Thursday 18 November, 7pm
Explore Ensemble performs
Systema Naturae, by Mauro Lanza and Andrea Valle
UK Premiere
Supported by ICI London
As part of the 2021 edition of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Explore Ensemble present the UK premiere of the audaciously spectacular cycle by Italian composers Mauro Lanza and Andrea Valle: Systema Naturae, for ensemble and electromechanical devices.
Systema Naturae is about discovery. It is a meditation on the process, rather than the act, of making them, depicting the ways in which we classify, organise and most importantly give name to the minutiae of the natural world. A four-part ‘play’ comprising a series of pseudo-textbooks – Regnum Animale, Regnum Vegetabile, Regnum Lapideum and Fossilia – , Mauro Lanza and Andrea Valle have created a vast, open world metaphor for our own histories of observation and categorisation.
Inspired by medieval encyclopaedias known as bestiarias, herbarias and lapidaria – texts that listed types of animals, plants and stones – Lanza and Valle envisioned an imaginary ecosystem of their own. Organised as if it were a musical transposition of this information, the score for Systema Naturae is structured like a reference catalogue, such as the eponymous work written by Carl Linneaus in the 18th century. Each individual part of the piece, performed by the composers alongside Explore Ensemble, focuses on a newly named fauna or flora. With over 50 pieces spanning four distinct movements, their lorebook is densely comprehensive, containing an entire natural world of mythology.
Explore Ensemble is a London-based chamber music group founded in 2012 at the Royal College of Music by composers Nicholas Moroz and Arne Gieshoff, which performs, commissions, and promotes new music. Built around a core sextet which often works with electronics, Explore Ensemble’s reputation for outstanding performances and inventive curation stems from its advocacy of some of the most original composers of today, combined with its revival of musical gems from the recent past.
More info and buy your tickets HERE