Birmingham City Council has launched a Public Consultation on its Budget Plans from April 2012. Please support the cultural life of the city by taking part in this. The official deadline for responses is 8 January, however we urge responses by the end of November, as they can then feed in to the Council Cabinet’s decisions on arts spending in early December

A public consultation might not be very exciting, but if you want this city to support culture and creativity then it wouldn’t hurt to mention that to the people who make the decisions – they’re not psychic, y’know.

• Marc Reeves: Why ‘business as usual’ is a fatal response to Birmingham’s riots
  If you only read one thing in this round-up, make it this
• ACE dancer Letty on new challenges « ACE dance and music
  A nice peek behind the scenes
• Birmingham Hippodrome Autumn Season 2011
  A few musicals (Top Hat, Evita, End of the Rainbow), some dance (plenty of BRB, Some Like It Hip Hop, Burn The Floor), opera (WNO doing Don Giovanni) and acrobatic craziness (Guangdong Acrobatic Troupe of China and Cirque Eloize). All to be squeezed in before the panto
• BCMG Concerts, Workshops and Events Sept 2011 – Jan 2012
  A new season brochure’s out for you to browse if you fancy
• 70-Eight.com
  Or 78. Maybe even Seventy-Eight or 7eventy Eight. The replacement for the Medicine Bar at the Custard Factory opens this weekend
• Bring Out Your Dead
  “We are working with Grand Union, an artist-led studio and exhibition space, that support the development of artists and aim to establish a dialogue between contemporary visual artists and art organisations”
• 7 Inch Cinema – Event – Adventures in freelancing
  “At this free one-day event you can explore what it takes to be a freelancer in the film and moving image industries, getting inspiration and advice from professionals in a huge range of fields – from art to animation, from gaming to graphics.”
• Heritage Lottery Fund workshop | The Moseley Exchange
  “To find out more about Heritage Lottery Fund grant schemes, top tips for filling in the application form and a chance to meet the HLF Development Team come along to a workshop at the exchange on Tuesday 4th October – 10am til 12.30” You’ll need to register for this.
• Birmingham Ballroom Wall Of Fame Open Day – Saturday 3rd September
  “Following the unrest not only in the second city but throughout the UK, we were very sad to announce that the original date for the Open Day had to be re-scheduled, however we’re very happy to inform you all that the show is now most definitely going on and we will now be opening the venue to you all on Saturday 3rd September to welcome you all back to the bosom of Dale End once more!”
• transmissions from the hub
  “A volunteer based radio venture homed in the Our Place Community Hub, Sutton Coldfield” Volunteers wanted
• News from Writing West Midlands
  Plenty of good stuff in their newsletter
• Home of Metal Black Country Weekender
  On the first week in the Sept the folksters will be in Moseley for the festival, the metalheads will be in the Black Country for this
• Programme Support Scheme Awards 2011/12 « Museum Musings
  Some museums have gone some money for doing some things

Anyway, he emailed me to say there’s a couple of shows of particular note that are on in Birmingham in the next week or so.

SHAMS: Reykjavik

This is at the MAC from today until Saturday. Aaron saw it in London the other week and says:

It was really great – innovative immersive theatre done with real style which was unusually matched with great content – one man starting a new life in Iceland. It’s only for 25 audience members at a time and you get to wear a nice boiler suit

nOSTalgie: a cabaret

This is on Saturday at the CBSO Centre. The blurb says:

BCMG presents an evening of political songs and new vocal settings, under the brilliant direction of Dominic Muldowney, former Head of Music at the National Theatre

Buy a drink, take a seat and be transported by our cabaret singers, Mary Carewe and Richard Morris, between 1930s Germany and contemporary Britain, during an evening of entertaining delights from both eras

We are lucky to live in city so diverse that there is music and art of all types so readily available to us. In the music scene, some artists aren’t just available, they are begging for audiences to experience their music. I have sourced some excellent music that is being performed in Birmingham in the next month, alone. This is just a tiny snapshot into the world of music and performance that is not achieving quite the audience members that it rightly deserves.

With the news of the cuts happening in the next few years in Birmingham, it is now that we should be celebrating what we, as artists, have to offer. The best way, I feel, to do this, is to see everything. Go to concerts and experience what has been provided to us, show the people in charge of money in this city what, we, as music fans need.

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – contemporary, classical, dance, technology

One of the the CBSO’s (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra) biggest projects of the 2010/2011 is it’s performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. A formidable and excellent piece in it’s own right, the creators at the CBSO and Symphony Hall have fused together music, dance and technology :

Experience an astonishing interplay between reality and fantasy as dancer Julia Mach’s extraordinary live performance interacts, through the magic of digital wizardry, with real-time, computer generated stereoscopic projections, translated into a virtual reality space with the aid of 3D spectacles for the audience.

– THSH

The 30-minutes piece is preceded by Varese’s Tuning Up and Ligeti’s Lontano for large orchestra, a distant and warm piece which plays with with the make-up of unconventional diatonic harmony.

For more info and for the special Rite of Spring micro-site, please visit http://riteofspring3d.thsh.co.uk

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group – contemporary, classical

The BCMG is the city’s orchestra dedicated entirely to the performance of contemporary and new music. Made up of players from the CBSO, the flexible organisation has grown in the one of the world’s most fore-thinking ensembles of new music. They play regular concerts at the CBSO Centre on Berkley Street, B1, as well as touring all over the city.

The percussion players are performing what promises to be an excellent concert of Varese and Xenakis on the 25th March at Yardley Old Church as well as this Sunday (13th March).

Oliver Knussen conducts his own memorial work Requiem – Songs for Sue as well as pieces by Morton Feldman and Harrison Birtwistle

Steve Reich and Thomas Ades. – contemporary, classical

This week, Friday 11th March, Symphony Hall have also included another excellent performance of contemporary. The London Sinfonietta, one of the world’s leading orchestra for contemporary classical music are visiting Birmingham, performing Steve
Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, complete with 4 grand pianos and 5 marimbas. The minimalist style of Steve Reich is used in many sources of media, films, adverts and television, purely for the fact it is accessible to both musician and audience alike. Conductor Thomas Ades? starts the concert with his own In Seven Days, a collaborative project with filmmaker Tal Rosner and is based on the Creation.

Tickets start from £10 (or £5 on the day for U25s)

The Irrepressibles: Mirror Mirror – contemporary pop, performance art, collaboration, crossover

Another gig at the heart of Birmingham, the Town Hall, The Irrepressibles are a 10-piece orchestra committed to stretching the boundaries of conventional performance. Lead by singer, Jamie McDermot, they perform hearty indie music with a set up of orchestral musicians as accompaniment.

This show is in conjunction with Fierce Festival and is at Town Hall, 22nd March, £15

SOUNDkitchen – contemporary, sound, experimental, collaboration

SOUNDkitchen is a new group made up of music graduates from the University of Birmingham. Their “STONEsoup” concert at the MAC was met with rave reviews and are following up with a collaborative event with Balkanic Eruption, promoters of Klezmer and Balkan music within the city. Playing at the Hare and Hounds, B14, the concert focuses on expanding sound using technology and live instruments, it will be followed by a live laptop performance from Garfield Benjamin.

Birmingham Conservatoire – classical contemporary, premieres, fusion

Like the Uni of Birmingham, the Conservatoire has one of the most developed composition departments in the country. The students are exceptionally talented and lucky for us the concerts are generally very cheap and on a regular basis. This month as well as a student showcase of new music (held on the 18th March and conducted by the great Edwin Roxburgh) we see the Frontiers department of Conservatoire play host to world-renowned electronic violinist, Barbara Luneberg. This young talent has worked with some of the world’s best contemporary composers. On the 14th March, Luneberg is to perform works written for her by young composers from all over Europe, this will also include a premiere of work by VT of the Conservatoire, Ed Bennett.

For more info on any of the above please visit
www.thsh.co.uk
www.bcmg.org.uk
www.soundkitchenuk.org
www.theirrepressibles.com
www.bcu.ac.uk/pme/conservatoire/events-calendar

—————

We mentioned Birmingham Contemporary Music Group’s new 2010/11 season the other day, and have since picked up this paper which they’ve produced for the new season. Adds a nice touch, we thought.

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group launch their 2010/11 season on 10 October with a double focus. The concert will feature new work by composer Simon Holt, along with the talents of pianist Rolf Hind and soprano Sarah Leonard, plus work by hugely influential German composer Helmut Lachenmann.

Simon Holt’s complex, dramatic music was first performed by BCMG in 1990 and it has rarely been out of the ensemble’s repertoire. Twenty years on, BCMG presents another Holt premiere.  A Knot of Time, conducted by Richard Baker, is the composer’s setting of five poems by Federico García Lorca – the Andalucian poet whose dark, passionate and enigmatic texts have much in common with Holt’s own sound world.

Following the Season Launch Concert, there are whole string of concerts filling the BCMG diary through until Summer 2011. The programme until the end of 2010 looks like this;

BEAST: States of Play – 16 & 17 October. Presenting another weekend of electro-acoustic sound, using this spectacular multichannel diffusion system.

Feel the Buzz – 24 & 31 October. A free composing workshops for 14 to 18 year olds held at mac.

Families@5 conducted by Oliver Knussen – 14 November. A bite-sized interactive concert for young people and families, exploring energetic and jazz-influenced music.

Mark-Anthony Turnage 50th Birthday Concert – 14 November. A celebration of the composer’s work, with pre-concert talk Mark-Anthony Turnage and Charlotte Bray, open to all ticket holders.

BCMG conducted by Peter Rundel – 5 December. This high-octane mid-afternoon concert features works from two established younger composers – Tansy Davies and Enno Poppe.

Tickets for all of the above can be bought online or by calling the box office on 0121 767 4050

his exploration of the infinity of data between 0 and 1, an abstraction of reality that challenges our perception of the codes present in everyday life

It was quite nice and sunny on Friday afternoon, so stepping off Fazeley Street and walking straight into a pitch black space was a little disconcerting. Especially with no-one else around, the air filled with a high-pitched whine and clicking with the large wall at the far end taken up by a projection of streaming data.

For a second it all felt a little too Poltergeist/Ring-esque – I half expected Sadako to start crawling towards me. That didn’t happen.

What looked like white noise from a distance turned out to be precisely determined; calculated data with it’s own, very particular, order (albeit one I couldn’t make out – but I’m happy to accept it’s there). Interesting, then.

data.tron will be at Ikon Eastside until 8 November, while on 24 November there’ll be an audio-visual concert – datamatics [ver 2.0] – by Ryoji Ikeda at the CBSO Centre, hosted by BCMG.

The work will also form the backdrop of Ikon Eastside’s closing party on 12 November:

Dress code is black and white, lights and atmosphere will be suitably monochrome, music and bands organised in collaboration with Colour

It’ll start at 6.30pm with a ‘Spotlight on Matthew Sergeant’ and is followed at 7.30pm by a programme featuring premieres of a couple of BCMG’s ‘Sound Investment‘ commissions.

Matthew Sergeant is/was Apprentice Composer-in-Residence at BCMG and there’s a couple of interviews with him – one from the start of his residency and another at the halfway stage.

There’s a ticket offer for the Friday night too – just quote ‘Welcome’ when booking online or over the phone on 0121 767 4050.