Interview: BBC Radio 3 - New Music Show

Interview with Felix Carey (presented by Tom Service) in Birmingham before the premiere of interbeing, written for BCMG and Noh Reimagined. Talked about my experience of noh theatre in Japan and how it influenced my piece. From June 2024.

Excerpt

Watching the noh performances in Japan, from a naive perspective, there was something interesting about how fluid the whole thing felt and also how precise it felt at the same time. The musicians and actors would lock in at certain moments that were really surprising, even though there was no perceivable pulse a lot of the time. That sense of them all being connected by something that was almost sort of beyond me, that was quite interesting. So I wanted to try and create a space in my piece where the eight musicians are- there’s a sense of connection but it’s also nebulous in the way that it behaves.

. . .

I wanted to try and create a sense of non-hierarchy, so in the piece one of the percussionists has a sampler, which is playing a series of drones, just sine waves, and each one loops forever basically. So each section can kind of go on forever and each musician has a series of gestures which they loop at their own pace, and when the percussionist is ready they press the next sample and everyone moves onto the next section. So I wanted to try and create that sense of non-linearity, almost circular, like a video-game.

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The other thing about jo-ha-kyū [a concept of acceleration in noh] is that each micro-gesture within the larger scale acceleration is also accelerating, so it’s like a fractal. In the final section of my piece, it’s sort of like a chaotic free-for-all where everyone’s playing their own cells of music as fast as they possibly can, and the two percussionists have crotales which they’re accelerating on, and once they reach their maximum speed it sort of breaks and a new section starts, a new wave of acceleration starts. So I pictured it like a series of waves that are constantly hurtling forward and then reseting and then starting again.