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12
Nov 18

Colin Currie Group return to Cambridge Music Festival

After their highly successful concert with Steve Reich in 2016, the Colin Currie Group returns to Corn Exchange on 21 November as part of the Cambridge Music Festival. The programme includes Reich’s Drumming (part 1), Music for Pieces of Wood and Six Marimbas, which the group performs for the first time.

Six Marimbas (1986), is a rescoring for marimbas of Reich’s earlier Six Pianos (1973) full of intricate rhythms allowing players to be physically and musically close together. Similar to Drumming, this piece has the same process of substituting beats for rest resulting in a pattern played against itself.

Prior to the concert, fifty young percussionists across Cambridgeshire will come together with the Colin Currie Group to co-create a piece based on Reich’s compositions. The percussionists will literally “play” the city’s Corn Exchange with everything from washing-up brushes to spatulas used as makeshift percussion as part of this year’s Cambridge Music Festival. They will be exploring the percussive sound of their surroundings and turning the venue into a musical instrument for a very special one-off performance that will open the Colin Currie Group’s concert. This educational project is a partnership between Cambridge Music Festival and Cambridgeshire Music.

This concert follows the group’s Southeast Asia debut at the Esplanade Concert Hall in Singapore earlier this month, with a performance featuring the music of Steve Reich. The programme included Music for Pieces of Wood, Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ and Drumming with Synergy Vocals.