Amber Priestley

Ce texte n’est pas disponible en français.

Born in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Amber Priestley has lived in the UK since 1991. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sussex, and her doctorate in composition at the University of York. Some recent performances include: Then You Are In Clover (Queens’ College, Cambridge commission); Such Nights I Get All The Free Margins (Damien Harron/spnm commission); If you really loved me, you’d stop playing that piano and listen to me (Claudia Molitor commission); and And Yet Something Shines, Something Sings in that Silence (Quatuor Bozzini, Composer’s Kitchen 2013).

The majority of her work deals directly with musicians performing both music and theatre. Some of this forms a very small portion of the performance (for example, choreographed page turns) or a fundamental portion of the performance (such as where the music is the least important element, with the focus on the various movements of the musicians).

Another of her major preoccupations lies in open-form scores. In 1932, the American photographer Edward Weston wrote that photography “is not all seeing in the sense that the eye sees… Our vision is in a constant state of flux, while the camera captures and fixes forever a single, isolated, condition of the moment.” As in photography, most concert music is also an attempt to define a certain time (in music it is the length of the piece of music). This certain length of time will be very similar each time it is experienced in most music. Amber is interested in trying to allow again for a possibility where time is not fixed, and each time a piece is experienced, the music has the chance to be different. The other separate reason that Amber is interested in open-form scores is that she would like, without use of traditional jazz-style improvisation, to allow for the performer’s own individuality to emerge through her scores.

Amber is particularly fascinated by the visual aspect of a completed score, especially simple but elegant staves which are, in fact, stripes! She finds these stripes to be æsthetically pleasing and add to the joy of composition.

[source: www.quatuorbozzini.ca] [ii-14]

Amber Priestley

Nevada (ÉU), 1973

Résidence: RU

  • Compositrice

Sur le web

Œuvres

Concerts passés

19 nove 2013
11h00
Priestley
En salle Entrée libre Résidence
Huddersfield (Angleterre, RU)
27 avri 2013
17h00
Série QB
ClancyGrovenMartinPriestley
En salle Résidence
Montréal (Québec)