New Music, Old Technology/Old Music New Technology. Today’s composers are inspired by the possibilities offered by the old instruments and instrumental technologies used by performers. Paradoxically, the collaboration between performer and composer often inspires new instrumental technologies and techniques. Peter Sheppard Skaerved explores this contradiction-following on from a presentation he gave at TED Bergen on the 28th September 2013 [in preparation]

‘Patent’ automatic mute recommended by Carl Nielsen for his Praludio og Presto

Brand new music, using new notation, new notes even, the gaps between the notes, warp-speed, vast amounts of information in conveyed in a very short space of time (about 6000) notes in round about a minute of music, each one of them requiring at least two/three independent movements to execute, across 6 octaves of the audible sound spectrum, and bowing techniques requiring the performer match the speed of a bow, ‘thrown’ to bounce at about 30 attacks per second with an exact ‘controlled’ equivalent created by setting up an interference between the muscles of the right arm, which vibrates at the same speed, quarter tones, irrational divisions of the meter in units of 5, 7…all that you don’t need to know…what I do need us to think about is that it has been written to be executed using a machine made 400 years ago….(thinking about David Gorton’s Caprices, played on a 17th Century Cremonese violin)