Jack Sheen new work premieres in Berlin
Jack Sheen's Ceremony Container will be given its premiere by ensemble mosaik this month at Berlin’s Silent Green, the culmination of his scholarship from Progetto Positano. The scheme was initiated in 2017, supported by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. It offers two composers every year the chance to live and work at Casa Orfeo – Wilhelm Kempff’s old summer house on the Amalfi Coast – with their work performed by ensemble mosaik. He tells us about his experience this summer
What was your aim during your time in Positano?
There is no fixed outcome that comes with the residency, but I knew I wanted to make a new piece that would push my music into more ambitious territory.
Over the last few years I’ve been making performance-installations: compositions which disperse live musicians and electronic sound across large, unseated spaces through which the audience are free to move and settle as they wish while the music unfolds. They’re realised outside of concert halls and instead in galleries, warehouses and heritage sites, and usually last between one to six hours.
With this in mind, alongside the offer of a ‘retrospective' concert on the table I decided to dig into older music of mine as a starting point, tearing out material from pieces dating back to 2014 to use as building blocks alongside new, bespoke music composed while in Italy.
How did the residency affect your creative process?
Being isolated somewhere beautiful for a clearly defined amount of time has always catalysed my work: the fixed departure date back to the distractions of everyday life always forces compositional decisions into place with a certain abandon and playfulness that is much harder to achieve at my desk in Manchester.
What are the most important things you learnt from the experience?
The best way to make yourself want to sit at a desk and compose is to wake up and actively try not to work. (This is easier to do when you can sit for hours drinking coffee and looking at the sea as the sun rises). Through some sort of reverse psychology and maximising the amount of time that ideas can freely come and go into your head while doing nothing about them, the desk becomes magnetic after a while.
Were there any particularly special lightbulb moments?
So far I’ve made three performance-installations, all of which are quite sculptural. The music – although never repeating in an obviously mechanical way – is static enough that it is the audience’s movement around the musicians and space that creates a (different) ‘musical narrative’ for each listener.
In Ceremony Container I wanted to change this and compose a piece that guided the audience through the vast space of Silent Green. At times, they would all have to gather around one precise spot in the room to hear one musician playing delicately by themselves, while at others they would feel surrounded by sound and thus free to move as they wished towards what they pleased. Figuring out how to draw hundreds of people in a massive space to one precise spot and then disperse them again using (almost) only acoustic sound was a constant series of small lightbulbs. Of course, how exactly an audience interacts with and becomes a true part of the piece is not totally predictable, and I’m incredibly excited to see how it will all play out.
Also, the title Ceremony Container felt like a real lightbulb moment. But I will leave that at that.
Jack Sheen’s Ceremony Container will be performed by ensemble mosaik on 23 October at Silent Green. Find out more.
