Composer takes prestigious George Butterworth Prize
Photo by Stefan Fuhrer
Mon, 20 Jun 2016 14:33:00 BST
Pia Palme’s work Mordacious lips, to dust was composed as part of a Sound and Music-backed Portfolio project in association with the ensemble Exaudi
ESTABLISHED as one of Europe’s most innovative composers, Austrian-born Pia Palme is currently concentrating on completion of her doctoral thesis at the University of Huddersfield, home of CeReNeM, the Centre for Research in New Music. But one of her recent works has been announced as the winner of a valuable and prestigious prize that commemorates an English musician and soldier who met his tragic end 100 years ago.
Pia’s 11-minute vocal work titled Mordacious lips, to dust has been awarded the George Butterworth Prize, a £1,500 grant bestowed annually to the composer of an outstanding new work that was created through one of the programmes administered by the charity Sound and Music, the UK’s leading development agency for new music.
The year 2016 is especially poignant in the history of the prize, which is backed by the George Butterworth Memorial Fund, established in the aftermath of World War One by the family of the composer. A holder of the Military Cross, he was killed during the Battle of the Somme in July 1916.
Before volunteering for active service, Butterworth had composed works such as A Shropshire Lad and The Banks of Green Willow that remain much loved for their bittersweet vision of pre-WWI England.
Pia Palme is also interested in using music to explore beauty, while investigating what she describes in a recent interview as “the crannies of something dark underneath”.
Her Butterworth prizewinning work was one she composed as part of a Sound and Music-backed Portfolio project in association with the ensemble Exaudi. Mordacious lips, to dust is a work for four singers, and features a highly-demanding soprano part.
The adjective “mordacious” has meanings that include acerbic, stinging or corrosive and Pia has explained that in her work it “makes reference to the fictional, irate female voice permeating the composition”.
“The text for the soprano summons the thorns of a rose, shards of glass, or the penetrating power of love and madness to punctuate reality and skin, to unveil what lies underneath.”
The work was premiered by Exaudi in October 2015 and in the George Butterworth Prize jury was “impressed by the beauty and pacing of the work and the skill demonstrated in the handling of the material”. The composition can be heard at http://piapalme.at/works/mordacious-lips-to-dust/.
Commenting on the Butterworth prize, Pia said she was happy and honoured and that she found the connection to George Butterworth’s personal history extremely touching.
- Pia Palme is both a composer and sound artist. Interdisciplinary and collaborative projects are an important feature of her work, such as the radical opera Abstrial. Viennese-born, she studied music and mathematics and has also worked as an oboist, recorder-player, curator, producer, teacher and experimentalist. She was part of the Sound and Music Portfolio Project in 2015 and has also received the Austrian Ministry of Art’s Outstanding Artist Award. Her PhD at the University of Huddersfield – supervised by Liza Lim, who is Professor of Composition and Director of CeReNeM – deals with Pia’s recent body of works with a focus on voice “as embodied, integrating aspects of physicality, emotions, mind and space”. The compositions in the portfolio contain ensemble and solo works with or for voice, some with electronics, text and video, installations and lecture-performances.
