Cyborg musician Zubin Kanga will be preforming the world première of Laurence Osborn’s Schiller’s Piano with Manchester Collective this October
For more than a decade, he has been at the forefront of curating and creating interdisciplinary musical programmes.
As Director and Principal Investigator at Royal Holloway University multi-year project Cyborg Soloists, Zubin, together with a host of collaborators, is unlocking new possibilities in music making through interactions with AI and machine learning, interactive visuals and VR, motion and biosensors, and new hybrid instruments.
After seeing a replica of Schiller’s piano – which was built by WW2 prisoners and unable to play music – Laurence has responded to fascism’s empty attempts to recreate the past in this new concerto commissioned by Zubin and Manchester Collective as part of Cyborg Soloists. It’s an auditory hallucination where Zubin conjures ghostly samples of piano construction with his keyboard: handsaws, sandpaper, drills.
Zubin believes the exciting evolution of instruments makes musical creativity more accessible, and encourages musicians and composers to push the boundaries of traditional music making.
Fever Dreams, RNCM
Thursday, 10 October 19:30 21:30
Zubin Kanga premieres Laurence Osborn’s new piece Schiller’s Piano with Manchester Collective. Also on the programme, music by Grażyna Bacewicz, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Caroline Shaw and Wojciech Kilar.
Programme:
Grażyna Bacewicz Concerto for String Orchestra
Laurence Osborn Schiller’s Piano (world premiere)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings, I. & III.
Caroline Shaw Evergreen, I & II.
Wojciech Kilar Orawa
Performers:
Zubin Kanga piano keyboard, live electronics (Schiller’s Piano)
Aaron Holloway-Nahum Conductor (Schiller’s Piano)
Manchester Collective string orchestra
