Explore Ensemble

Standard £32 // Solidarity £41.60 // Under 30 £7
Advance booking required

Our Solidarity ticket price is an opportunity for audiences to support our work by purchasing a ticket at a slightly higher price (the cost of a Standard ticket plus 30%). Read more about Solidarity prices here.

Explore Ensemble:
Taylor MacLennan flutes
Alex Roberts clarinets
Sarah Park piano
Emma Purslow violin
Christine Anderson viola
Deni Teo cello
Nicholas Moroz sound

Rytis Mažulis (Lithuania, 1961)
Canon Mensurabilis (1998/2025) 15′ World Premiere

Bryn Harrison (UK, 1969)
The spectre…is always already a figure of that which is to come (2025) 40′ World Premiere

Click here to view programme note

Explore Ensemble open hcmf// 2025 with a performance of two strikingly different reimagining’s of sound, where transformation and resonance take centre stage. In his 1998 piece Canon Mensurabilis (now itself revised to incorporate an electronic layer), Rytis Mažulis transforms his earlier work Mensurations (1992) through the Renaissance practice of parodia – reshaping existing music into striking new forms. Echoing 15^th-century mensural canons in its rhythmic organisation, its precisely layered voices unfold with luminous intricacy. Built from rows of quarter-tones and their inversions, the piece evolves in shifting patterns: meticulously designed, yet glowing with fluidity, like the ever-changing view through a kaleidoscope.

Accompanying this new version of Canon Mensurabilis is the World Premiere of a new work from Bryn Harrison, The spectre…is always already a figure of that which is to come. The title, drawn from Jonathon Boulter’s Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett’s Short Prose (2019), reflects Harrison’s fascination with sound as something ghost-like: recordings as spectres – dislocated from their origin, yet still resonating in the present.

This is Harrison’s fourth work to weave together live performance with pre-recorded sound. Like echoes returning altered, materials are reversed, pitch-shifted or time-stretched – evolving in sonic forms, and, consequently, creating a haunting interplay between what is fixed and what is unfolding. The friction between the embodied and the disembodied, the present and the remembered, generates a compelling space for listening.

Co-commissioned by hcmf// and dedicated to Explore Ensemble, the piece invites us to encounter music as something at once spectral, material, and profoundly alive.

Produced by hcmf// supported by Lithuanian Culture Institute and Music Information Centre Lithuania; also supported by Hinrichsen Foundation, Vaughan Williams Foundation and hcmf// Benefactor Mick Peake; developed with support from the University of Huddersfield’s Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM)

Canon Mensurabilis (revised version) is commissioned by hcmf//

The spectre…is always already a figure of that which is to come is co-commissioned by Explore Ensemble (with the support of the Vaughan Williams Foundation and the Radcliffe Trust) and hcmf//

Photo: Explore Ensemble © Matthew Johnson