Aaron Cassidy

A painter of figures in rooms

EXAUDI, one of Britain’s leading contemporary music ensembles, will be working with Aaron Cassidy to generate new sounds for the human voice by exploring experimental approaches to vocal production. The Olympic idea of pushing the body to physical (and mental, and spiritual) extremes lies at the heart of Cassidy's conception for A Painter of Figures in Rooms.

New Music 20x12 is the brainchild of Jillian Barker and David Cohen who wanted to put new music at the heart of the Olympic celebrations in 2012. It is delivered by PRS for Music Foundation in partnership with BBC Radio 3, London 20x12 and NMC Recordings. For a full list of funding partners click here.

About Aaron Cassidy

Aaron Cassidy is an American composer and conductor based in the UK. His music is gaining increasingly widespread exposure, with recent performances in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Austria, the Netherlands, Croatia, England, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, Poland, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia.

His music can be characterized by an uncompromising dedication to instability and fragmentation. The received wisdom of performance practice is continually questioned and reasserted, often with intentionally unpredictable results. His recent works have experimented largely with the interaction of a performer with his/her instrument, introducing a decoupling of component performance techniques through a variety of extended tablature notations.

Recent projects have included significant research of linguistic, semantic, and spatial theories, focusing in particular on heightened states of dislocation (as in Jakobson's analysis of aphasics or Deleuze & Guattari's writings on smooth and haptic space).

EXAUDI

The performance of A painter of figures in rooms by EXAUDI at the Southbank Centre was recorded by the BBC on 14 July 2012 and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 18 August 2012.

This work is available on NMC from 27th August 2012 in mp3 and FLAC download formats. (See below)