Mutations and Variations by Catchpenny Ensemble

This will be a very special concert and WORM is proud to present this; The Catchpenny Orchestra is a music collective providing composers and artists a space for collaborating, and exchanging and practising creative musical and artistic ideas. This shows exactly what WORM is about as well, in all possible directions. This time it is about a -more then is common for us- refined way of using electronics with electro-acoustics mixed with images and very different approaches from young composers and musicians. A good start of the new year!
Check out the information that follows… it’s a lot and we know you would rather see a tictoc but there is actually some interesting stuff said….

Mutations & Variations | Catchpenny Ensemble
This programme explores a single theme, Mutations and Variations: the inherent inevitability of change, unfolding realities, societal issues, and political struggles entangled with techno- ethical questions; all these, demanding from us, as a society, to transform and mutate.
Program:
Sculptor  – Maya Verlaak
The room holds time – Jimena Maldonado
Heat – Luke Deane
Half-Broken Hymns for Synthetic Souls –Jan Foote

Sculptor | Maya Verlaak
The score of Sculptor is a live interactive construction for the musicians to explore. It is built in Maxmsp and consists of an 8×8 square. The square is a visualization of the sound it produces. Each horizontal line is a pitch, and all horizontal lines together form a cluster.
Each vertical line of the square divides these pitches into a (regular) rhythm. However, the sound of the cluster and the regularity of the rhythm will be changed by the musicians throughout the performance. The musicians can move the horizontal pitch lines by playing specific pitches, and they can also move the vertical lines by changing dynamics. The musicians are not given an end goal but are instructed to deconstruct the 8×8 square into a new sound they find interesting to perform together with. The pianist has the most important role in the performance; they control what everyone hears. The sound of the full square can only be heard when all piano keys are pressed. This means that the pianist can select specific sections of the square to listen to and construct a structure for the performance.

The room holds time | Jimena Maldonado
The room holds time is a sonic portrait of 11 hours in the life of a newborn — or perhaps more accurately, a meditation on the strange, suspended temporality of early motherhood.
Composed using data collected from a baby tracker app over an 11-hour period, the piece maps the intimate, cyclical rituals of infant care: feeding, diaper changes, fleeting moments of wakefulness, and the deep, unpredictable swells of sleep.
Performers navigate a video score created directly from this data stream — a visual and temporal map of the baby’s day, where one hour is one minute. Players respond to the video’s cues while also interpreting fragments of written notation, creating a hybrid performance that mirrors the improvisatory, attentive labor of new motherhood.
At its heart, the piece seeks to sonically recreate that peculiar paradox of the newborn’s first weeks — when time seems to both stretch endlessly and collapse into itself. Hours blur. Repetition becomes ritual. The outside world recedes. You are suspended in a quiet, tender bubble — where everything is happening, and yet, somehow, nothing ever seems to change.

Heat | Luke Deane
A frame-perfect score re-contextualises gun violence, friendship and the meaning of life and death in classic cinematic scenes from the 1995 Michael Mann movie Heat. By taking unconventional cues from the film, such as actors blinking, or shifting their eyes from left to right, hidden meta-modern layers of vulnerability and care are shown to also exist inside more macho “classics”. 

Half-Broken Hymns for Synthetic Souls | Jan Foote
When composing Half-Broken Hymns for Synthetic Souls, I was thinking about the effect that new technologies have on composition.
AI is an extremely divisive topic when it comes to art and music. The advocates of it claiming that it democratises music-making process, because it gives non-musicians the chance to create an idea that they have had even if they lack the knowledge to realise it.
The critics claim that, apart from the serious ethical questions about ownership that are raised by AI use, that AI only copies existing work and cannot create anything new; and that it only re-composes existing works from the past.
This reminded me of Mark Fisher’s book Ghosts of my Life, in which he describes as a sense of cultural déjà vu, where the new feels eerily familiar, reflects a society struggling to envision a future distinct from the past. This piece explores the relationship between hauntology and technology, using forgotten, distorted echoes of AI-generated melodies, buried and resurrected as ghostly artifacts.
The inability of AI to innovate novel art and not only replicate old styles was the starting idea for this piece. I wanted to use generic-sounding AI music to create, what I felt to be, a genuinely interesting work of art.

*Catchpenny Ensemble is a music collective providing composers and artists a space for collaborating, and exchanging and practising creative musical and artistic ideas since its creation in 2014. Its unique instrumentation – flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, double bass, and live electronics, combined with visual media – makes space for a new repertoire tailored for Catchpenny. The combination of acoustic and electronic instruments, together with video art, cinema, and audio-visual elements is Catchpenny’s defining characteristic. *

Irene Ruipérez – flute
Camille Verhaak – clarinets
Natalia Álvarez-Arenas – percussion
Reinier van Houdt – piano
Ilya Ziblat Shay – contrabass