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39-523: Since then they have created a repertoire of over one hundred works, the majority of which have been written specially for the ensemble. These include pieces by Kevin Volans , Graham Fitkin , Brian Eno , Louis Andriessen , Erkki-Sven Tüür , Terry Riley , Nikki Yeoh , Michael Nyman , Robert Moran , Peter Bengtson , and Heiner Goebbels . Piano Circus has released seven CDs with Decca and now has three CDs available on its own label. The six pianists have

78-598: A "Kevin Volans Day" of concerts, and in 2019 the Wigmore Hall again had a concert celebrating his 70th birthday. Volans taught composition at the University of Natal , where he received a DMus in 1986. He was also composer in residence at Queen's University Belfast (1986–89) and at Princeton University (1992).( Anon. & n.d. (c) ) Since moving to Ireland in 1985 he has exerted a considerable influence on

117-452: A background capacity. In a number of works since Cicada , Volans limited the content and pursued a similar policy of incremental changes at the margins of the material. The reduction of material in these pieces is even more extreme than in Cicada and exemplifies a tendency which Volans has described as follows: Looking back over the music of the 20th century, I have been struck by how on

156-480: A broad range of experience, from traditional western classical music to jazz, pop and rock, African and Asian traditional music, improvisation and composition. Between them the members of Piano Circus work in collaboration with film and video makers, theatre and circus performers, dancers and choreographers, and in a variety of educational settings. The group performs throughout the UK and internationally, with appearances at

195-544: A conductor, in the 1994 French premiere at the Opéra-Bastille in Paris of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten , but another report names his younger brother, Bernhard, as conductor for this production. It seems unlikely this was Aloys, who in 1983 suffered two debilitating strokes, which left him paralyzed on one side with visual and speech disorders. His wife, Gisela Saur-Kontarsky, curtailed her artistic career as

234-511: A learning curve) from pure transcription (in the manner of Bach) through paraphrase (as in Liszt), quotation as object trouvé (Charles Ives) assimilation (in the tradition of Stravinsky and Bartók) to what was then called an "invented folklore"—what I thought of as a new music of southern Africa, or music for a new South Africa. Thus the series began with Mbira (1981) (now withdrawn) which involved traditional patterns, some newly composed patterns and

273-460: A nontraditional coda, Matepe (1982), which is largely non-traditional in style, and where the music is expanded to encompass the wider range of the harpsichord, through to She Who Sleeps with a Small Blanket (1985) in which only the title is African. As a political statement, Volans, as a white South African, felt that the series might lend some sort of contribution to the struggle against apartheid and some performances were met with protests from

312-495: A series of pieces which attempted to combine aspects of African and contemporary European music. Although Volans later moved away from any direct engagement with African music, certain residual elements such as interlocking rhythms, repetition and open forms are still detectable in his music since the early 1990s which takes a new direction more redolent of certain schools of abstract art. He settled in Ireland permanently in 1986 and

351-492: A series of works in which he attempted to reconcile African and European aesthetics. At the start of the series Volans envisaged that the African source material would be quite recognizable but as the series progressed he would gradually exercise more and more intervention into it so that by the end of the series the African material would be fully assimilated into his own style: I planned a series of pieces which were graded (as

390-534: A singer in order to attend to her husband. In 2008, she was presented with a Medal of Merit from the City of Cologne by Mayor Fritz Schramma for her service to her husband. Their students included: York Höller , Steffen Schleiermacher , Christine Gerwig and Efraín González Ruano, Anna Haas-Niewiedział and Piotr Niewiedział, Douglas Nemish and Dominique Morel, and many others. See: List of music students by teacher: K to M#Aloys and Alfons Kontarsky . Alfons Kontarsky

429-633: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Kevin Volans Kevin Volans (born 26 July 1949) is a South African born Irish composer and pianist . He studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel in Cologne in the 1970s and later became associated with the Neue Einfacheit ( New Simplicity ) movement in the city. In the late 1970s he became interested in the indigenous music of his homeland and began

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468-412: Is clearly seen in works such as Chevron (1990) and One Hundred Frames (1991), as well as his opera The Man with Footsoles of Wind (1993) based on the last year of the life of the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud . A parallel development to this was his increasing interest in writing for dance, an art-form particularly suited to Volans's open conception of formal structure and he has collaborated with

507-555: The Musikhochschule . He became intimately acquainted with Stockhausen's extensions of serial technique and eventually became his teaching assistant in 1975–76, replacing Richard Toop . He also took lessons in music theatre from Mauricio Kagel as well as taking piano lessons from Aloys Kontarsky and studying electronic music with Hans-Ulrich Humpert. While in Cologne Volans became increasingly dissatisfied with

546-825: The South Bank Centre , London ; Lincoln Center, New York City ; Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival , Edinburgh Festival , Bath International Festival, the Big Chill Enchanted Garden Festival, the Hong Kong and Singapore Festivals, the Istanbul Festival, NYYD festival ( Estonia ), Musica Ficta Festival ( Lithuania ), the CREA and 38eme Rugissants Festivals (France), Settembre Musica (Italy) and in Canada (Banff residency),

585-639: The United States, Sweden, the Netherlands , Portugal and Spain. Piano Circus are currently Associate Artists at Brunel University , London, where they have been working with composer Colin Riley and, through him, drummer Bill Bruford . An album of the new music, 'Skin and Wire', was released on Bill's label, Summerfold Records, in September 2009. This article about a classical ensemble

624-775: The cellist Siegfried Palm . As a piano duo, the brothers gave first performances of works by Luciano Berio , Sylvano Bussotti , Mauricio Kagel , Karlheinz Stockhausen , Henri Pousseur , Luis de Pablo , and Bernd Alois Zimmermann . They made frequent tours of Western European countries, the Middle East, and the Americas, and also appeared in Australia and on two tours in Southern Africa. Their recordings are numerous, and include Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion , Stockhausen's Mantra , supervised by

663-421: The choreographers Jonathan Burrows , Siobhan Davies and Shobana Jeyasingh . The key work which confirmed this new direction is Cicada (1994) for two pianos, which was inspired by his experience inside one of James Turrell 's Skyspaces. The piece involves very gradual adjustments of tone, harmonic colour and tempo being applied to a repeated sonority based on a B-flat major and A major triads. Described by

702-426: The composer as his first minimalist piece, Cicada' s reduction in content and largely flat surface is a departure from the generally high degree of activity which marked many of his earlier works. Although there is no recognizably African material present in the piece, the existence of interlocking patterns, inherent rhythms and open non-developmental forms demonstrate how African elements continue to inform his work in

741-553: The composer, once issued on LP by Deutsche Grammophon and reissued on CD 16 of the Stockhausen Complete Edition, and Structures for two pianos by Pierre Boulez. They also performed the standard repertoire. Their more traditional fare includes the complete Brahms Hungarian Dances and Schubert's Fantasia in F minor , D.940. They are heard on the soundtrack of the 1990 film Henry & June , playing Debussy 's Petite Suite . In 1974, Alfons made

780-470: The direction of music in the country through his teaching. His notable students include Jennifer Walshe . Aloys Kontarsky Aloys (14 May 1931 – 22 August 2017) and Alfons (9 October 1932 – 5 May 2010) Kontarsky were German duo - pianist brothers who were associated with a number of important world premieres of contemporary works. They had an international reputation for performing modern music for two pianists, although they also performed

819-498: The equivalent of the blank canvas. I am still a long way off achieving this: old habits die hard. Two works in particular demonstrate this tendency – String Quartet No. 6 and the Concerto for Double Orchestra. String Quartet No. 6 is not in fact a string quartet at all but a piece for two spatially separated string quartets which can be performed live with both quartets or with one live and the other pre-recorded. The vast majority of

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858-558: The first recording with the original instruments of Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata in A minor , D.821, the arpeggione played by Klaus Storck and Alfons playing fortepiano . Aloys appeared in a recording of Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I playing the tam-tam , and Alfons participated in Mikrophonie II , playing the Hammond organ . In 1959 Aloys married the actress Gisela Saur. According to one source, Aloys may have appeared as

897-556: The indigenous music of his homeland due to apartheid strictures which largely prohibited the intermingling of black and white cultures. It wasn't until he was commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) to undertake a number of field trips between 1976 and 1979 to South Africa to record various kinds of indigenous African music that he began to actively take an interest in this music. These field trips alerted him to aspects of indigenous African culture, both musical and visual, which he had previously overlooked. He thus set about planning

936-436: The music a static floating quality. While Volans's music has often been viewed as a reaction to the perceived excesses of serialism, it is nevertheless significant that his approach to dynamics and articulation is always structurally rather than expressively directed. In this way, Volans identifies with the tradition of modernism and his music studiously avoids any lapses into postmodern nostalgia. He has been described by

975-646: The music critic Kyle Gann as: By refusing to repeat himself or anyone else, Volans remains one of the planet's most distinctive and unpredictable voices. In 1997 the BBC Music Magazine listed Volans as one of the 50 most important living composers. In 1999 the Southbank Centre in London hosted a 50th birthday celebration of his work, for his 60th the Wigmore Hall in London organised

1014-489: The musical establishment in South Africa. The most well-known piece from the series is White Man Sleeps (1982) for two harpsichords, viola da gamba and percussion. In this piece Volans attempted to "Africanize" Western European art music by transferring paraphrases and transcriptions of Venda , San, Nyungwe and Lesotho music, as well as his own material, onto re-tuned period instruments. The subsequent reworking of

1053-432: The new work explores the interaction between individual parts playing independently of each other to some degree. The Partenheimer Project is spatially separated into three ensembles while both Violin: Piano (2008) and Cello: Piano (2008) contain instruments playing at different tempi propelled for the most part by irregular repetition. The transparent scoring and negation of any sense of goal-orientated progression lends

1092-490: The new-music movement in the city, which he perceived to be dogmatic and creatively restricting. Alongside other composers such as Walter Zimmermann , Gerald Barry , and Michael von Biel , Volans began to question the hegemony of the prevailing new-music style that was based on an extension of the serial techniques of the previous generation. This group of composers, loosely referred to as the Cologne School , marked

1131-478: The open approach to time present in the late works of Morton Feldman . Despite the success of the African series, Volans began to find himself increasingly categorized as an "African" composer—a label which he found creatively restricting. In the late 1980s he began to pursue a new direction, developing a style characterized by an overall tendency towards increasing abstraction occasionally punctuated by works where literal African elements once again re-emerge. This

1170-540: The piece consists of just two chords which overlap between both quartets creating a blurring of the harmonies not unlike the blurring of colour fields in the paintings of Mark Rothko , which served as the piece's inspiration. In the Concerto for Double Orchestra (2001) static harmonies are spatially distributed back and forth between a split orchestra with a focus on the "edges" of the chords through accented pizzicatos and dynamics rather than "bleeding" them together. Both of these works demonstrate Volans's concerns with moving

1209-480: The piece for a recording by the Kronos Quartet became one of the biggest-selling string-quartet releases of all time. The works immediately following White Man Sleeps , such as the second and third quartets, continue to use some African references, but display an increasing preoccupation with non-directional narratives influenced by the uneven and often random patterns present in African textiles, as well as

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1248-415: The site of musical discourse to the margins of the material, a strategy inspired by his lifelong interest in visual art. The music tends to focus on the interplay between dynamics, voicings, register, timbre and types of attack; parameters which are usually considered secondary to larger-scale transformations in the domain of pitch and rhythm. The reduced approach to content directs attention towards changes in

1287-632: The slightest details and encourages a form of engagement perhaps more prevalent in the world of visual art. This tendency towards reduction is not universal, however. Perhaps due to the inherent nature of the medium, Volans's concertante works such as the Trio Concerto (2005) and the Piano Concerto No. 2 (2006) are notable for their virtuosic writing and dynamism. Volans's most recent work constitutes yet another phase of development. Beginning with The Partenheimer Project (2007), much of

1326-589: The standard repertoire and they sometimes played separately. They were occasionally joined by their younger brother Bernhard in performances of pieces for three pianos. After suffering a stroke in 1983, Aloys retired from performing. The Kontarsky brothers were both born in Iserlohn . Aloys received early tuition from Franz Hanemann. He later studied at Cologne and Hamburg with Else Schmitz-Gohr , and with Eduard Erdmann in Hamburg. Their first public concert

1365-644: The start of the Neue Einfachheit (New Simplicity) movement which began with a concert series organised by Zimmermann in January 1977. Composers linked with the New Simplicity generally sought a more transparent and direct style, an openness to aspects of tonality and a freedom to use pre-existing material quite in contrast to the intense abstraction of the post-war avant garde. Despite having grown up in South Africa, Volans had little contact with

1404-452: The whole mainstream music has been very "busy"... Emptiness has not been a favourite mode of expression. By contrast, visual artists have repeatedly simplified their imagery and had regular "clean-outs". Malevich, Mondrian, Yves Klein, Rothko, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden and others immediately spring to mind... At the turn of the century I became increasingly interested in eliminating subject matter in my music as far as possible. My ideal would be

1443-779: Was also a member of the Darmstadt International Chamber Ensemble. From 1963, Aloys was an instructor at the Cologne Courses for New Music. Alfons was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and of the Deutscher Musikrat (German Music Council, a member of the International Music Council ) and held professorships at Music Universities in Cologne, Munich . In 1965 Aloys formed a duo with

1482-638: Was granted Irish citizenship in 1994. Volans was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, on 26 July 1949. During his teenage years, he developed an interest in the music of the post-war avant garde as well as abstract painting. He pursued a Bachelor of Music degree at the University of the Witwatersrand graduating in 1972. After postgraduate study at the University of Aberdeen he moved in 1973 to Cologne, where he became one of only five students admitted to Stockhausen 's composition class at

1521-555: Was in 1949, in which they played Stravinsky 's Concerto for Two Pianos . In 1955 they formed their piano duo "Klavierduo Kontarsky" and performed regularly from 1959 until Aloys became paralyzed in 1983 as the result of two strokes. In 1955, they won first prize for piano duo at the fourth German Radio International Music Competition. From 1962, Aloys and Alfons were instructors at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music . Aloys

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