John Tilbury

Two dates for your diary! Two very special concerts!

John Tilbury and The Merseyside Improvisers Orchestra.
The Capstone Theatre, Liverpool. Tuesday 4th December 7.30pm.

Monday 3rd December at The Capstone, John will be playing Morton Feldman’s solo piano composition, For Bunita Marcus.

Pianist John Tilbury is acclaimed not only as an unequalled interpreter of contemporary composers, but for his work as a free improviser. He is particularly known for his many seminal recordings and performances of the work of Morton Feldman, John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Howard Skempton, and as an improviser for his work with The Scratch Orchestra with Cornelius Cardew and the legendary group AMM.

For the concert with The Merseyside Improvisers Orchestra, it will feature a composition, written by John Tilbury, which uses a text from an important figure for him, Samuel Beckett. In this piece, the text is the determining factor, with the musicians responding to it in a thoughtful and reflective way. John writes, ‘it is self-sustaining and private, of a quiet intensity’. This concert will also include John improvising with and directing the orchestra for the second half of the concert.

Steve Boyland 

Steve Boyland & Merseyside Improviser’s Orchestra: For Some Time, Nothing. Thursday, 1 November 2018 Time: 7.30pm. The Capstone Theatre Liverpool.

For Some Time, Nothing is a sequence of improvised compositions created by international voice artist Steve Boyland and Merseyside Improvisers Orchestra in response to the poetry of Sean Borodale.

These poetic fragments, written live and on-site by the poet as part of an ongoing project started in 2004, were retrieved and curated during the Lyrigraph Sessions, an intensive period of creative discourse enacted between poet and vocalist during 2017-18.

The fragments were subsequently edited for performance by Boyland and given the title For Some Time, Nothing, a line taken from that edit which captures the metaphysical, almost Beckettian flavour of its dramatico- poetic landscape.

The work was premiered in a staged ‘reading’ with Borodale at the Bluecoat, Liverpool in March, 2018. This collaboration between Steve Boyland and members of MIO represents a unique opportunity to further extend and explore the processes of retrieval and re-authorship at the heart of the lyrigraph project and to reconfigure the texts within the broader possibilities of an improvised abstract soundscape.