Tickets £16 // Concession £12 // Under 30 £5
Advance booking required
Benas Jonušas pipe organ
Gailė Griciūtė pipe organ
Arturas Bumšteinas (Lithuania, 1982)
Stand-by for Minna (2023) 45’ World Premiere
Stand-by for Minna was devised by Lithuanian composer and sound artist Arturas Bumšteinas after spending several days in the British Music Archive at the University of Huddersfield. Bumšteinas was inspired by a VHS tape documentary about 20th century British composer Minna Keal, who briefly studied composition at an early age, abandoned it, and then successfully returned to it in her 80s:
“As a composer, I feel that I’m constantly looking for my identity. I’m always thinking of my perfect music as if I can hear it in my head but must wait for the moment when I’ll be able to start writing it down, and it seems that in my life this moment is constantly getting postponed. Minna’s example gives me hope that it’s never too late, this can happen if not now, maybe at the end of the earthly road, but meanwhile for me, the search for creative identity became my identity. Unlike a protagonist of Thomas Bernhard’s The Lime Works, I’m not going crazy ruminating about my impossible-to-write ‘treatise on hearing’; while dreaming of my ‘perfect music’ I’m composing my ‘unperfect’ sonic structures that are like standbys, frozen moment-forms waiting to be metamorphosed into ‘real music’. Structures that are dreaming of music.”
Cut-outs from Minna Keal’s Wind Quintet op.2 are looped and manipulated to form a harmonic background for the score, played by two Lithuanian organists: Gailė Griciūtė, a prominent sound artist, composer, piano improviser, performance artist and the main performer of Bumšteinas‘ keyboard music; and Benas Jonušas, a young organist currently studying at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.
Produced by hcmf// supported by Lithuanian Culture Institute and Music Information Centre Lithuania
Stand-by for Minna is commissioned by hcmf//
Photo: Arturas Bumšteinas © Laura Vanceviciene
Getting There
Venue: St Paul's Hall
Accessibility: Accessibility information is available here. Further information on campus accessibility is available on the University of Huddersfield website.
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Address: Queensgate, England, HD1 3DH, United Kingdom.