David Collier
What to do with a…
I’ve been working on a piece in collaboration with scenographer Hannah Krauß for the last while. The project is an interdepartmental project between the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and de Theaterschool. In it a composer and a scenographer are paired up to make something. We’re working on a stage piece together combining music with set design and have decided to focus creating a piece from everyday objects which make sound, like table-fans, record players and balloons. We’ve been working together for about a month now throwing around ideas and are at about the half way point in the project. I’ve put together a video with some of the things we’ve been working with so far. It was a fun video to make and I hope you enjoy.
I’m interested to look back on this video when we’ve finished to see where our explorations lead. Just out of personal curiosity about where the collaborative process of making something can lead. Join us for the live staging at de Theaterschool at the end of April to see what we come up with.
‘it shimmers in the air’ at the Muziekgebouw
Last Saturday was the first performance of a piece I’d written since arriving in Amsterdam… and it happened in the Muziekgebouw! The piece called it shimmers in the air and was written for the Conservatorium van Amsterdam‘s newest ensemble Score Collective. It’s only the ensemble’s second performance and it’s an honour to have been asked to write for them.
Hans Abrahamsen workshop at New Music Dublin
Working with Hans Abrahamsen and the ConTempo String Quartet (via Seán Doherty)
It’s been almost two weeks since New Music Dublin ended and I’m just starting to recover. The festival was a collage of all things new music with concerts, installations and workshops happening over the course of the 4 days. As well as the main festival itself there was a conference on new music hosted by the Music Composition Centre in Trinity College. Needless to say it was a hectic weekend. I didn’t get to go to everything but I was luck enough to be selected as a participant on a string quartet workshop with featured composer Hans Abrahamsen. Read more
2013 – a look back on the year that was
The year of Our Lord 2013 is almost over and at least 2013 things have happened to me this year, but rather than list them all here is an abridged summary. Lots of travelling, meeting new people and hearing interesting things in interesting places with interesting people.
Learning
This year was a pretty hectic in terms of education. I’m out of my masters a little over 18 months and I’ve been trying to continue to learn as much I can. I’ve been luck enough to get the opportunity to study on a number of courses, both in Ireland and internationally. The first was the Young Composers’ Meeting in Apeldoorn. This was a pretty terrifying experience as I got to write for a 16 piece ensemble with voice. Most of the instruments were ones which I had never written for before, and I wrote the piece as we drift softly (into the fog) for the course. Read more
First post of 2013
The year of our lord 2013 is upon us and in spite of the people’s misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar we’re still here. There’s some exciting stuff happening this year and I’ve decided to start the year as I mean to continue, with a to-do list–masquerading as a blog post. A couple of website announcements first, you might have noticed that my domain name has changed. No longer am I davidbcollier.com, 2013 means the shiny new domain of davidcollier.ie (I felt the ‘b’ was holding me back) and a little update to the look of the site. Any links to the old site will redirect to this one, so no worries there. As well as that I want to announce that the website for the app In Your Own Time–which I’ve been working on over the last year–is now live! The app isn’t out yet but the website is there to give an idea of what to expect when it is released in March. You can stay up to date with it’s progress on Facebook and Twitter. Read more
Pure Data Mini Conference
The second annual Pure Data Mini Conference took place a little over a week ago and I was lucky enough to have been invited back to present again this year. The conference took place over two days with six presentation the first day, a concert that night and two workshops the second day. I was speaking the first day about my ongoing work with Mobile Music, talking about the prototype app that I’ve put together and some of my ideas about composing for smartphone. All the audio programming for the app is created using the libpd library which allows Pd to be run on smartphones, which was my connection to the conference. Read more