Benjamin Gait

Further performances of ‘Three inventions’

My recent piece for Dark Inventions, Three inventions, is being toured along with works by Philip Cashian, Patrick Jones, Stef Conner, Martin Scheuregger and Christopher Leedham, beginning next Thursday in Manchester. The full list of dates is:

8th May - Manchester

10th May - York

11th May - Leeds

12th May - Newcastle

16th May - Liverpool

I’ll be at the Manchester gig, and hopefully one or two others too. Much more details including how to purchase tickets can be found here.

‘Three inventions’ premiered in Scarborough

My new piece for Dark Inventions, Three inventions, was premiered in a lovely concert at the Rotunda museum in Scarborough, alongside other contemporary works as well as pieces by Bach and Telemann. Below, you can see a video of a rehearsal from the day before, taken in the very dry acoustic of the Rymer Auditorium at the University of York. This is a run through of one third of the piece, in which the clarinet takes the lead and the other two musicians accompany. The musicians are Jonathan Sage (clarinet), Neil Thomas Smith (flute) and Martin Scheuregger (vibraphone, and co-director of Dark Inventions with Christopher Leedham, who made this video):

Benjamin Gait – Three Inventions (clarinet invention) from Dark Inventions on Vimeo.

In each ‘invention’, one musician plays a melodic line whilst the other two musicians devise an accompaniment from more ambiguous material. In the above invention, the flautist is presented with a loose staccato accompaniment, whilst the vibraphone has four different boxes of material which can be played at any point - soft glissandi (frequently), a soft two note chord (up to four times), echoing a clarinet note (occasional) and a loud four note chord (once only).

Two performances in February

Next month, I have two pieces being performed: in Scarborough, Dark Inventions will premiere a new piece of mine for flute, clarinet and percussion as part of Coastival 2014 on 16th February, and in York on the 28th February my percussion piece from 2009, Medicean Stars, will receive another performance by percussionists at the University of York.