"The
foreigner, it has been said, is audible”. Fran Tonkiss, Aural
Postcards: Sound, Memory and the City
At the invitation of RADAR, Loughborough University’s new arts programme,
Mikhail Karikis collaborated with celebrated Cantamus choir under the direction
of Pamela Cook MBO to create a concert and a new composition for the choir.
The programme is the result of their exploration of notions of difference and
its musical articulation and consists of old and new works from the UK and
abroad, which feature ‘strangers’ from otherworldly realms and
disparate geographical locations.
Angels, fairies, witches, unborn fetuses, Japanese girls and gypsies are among the ‘strangers’ appearing in these works, presenting different ways in which the 'strange' has been musicalized.
In ‘A Stranger Here’, a new work for 45 voices in five sections by Mikhail Karikis for Cantamus and him in the role of a soloist, he visits the homonymous motet by English Baroque composer John Amner (1579-1641) and imagines a cross-century and cross-cultural musical dialogue wedding traditional choral composition with experimental voice performance and sound art.
This project is part of RADAR's 'You are the music while the music lasts' programme organised by Loughborough University and curated by Nick Slater. The other artists commissioned to create works for this project are Scanner, Janek Schaefer, Salome Voegelin, Kaffe Matthews, Mike Marshall, John Wynne, Juneau Projects and Ben Neal.
