British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access

Hear the Future of British Music

By breaking down the barriers for those who cannot access the Collection physically, however, we can open it up to new and broader audiences. Every month we ask a different composer or industry figure to write a short article for us that we call ‘Spotlight.’ In this way we ask the writer to reflect on a piece in the Collection that has been important in their own artistic development or simply something they have loved as a listener. These Spotlight articles show just how important an archive can be in supporting new creative work.

Monty Adkins is a composer, performer and professor in experimental electronic music. Here he is spotlighting Alvarez’ ‘Papaloti’:

Walking into the room in which the British Music Collection is currently housed at the University of Huddersfield is quite awe inspiring. If I had a spare three months I could quite happily be left in there to explore and listen to the wealth of music in the collection. In the end my shortlist was reduced to two scores: the first was the Keyboard Anthology published by the Experimental Music Catalogue comprising beautiful piano miniatures from the early 1970s by Howard Skempton, Gavin Bryars and Hugh Shrapnel amongst others; the second was Papalotl for piano and tape by Javier Alvarez. In the end Papalotl won  out – simply because of the vivid memory I have of a truly virtuoso performance of this work by Philip Mead …

When I sat looking at this score again in the Huddersfield library a few days ago it struck me how simple this work looks on the page. Yes, there are a lot of notes, but they are mostly no more complicated than patterns of (dotted) semiquavers, quavers and crochets. However, Alvarez’ real skill is in the evolution and development of these patterns. Rhythm is not only the surface driving force in this score it is what articulates its formal development and its structure. That Alvarez can maintain such a high level of rhythmic activity and musical intensity across the work’s 14-minute span and keep the listener gripped throughout is a testament to his compositional craft. Even though this work is now twenty-five years old, for me, it is still fresh, vibrant and demonstrates the one of the best examples of what can be done when combining instruments and electronics.

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A snapshot of Brian Ferneyhough’s Transit (1972-75), one of the pieces in the collection.

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