Black Cats and Blues: New Work for Cello and Electronics from Métier

Leading new-music label Métier pushes the boundaries with a new work for improvising cellist and electronics. Black Cats and Blues is a composition by Craig Vear, and performed/realised by cellist Craig Hultgren. The piece which is in ten movements allows the cellist to interact with electronic score generation and processing (and visual imagery in live performance) and use the whole panoply of performance techniques in this fascinating work.

Composer Craig Vear is Professor of Digital Performance (Music) at De Montfort University, Leicester, England. He has had much experience in the avant-garde and experimental music worlds and enjoyed success with his pop group Cousteau at beginning of the 2000s. Cellist Craig Hultgren is American and an active figure in presentation of new music. His performances here and his poetic responses to the digital score are innovative and breathtaking.

Black Cats and Blues (MSV 28594)

For release autumn 2019 (duration 46:26)
Recorded at De Montford University, Leicester, UK in August 2018

Black Cats and Blues (2014-18) is an extended composition by Craig Vear for improvising cellist and digital technology. It is inspired by Boris Vian’s collection of 10 short stories and creates a unique hybrid performance environment for each. All the electronics components (processing, score generation and visual imagery) that form the “score” are generated live or are controlled by interaction with the cellist Craig Hultgren. His response is entirely in-the-moment and improvised, although it is guided by the imaginary worlds from within each short story. 

The technical challenge in Black Cats and Blues was to reconsider the notion of a “concerto” through the digital score. Generally considered to be a masterpiece exemplifying the performance prowess of a single instrument or performer, the interpretation of the term was expanded to three core principles: first, the technical challenge for the musician to cooperate with the hyper-media elements of the technology; second, how the performer embraces the ‘pataphysical’ nature of the original stories and their translation into digital music; and third, how the performer embodies the digitally mediated worlds set-up by each of the movements.

The narratives of Black Cats and Blues were inspired by Boris Vian’s 1949 book Blues for a Black Cat and other short stories. The poetic aim was to rupture the domain of the page and enter the realm created in the imagination when the words are read; using technology and the digital score format to achieve this. This book was chosen because of its rich imaginative worlds and its references to sounds, images and colours. It was felt that this would translate well into music, and the fact that there were 10 short stories each defining their own imaginative world, would be a useful format with which to explore different technical approaches. To enhance this principle all the reference and found materials that serve to colour each movement are taken from the book and are clearly influenced by the left-bank aesthetics of 1960’s France and jazz (Vian was an important influence on the French jazz scene of this period). 

The piece was premiered at the Kranzberg Arts Centre in St. Louis in May 2018 which was supported by Hearding Cats Collective.