Slight Change of Programme and Running Order

Please note that the programme and running order for this concert has changed slightly and will now be as below.

In recent years, John Gilhooly has encouraged a new relationship between Wigmore Hall and the London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF). Since its foundation in 2013, LCMF has doggedly pursued its mission to ‘provide a home for the promiscuous music lover’.

‘These eccentric hurdy-gurdy instruments first created in 1913 still sounded musically radical after all these years.’
– Roberta Smith, The New York Times

This concert, in association with Performa biennial, New York, and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London, welcomes an extremely rare visit by Luigi Russolo’s infamous intonarumori (noise intoners). This will be the first time these instruments have been to the UK for over 110 years, since they set up camp at the London Coliseum on the eve of war in 1914. Russolo’s intonarumori mark the birth not only of noise music and sound art but of experimental music itself. 

Though most of the original instruments were lost or destroyed in the Second World War, composer Luciano Chessa faithfully reconstructed the intonarumori in 2009 for Performa, New York. Chessa's Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners will finally reach these shores on 17 January 2025 as the culmination of the London Contemporary Music Festival's 10th anniversary programme. 

Here – at the very same venue where Filippo Tommaso Marinetti first introduced futurism to Britain in a lecture in 1912 – Wigmore Hall and LCMF present a slate of UK and world premières for the intonarumori composed by Pauline Oliveros, Peter Ablinger, Ellen Fullman, Chris Newman, Jennifer Walshe & Tony Conrad, Pablo Ortiz and Margareth Kammerer.

The concert also includes two revivals of works that were first performed in 1913 and 1916, respectively, by futurist poet Paolo Buzzi and the instrument’s inventor himself Luigi Russolo, and Jennifer Walshe will perform three mysterious Irish Dadaist poems.

In the second half, Ensemble Klang performs OCCAM DELTA XXIII, a world premiere commission from the 92-year-old composer who gave birth to drone music, Éliane Radigue, working in collaboration with composer/musician Carol Robinson.

BIOGRAPHIES OF PERFORMERS AND COMPOSERS (in alphabetical order) 

Peter Ablinger is a prolific composer and musician who started life in the graphic arts. Since 1982 he has lived in Berlin, where he has initiated and conducted numerous festivals and concerts. In 1988 he founded the Ensemble Zwischentöne. He has been guest conductor of Klangforum Wien and the Insel Musik Ensemble. Since 1990 Peter Ablinger has worked as a freelance musician. In 2012 he became a member of the Academy of Arts Berlin. From 2012-2017 he was research professor at the University of Huddersfield. 

Paolo Buzzi (1874-1956) was an Italian poet, playwright, and journalist, and one of the early proponents of Futurism. Born in Milan, Buzzi became associated with the movement in 1909. He contributed to the movement's literature, writing poetry that embraced the movement’s fascination with speed, machines, and the rejection of traditional forms. Buzzi's work was characterized by its experimental language and typographical innovation. He remained a significant figure in Italian literary circles until his death. 

Luciano Chessa is an artist and historian. His works include A Heavenly Act, Piombo and Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago, a 60-hours opera installation. He has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial. In 2014 he presented three events at the Guggenheim Museum as part of Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe. Artist in residence at Monaco’s Direction des Affairs Culturelles, he created Monaco Veloce, a new performance produced by the Théâtre Princesse Grace. He is the author of Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (2012). He has presented his Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (OFNI) across the US and internationally in Berlin, Singapore and Lisbon. 

Ensemble Klang was founded in The Hague in 2003. Projects have been staged with Heiner Goebbels, David Lang, Tom Johnson, Julia Wolfe, Michael Hersch and Peter Adriaansz. Performing without a conductor, a typical Ensemble Klang programme combines complex music requiring virtuosic accuracy and breathtaking musical risk. They are born collaborators, and participate in music theatre, site-specific and dance projects almost every season. 

Ellen Fullman has maintained a singular focus on her project The Long String Instrument, an installation of tuned strings 50 feet or more in length which have resonated architectural spaces in festivals across the world, including Tectonics, Sydney Festival and LCMF. Awards include: Guggenheim Fellowship, Music Composition (2020) and DAAD, Artists-In-Berlin Program residency (2000). Her recordings include: Harbors (Room40, 2020) and the critically acclaimed The Long String Instrument (Superior Viaduct, 2015). 

Guinness Dadaists. Brian Sheridan, Toshiro Sawa and Dermot O’Reilly, three pioneering, if rather mysterious Irish are so-called because the most active members of the group worked at the Guinness brewery.‘The Guinness Dadaists’ sound poetry is notable because it is written mostly using the Irish alphabet, following Irish rules of pronunciation. The group used Irish as a medium rather than a symbol, seemingly seeking to weaponise it against the political turmoil of the times they lived in, Dermot O’Reilly writing in one manifesto how “the Irish language is a material which can be broken into fragments which can be mobilised against all sense and meaning”.’

Margareth Kammerer is a singer, composer and musician. She is interested in the genre of the song and the expansion of its form. Her songs are shaped by various influences: early blues, folk, lied and electronics. She performs both as a soloist and in bands such as The Magic I.D. (Christof Kurzmann / Kai Fagaschinski / Michael Thieke) and Rubyrubyruby (Derek Shirley / Steve Heather). As well as playing concerts in Europe and North America, she writes for film, theatre, dance and radio. 

Neil Luck is a composer and musician, and founder and director of the experimental music ensemble ARCO. Neil has presented work at Tate, BBC Proms, Aarhus and Vilnius European Capital of Culture festivals (2017, 2009), V&A, Tokyo Experimental Festival, LCMF, BBC Radio 3, Venice Biennale, ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, MATA Festival (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Klangforum Wien, and with Apartment House, and Explore Ensemble. Neil also performs with artist Jennifer Walshe in the duo WACK, touring internationally. 

Chris Newman is a Berlin-based composer and artist. He studied music at King's College, London and with Mauricio Kagel at the Musikhochschule in Cologne. His music has been performed at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, LCMF and ICA (London) and broadcast by, among others, Bayrischer Rundfunk and Hessischen Rundfunk; it includes a large repertoire of songs for voice and piano which he frequently performs himself. 

Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) was an American composer and accordionist. She was a central figure in the development of experimental and postwar electronic music. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, and served as its director. She taught music at Mills College, the University of California San Diego and Oberlin Conservatory of Music. In 1988, as a result of descending 14 feet into an underground cistern to make a recording, Oliveros coined the term ‘deep listening’, a pun that has blossomed into an aesthetic based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation. 

is an Argentinean composer, now resident in the USA. He is a professor of composition at the University of California, Davis. Prizes and commissions include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), the Charles Ives Fellowship (1996) and Academy Award (2008) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent premieres include his opera, (Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, 2024), Suomalainen tango for orchestra (Orquestra Nacional de Catalunya) and Notker for Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices, Copenhagen.

Eliane Radigue (b.1932) is one of the most important composers of her generation. For decades she worked almost exclusively with the ARP 2500 synthesiser to produce long-form works. Since 2001 Radigue has only collaborated with instrumentalists. Her method of composition resembles the oral transmission of traditional music. These include Naldjorlak and the monumental OCCAM OCEAN series, performed by some of the most esteemed musicians of our time. This cycle (still in progress) already comprises more than 70 pieces for instrumental forces ranging from solo to orchestral.

Dermot O’Reilly (see: Guinness Dadaists)

Carol Robsinon is Franco-American composer and clarinetist, who has performed at festivals the world over, including Festival d’Automne à Paris, MaerzMuzik, Archipel, Wien Modern, Huddersfield. Recent compositions include: Can You See, Blanc de Neige, Forest Gazing, L‘illusion des étangs for Philharmonie de Paris and the opera Mr Barbe bleue for Opéra de Reims. She has recorded the work of Scelsi, Nono, Feldman, Berio, Niblock, Frey. Since 2006, she has worked closely with Éliane Radigue, premiering Naldjorlak and twenty pieces from OCCAM OCEAN. 

Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) was an artist, theorist, composer and instrument-maker. As a young man he helped in the restoration of Leonardo’s Last Supper and the frescoes of Castello Sforzesco. In 1909 with Boccioni, Carrà and Marinetti he founded futurism. In 1913 he published The Art of Noises and created the intonarumori. His activities were interrupted by the outbreak of the first world war, in which he was seriously injured. During the 1920s and 1930s he spent much time inventing a range of other instruments, such as the Russolophone – a keyboard capable of combining the sounds of individual intonarumori. He continued to paint for the rest of his life, exhibiting alongside other futurists at the 1930 Venice Biennale, and developed a profound interest in the occult. 

Toshiro Sawa (see: Guinness Dadaists)

Brian Sheridan (see:Guinness Dadaists);

Teho Teardo is a musician, composer and sound designer. He created the soundtracks for several movies by Oscar-winning directors Paolo Sorrentino and Gabriele Salvatores. He won various prizes for his music, such as the Ennio Morricone and David Di Donatello Prizes.

Jennifer Walshe is an Irish composer and performer. Recent projects include the opera TIME TIME TIME (co-commissioned by LCMF) and the orchestral work THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION (commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland). ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. 

Tony Conrad and Jennifer Walshe first began working together as Ma La Pert after they ran from service as servants of King Pepy I at the end of Old Kingdom Egypt. They were subsequently monks in Carolingean Gaul, Venetian courtesans at Pope Eugene’s court, and prisoners on what was then Van Diemen’s Land, where Walshe tried to secure Conrad’s escape using remote viewing techniques. The unfortunate outcome of the latter incident resulted in Conrad’s work as a stage magician in Australia, where they both accidentally ingested leprosy vectors and subsequently lost three legs and two arms between them.