TANGRAM: RITUALS FOR A CHANGING WORLD
Tangram Music Ensemble
Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Saturday 17 October 2026, 7.00pm
Tickets:
£17
£10 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s
Trad. Live Improvisations based on I Ching (4’)
SAARIAHO Six Japanese Gardens (excerpt) (4’)
YONG River Song (5’)
CAGE Four³ (excerpt) (10’)
HOSOKAWA Small Chant (5’)
Trad. Wind and Thunder Drumming (4’)
J. S. BACH Partita in G minor BWV 1004 – Sarabanda (arr. Daniel Shao) (4’)
VON BINGEN O vis eternitatis (arr. Alex Ho) (8’)
From the intimate to the divine: an intriguing musical exploration of Chinese music and philosophy alongside European classical traditions.
Moving between eastern and western instruments, these innovative musicians explore how ancient divination practices have inspired music, ritual and performance for over 1,000 years.
Praised for their “highly imaginative” (I Care If You Listen) and “powerfully theatrical performance” (Tempo) with an “intoxicating […] mood of poetry, restraint and elegance”, (The Stage) Tangram specialise in cross-cultural productions and are Associate Artists at LSO St Luke’s.
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SAARIAHO Kaija, Six Japanese Gardens
Six Japanese Gardens is a collection of impressions of the gardens I saw in Kyoto during my stay in Japan in the summer of 1993 and my reflection on rhythm at that time.
As the title indicates, the piece is divided into six parts. All these parts give specific look at a rhythmic material, starting from the simplistic first part, in which the main instrumentation is introduced, going to complex polyrhythmic or ostinato figures, or alternation of rhythmic and purely coloristic material.
The selection of instruments played by the percussionist is voluntarily reduced to give space for the perception of rhythmic evolutions. Also, the reduced colours are extended with the addition of an electronics part, in which we hear nature’s sounds, ritual singing, and percussion instruments recorded in the Kuntachi College of Music with Shinti Ueno. The ready-mixed sections are triggered by the percussionist during the piece, from a Macintosh computer.
All the work for processing and mixing the pre-recorded material was done with a Macintosh computer in my home studio. Some transformations are made with the resonant filters in the CHANT program, and with the SVP Phaser Vocoder. This work was made with Jean-Baptiste Barrière. The final mixing was made with the Protools program with the assistance of Hanspeter Stubbe Teglbjaerg.
The piece is commissioned by the Kunitachi College of Music and written for Shinti Ueno.
Kaija Saariaho ©
CAGE John, Four³
This work was originally used as music for the choreographed piece by Merce Cunningham entitled Beach Birds, with stage decors and costume design by Marsha Skinner. In this piece, four players perform 4 different actions, following the given time brackets: 1. Silence. 2. The sound of a rainstick. 3. A sine wave. 4. Excerpts from ‘Extended Lullaby’, played on the piano(s). The ‘Extended Lullaby’ is a set of 12 chance-determined variations of the cantus firmus and counterpoint of Vexations by Erik Satie (variations Cage also used in his Two⁶.) The rainsticks are played by slowly tilting, taking care not to disrupt the continuity of sound. The oscillator (or violin) plays a high C, without vibrato. Everything is to be played as softly and as slowly as possible. The work was commissioned by the Junifestwochen Zurich, Switzerland.
