12.30pm

The Creative Ensemble comprises of performer-composers from RBC with works encompassing a broad range of approaches, from the completely notated to the completely improvised, and everything in between.

Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms - 2pm

Featuring Thomas Strønen

Gertrude Stein’s ground-breaking stream of consciousness work (1914): ‘Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms’ has been heralded as “a masterpiece of verbal cubism”. Her unique writing style challenges traditional  alignments of words addressing instead their underlying sound and rhythm: “By departing from conventional meaning, grammar and syntax, she attempted to capture ‘moments of consciousness’ independent of time and memory.”

This contemporary interpretation of Stein’s work is a cross-disciplinary symbiosis of composition and improvisation, setting her unorthodox text for four piece vocal ensemble (SATB) and improvisers: drums/percussion/electronics and trumpet.

l(a - 3pm

One event. Once.

Skin - 6pm

An immersive concert-installation experience exploring the concept of body image through sound and moving image. A compilation of experiences, emotions and considerations of practicality form a structure for understanding and the potentiality for rejection, acceptance or neutrality.

George West//Peter Bell//James Abel - 7pm

An electronic trio exploring ideas of waste, noise and the downright absurd. This immersive experience sees the trio using a variety of concepts and processes to explore discarded objects and material collected from around Birmingham.

Singer-Songwriter Showcase - 8.30pm

Hear a diverse range of music from Royal Birmingham Conservatoire composers in this eclectic set. This is an evening CODA event combining music from RBC composers, singer-songwriters and music technology department, plus a chance to hear Hannah Liu's debut album launch. 

Phame - 9.45pm

Phame is a transatlantic collaboration that creates an uncomfortable post-anarchic doom narrative that thrives on bleakness. It is a project that aims to challenge the perception of the musical “works of art” by extending the boundaries of what is deemed the performance by the act of disruption as a musical gesture.