Métier Announces Avant-Garde Album from composer Paul Whitty: “The Morning”

Métier, the new-music division of Divine Art Recordings Group, will release in April a new album of works by Paul Whitty, titled The Morning featuring leading new-music ensembles [rout] and Icebreaker. The composer writes:

The Morning is an anthology of three works. Nature is a language – can’t you read? written for Icebreaker is a reorganisation or reconstruction of materials from Michael Gordon’s Yo Shakespeare, a classic of visceral, driving rhythmic patterns from Icebreaker’s repertoire. The reorganisation here is by turns sparsely then densely populated with points of sound and fragments of grit and noise generated by overheard field recordings, that lurch into life then vanish. I was bored before I even began is an exploration of the sounding surfaces of instruments wielded by members of [rout] and each fitted with a contact microphone and routed to guitar pedals while The Morning is a reconstructed, reorganised, reconstituted misreading of Thomas Arne’s Cantata No.5 developed as part of Vauxhall Pleasure, a project developed with Anna Best, and investigating the sonic archaeology of the Vauxhall Cross Gyratory, former site of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens where, for a time, Arne was composer in residence.

Paul Whitty was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, in 1970 and is currently Professor of Composition at Oxford Brookes University.  He is a founder and director of the Sonic Art Research Unit (SARU). He studied with Roger Marsh, Magnus Lindberg, Colin Matthews, Vinko Globokar and Michael Finnissy and has been a visiting tutor in collaborative practice at Dartington College of Arts and the Laban Centre, London. He is a Director of audiograft, Oxford’s Festival of experimental music and sound art, with Stephen Cornford.

His work has been performed by the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Expose, IXION, Michael Finnissy, [rout], Philip Howard, and Mieko Kanno amongst others, and his music has featured at festivals including Brighton, Ultima in Oslo, the Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the 54th Venice Biennale and at State Of The Nation in London. He has received awards, including from the Arts Council of England, AHRC, the Britten-Pears Foundation, and the British Council. Pianist Philip Howard titled his first album, Decoding Skin (Divine Art, 2003), after one of his compositions.

Paul Whitty is a founder, along with the composers Sam Hayden and Paul Newland, of the ensemble [rout], which has made concert tours in the UK, appearing on BBC Radio 3’s contemporary music programme Hear and Now, on a BMIC Cutting Edge concert tour, at the ICA and at the Huddersfield Festival.

Whitty has been a valued member of Divine Art’s composer roster for almost 20 years and his works have appeared on four previous albums:

ALBUM DETAILS

Title:  ‘The Morning”
Composer: Paul Whitty
Label: Métier
Catalogue number: MSV 28636
Recorded 2017;  release date April 14, 2023 tbc

Works and Artists

The Morning
Cheryl Enever, soprano; Angharad Davies & Emma Welton, violins; Bridget Carey, viola; Audrey Riley, cello; Catherine Laws, harpsichord.
I was bored before I even began
[rout]: Christian Forshaw, saxophones; David Arrowsmith & Paul Newland, electric guitars; Catherine Laws, Hammond organ; Emma Welton, violin; Paul Whitty, signal processing
Nature is a language, can’t you hear?
Icebreaker: James Poke & Rowland Sutherland, flute, piccolo and pan pipes; Christian Forshaw & Bradley Grant, saxophones; Emma Welton, violin; Audrey Riley, cello; James Woodrow, guitar; Pete Wilson, bass; Sam Wilson, marimba; Dominic Saunders, Andrew Zolinsky & Walter Fabeck, keys.