Screening and Conversation: FOXFIRE EINS

The first event in our cycle of activities, Music Futures, co-hosted this year by the Institute of Advanced Studies and the European Institute. 

We will screen four short films by artist, film-maker and UCL Slade Professor Jayne Parker, lasting 30 minutes in total, featuring cellist Anton Lukoszevieze. The films, which go under the collective title of Foxfire Eins, were co-commission by Spacex Gallery Exeter and Film and Video Umbrella for a touring exhibition. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Jayne, academic, filmmaker and musician Graham Riach and librarian-musician Tabitha Tuckett.

Synopses of each film

FOXFIRE EINS: 16mm film, b/w, 10 minutes, 2000

Performed on film by ’cellist Anton Lukoszievize, FoxFire Eins natrimpentothal (1993), is the name of a solo composition by Helmut Oehring. In FoxFire Eins the ’cellist must play with both hands plucking and striking the strings which are tuned down a perfect fourth. The child of profoundly deaf parents, Oehring’s first language was signing. Oehring hears music as gesture - for him music comes out of movement.

BLUES IN B FLAT: 16mm film, colour, 8 minutes, 2000

Blues in B Flat takes its name and subject from a cello solo, composed by Volker Heyn in 1981. In this film, the cellist, Anton Lukoszevieze, is both a musician and a protagonist. In the final section he must introduce a second bow to play on the underside of the strings, a strangely intrusive act. The film opens in a music repair shop, and we see the interior of a cello, the space where music resonates.

PROJECTION 1: 16mm film, 6 minutes, b/w, 2000

Anton Lukoszevieze plays Morton Feldman’s Projection 1 (1950) for solo cello, twice through. The film is in black and white and has few edits. The strong graphic lines of the cello and its strings, and the intersection of the bow, mirror the graphic score from which this piece is played. A film about form, sound and space.

591/2 SECONDS: 16mm film, b/w, 1 minute, 2000

Composed by John Cage in 1953, and played by Anton Lukoszevieze, there are several versions of this film, each lasting a minute. Despite being played from the same score, the films can appear to sound different, depending on what we see. The score for 591/2 seconds for a string player runs through an array of possible ways to produce a sound on a cello.

Participants

• Jayne Parker is an artist and film maker, whose work takes as its primary focus the performance of music. In 2003 she was the recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation 1871 Fellowship, a research residency at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, and the San Francisco Art Institute, California, researching the notion of musical equivalence between analogue film and the musical score and its expression. A DVD compilation, Jayne Parker: British Artists’ Films, was issued by the British Film Institute in 2009. She is Professor in Fine Art and Head of Graduate Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Her films are distributed by LUX: www.lux.org.uk
• Graham Riach is an academic, musician, and documentary filmmaker. His research focuses on questions of form and aesthetics in world literature, with particular interests in South African writing and the short story. He also works as a musician, including composing and performing the score for Violaine de Villers's award-winning The Crimson Tongue (2017). As a filmmaker, he trained in the anthropology department at UCL, and has since made films on topics ranging from the revival of the northern triple-pipes to the complex dynamics of complicity in wartime and post-war Germany. He is a Lecturer in World Literature at the University of Oxford.
• Tabitha Tuckett is Rare-Books Librarian, in charge of Academic Support and Events, at UCL Special Collections. Tabitha is interested in the relation between rare books, manuscripts and documents and their realisation in performance or relevance to performance practice; as a modern and Baroque cellist, she's interested in the relationship between musicians and audiences, particularly in the impact of physical structures and performance spaces on audience members’ personal experience performance. She co-founded an award-winning musical-in-hospitals project in the early 2000s that ran for 8 years, looking at participation as listener, and this interest has continued in exploring the effect of historical buildings, contextualising documents and online performance spaces on the intimacy of the experience of live performance. She also participated as a performer in a research project partly based at UCL looking at women musicians in Early Modern Italian Academies.

All welcome. Due to Covid restrictions there is a limit of 35 registrations, so you are advised to sign up on Eventbrite as soon as possible if you would like to attend. If you are unable to attend, please remember to cancel your ticket. Please follow this FAQ link for more information.