Research Forum - Laurence Osborn - 09 October 2024

Описание: ‘Some Images of the Keyboard in my Compositions from 2019-24’

Laurence Osborn

During the last five years, I have returned to the image of the keyboard in a number works involving piano, harpsichord, or electronic sampler. The image of the keyboard stands for various tensions and issues in music practice that interest me as a composer, and that I have tried to explore in the pieces surveyed here. Two pieces for harpsichord and ensemble, Automaton (2019) and Coin Op Automata (2021), depict the harpsichord as a site of elision between human and mechanism. Absorber (2019) is written for both piano and sampler played simultaneously and repurposes relics of late-twentieth-century ‘keyboardism’. TOMB! (2022) draws on the uncanny image of Nancarrow’s piano in its exploration of deadness and re-animation. My forthcoming piano concerto, Schiller’s Piano (2024), is about the forced construction of a hollow replica of Schiller’s piano at Buchenwald concentration camp in 1943. Here, the soloist alternates between piano and sampler, aurally ‘building’ the piano using recordings taken from piano construction.

Laurence Osborn is a British composer based in London. His music has been performed widely across the UK and abroad by orchestras and ensembles including London Philharmonic Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, and Britten Sinfonia. Recent highlights include an all-day retrospective at the Wigmore Hall, receipt of the RPS Award for Chamber-Scale Composition for the large ensemble piece TOMB!, and the release of two albums featuring Ensemble Klang with Agata Zubel and Riot Ensemble with Zubin Kanga. Laurence recently finished his PhD in Composition at Kings College London with Sir George Benjamin. He is currently Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge.