Jim Aitchison's Piano Quintets released
Two piano quintets from School of Music’ Jim Aitchison has just been released on the Métier label.
Jim Aitchison, a PGR student in the School of Music, has composed two piano quintets with Roderick Chadwick and the Kreutzer Quartet, available across all the major streaming platforms. The first quintet engages closely with Anselm Kiefer's 1981 painting, Margarete, and the second responds to passage from dark to partial light at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens after an experience of James Turrell's Aqua Oscura installation.
Both pieces of work draw on Jim’s unique dual practice as composer and artist, creating music that responds to encounters with powerful works of art by leading visual artists.
Jim said: “We were fortunate with a huge amount of support from Neil Armstrong, the indefatigable owner of Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, and from friends and colleagues at the Royal Academy of Music, Peter Sheppard Skaerved, Roderick Chadwick, Mihailo Trandafilovski, Morgan Goff, Jim Sleigh, Neil Heyde, and thanks to sound engineer Adaq Khan, and to James Cardell-Oliver, David Wueste and the folks at First Inversion and Divine Art Recordings, and from Composers Edition, Arts Council England, The Vaughan Williams Foundation, The Hinrichsen Foundation, The Royal Academy of Music, Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens and Falmouth University.”
Buy: https://divineartrecords.com/recording/jim-aitchison-piano-quintets/
Jim Aitchison is a composer known for creating musical responses to the work of major visual artists, and he is a visual artist in his own right. His first significant work in this area was with Sir Terry Frost for the US pianist Andrew Russo, premiered at the Van Cliburn Modern at the Modern concert series in Dallas in 2002. His collaboration with Peter Sheppard Skærved and the Kreutzer Quartet began at Tate St Ives in 2005, responding to sculpture by Richard Deacon, and paintings by John Hoyland in 2007, for whom he composed his string quartet, Four Trajectories after John Hoyland. In 2008, as a Henry Moore Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music, he composed Fugue Refractions for the Henry Moore Institute with violinist Philippa Mo, and Memory Field after sculpture by Antony Gormley, performed by countertenor Nicholas Clapton and the Kreutzer Quartet at the artist’s King’s Cross studio.
In 2008–09, Tate Modern commissioned him to respond to their large-scale Mark Rothko exhibition, and during this period he also created a response to Doris Salcedo’s iconic Shibboleth installation, performed by Peter Sheppard Skærved in the Turbine Hall. In 2012, Tate Media published Shadows of Light II (after Mark Rothko) as part of the Rothko Room multimedia tour at Tate Modern, and since then Shadows of Light II has been performed by the NewEar Ensemble in Kansas City, USA.
In other projects, he has composed musical responses to Anish Kapoor for the Royal Academy’s large-scale exhibition, working with Peter Sheppard Skærved, Neil Heyde, and Michael Thompson. In 2014, while an Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal Academy of Music, he created a large, geographically distributed response to the art of Gerhard Richter funded by Arts Council England, working with curator Paul Moorhouse, Roderick Chadwick, and the Kreutzer Quartet, in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Music, Falmouth University, Yamaha UK, and Goldsmiths. In 2017, he was commissioned by the New Art Centre, Roche Court, and Poole Museum, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to create music in response to sculpture by Anthony Caro for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
In 2020, he made his filmmaking debut with Contrapunctus, a piece of video music about disconnection and psychotherapeutic harm, for the Social Distancing Festival in Toronto. In 2023–24, Arts Council England supported his large-scale new music project based at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens in Cornwall, working with Peter Sheppard Skærved, Roderick Chadwick, and the Kreutzer Quartet, with support from Falmouth University and Research England.
Recently, he has completed a new clarinet quintet for Linda Merrick CBE and the Kreutzer Quartet, commissioned by the Marchus Trust. His music is published by Composers Edition.
www.jimaitchison.org
