Jack Sheen, CROON HARVEST

The Museum as Performance

O MUSEU COMO PERFORMANCE

11 - 12 SET 2021

Horário: 15:00 - 19:00

Image: Laura Hilliard

11 september, CROON HARVEST (indoor version), Casa de Serralves.

12 september, CROON HARVEST (outdoor version), Ténis do Parque de Serralves.

Jack Sheen’s music is concerned with evading linear narratives in favour of more sculptural and ecological forms, often using simple ideas such as repetition and stasis whilst questioning more elusive notions such as process, memory, and climax.

‘Croon harvest’ (2020) centres on the voice’s potential to create incredible intimacy in its most hushed, unprojected state, a state within which blemishes, grain, and imperfections ornament the resulting sound. The piece is made up of small, breath-long fragments of vocal sound, with each singer instructed to perform in a way that is closer to humming or mumbling rather than singing in a projected manner.

The piece – a spatialised performance installation – invites a celebration of vacancy, placing gentle vocal lamentations in dialogue with lo-fi recordings of domestic silence taken by the large body of singers that perform the work to create a gentle tapestry of ritualistic activity, soft mumbling and white noise.

For The Museum as Performance, Sheen presents two versions of the work. One following the original one to be performed outdoors in the Serralves Park and the world premiere of a new version that includes string instruments to be performed at Casa de Serralves.

Composition, direction: Jack Sheen

Performers: Ensemble Vocal Pro-Música, lead by José Manuel Pinheiro

Gil Fesch (guitarra), Nuno Pinto (guitarra), Hugo Simões (guitarra), Laura Peres (violino), Ana Tedim (violino), Sofia Belo (violino).

This presentation of ‘Croon harvest’ is made possible by the support of:

Trailer video: Laura Hilliard

Jack Sheen

Jack Sheen is a composer and conductor from Manchester.

He regularly works with leading orchestras, ensembles, galleries, and artists on concert and operatic performances, commissions, installations, and interdisciplinary projects. Jack’s own music encompasses concert works for orchestras, ensembles, and soloists, alongside immersive performance-installations that disperse live musicians, audio, film, and dancers around large, open, non-seated spaces, blurring the lines between long-duration composition and sculpture. His recent compositions often exist in both formats.

2021 will see Jack debut with the London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Basel Sinfonietta, Britten Sinfonia, and FontanaMIX Ensemble in diverse programmes including premieres of his own music, return to the Lucerne Festival Academy as a Conducting Fellow, create a new loudspeaker-installation for the Venice Biennale Musica with Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, complete a large-scale new concert work and performance-installation for Octandre Ensemble, take up an artist residency at PINK Gallery in Manchester’s city centre, and complete his tenure as Carne Fellow at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance, the first ever composer to hold this position.

Jack is the Co-Director of London Contemporary Music Festival (‘the capital’s most adventurous and ambitious festival of new music’, The Guardian; ‘London’s most important festival’, The Wire) and Co-Founder of the critically acclaimed LCMF Orchestra.