Tag Archives: Preludes

#MinervanMiniatures: Five preludes by Nannie Louise Wright

Our sonic cabinet of curiosities exploring forgotten piano repertoire written by women, Minervan Miniatures, presents five preludes by American composer Nannie Louise Wright (1878/9 – 1958), from her collection 12 Preludes Op.25.

This selection ranges from Wagnerian grandeur to dazzling Saint-Saens-esque virtuosity that disappears in a flash, and a fascinating prelude ‘For The Left Hand Alone.’ The entire set is a marvellous addition to the canon of prelude-writing, in the tradition including Chopin, Rachmaninov and Debussy, and surely deserves to be better known. We’ll be rectifying this as part of a planned recital series next year…

Preludes Re-visited accompanied by live music for two pianos

A special event next week brings together an exhibition in Colyer-Fergusson Gallery with live music for two pianos on Friday 2 December.

14184510_10154537619231180_3622527117156399451_nPreludes (where you go I go) by artist Adam de Ville returns to the gallery to see out the Autumn term in a new form, and to mark its re-emergence, you are invited to view the images accompanied by a live performance of Gavin Bryars’ My First Homage, for two pianos, performed by Dan Harding and Matthew King.

The exhibition, created especially for the Colyer-Fergusson Gallery, is Adam’s response to Bryars’ piece, Sinking of the Titanic, and this event offers the opportunity to experience the images during a live performance of Bryars’ equally meditative homage to jazz pianist, Bill Evans, as a live soundscape. Adam will also be present at the event, and will be available for a ‘Meet the Artist’ session afterwards.

The exhibition will be open throughout December; the viewing together with the live performance begins at 1.10pm and will last twenty minutes; admission is free, details online here.

Where you go, I go: Preludes exhibition now open

We’re delighted to announce that the latest exhibition in Colyer-Fergusson Gallery is now open!

14184510_10154537619231180_3622527117156399451_nCreated especially for the Colyer-Fergusson Gallery, Preludes (where you go, I go) by visual artist Adam de Ville is a series of images in response to Sinking of the Titanic by composer Gavin Bryars, a haunting meditation on the idea of what happens to the music played by the band as the great ship sank.

Adam’s exhibition imagines the same effect happening to paint and paper in a sequence of images capturing particular moments before, during and after the event. Based on accounts, personal stories and surviving artefacts, the series is a moving contemplation of the human side to one of history’s great tragedies.img096

preludes_exhibitionThe exhibition is showing in Colyer-Fergusson Gallery until Friday 4 November during normal opening hours, and admission is free. Find out more about Adam here.

Preludes: new exhibition by Adam de Ville at Colyer-Fergusson

Colyer-Fergusson Gallery is delighted to be hosting Preludes (where you go, I go), a new exhibition by Kent-based visual artist, actor and illustrator Adam de Ville next month.

A Night To Remember Adam de Ville webAdam’s new exhibition, created especially for Colyer-Fergusson, takes inspiration from Gavin Bryars’ piece, Sinking of the Titanic, in which the composer imagines what the music the band was playing as the ship sank might have sounded like as the band played during the sinking, and what happened to the music as it continued to reverberate in the water.

“I hope to carry this poetic notion through, imagining how the paint might react under water both physically and poetically,” Adam observes, “with the preludes being eye-witness accounts before, during and after, with the ‘after’ forming a prelude to history, to the passing of living memory and our continuing / changing ‘imagining’ of the event, like the music and paint, transformed by the depths of the ocean, of time.”

image2 webFrom Bach to Debussy, the prelude as a musical form has appealed to composers, both for its concision as well as for its imaginative potential; the iconic collection by Bach exploring equal temperament, or the evocative dreamscapes of Debussy’s two books of piano preludes, the prelude offers both discipline as well as imaginative possibilities; Adam’s exhibition explores both concepts, inspired by Bryars’ music. The hauntingly beautiful strains of Bryars’ moving piece find echo in Adam’s evocative images, which hover on the cusp of dissolving, disappearing.

From May to August this year, Adam was the Armchair Artist-in-Residence at the Beaney Museum in Canterbury, for which he also created Something Between Us, an instillation exploring the life of the physical book, funded by Canterbury Arts Council; he has also had exhibitions at the Stark Gallery and the Beaney Front Room. His illustrations accompanied the book Richmond Bigbottom, a fairy-tale for children published in 2015.

Find out more about Adam hereand about his public theatre / art installation work herePreludes (where you go, I go) will be on display at Colyer-Fergusson Gallery on the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus from 24 September – 4 November; admission is free.