Lauren Redhead
I am a composer, an organist, and a musicologist who writes about 20th and 21st Century Musics. As a composer, my work falls broadly within the context of experimental music. Increasingly, I also work on a project-based and collaborative basis, creating series of graphic scores, notated scores, texts, and audio fragments or sound compositions. These aspects of my work can be performed, layered and responded to in many different ways, resulting in multiple performance presentations and A/V works.
I am interested in notation and materiality, and use a combination of experimental approaches to the creation of scores and electronic materials, alongside improvisation. This often means that I take on the role of the composer-as-performer, including working with others so that many of my pieces are devised and created collaboratively. Some examples of pieces that have come about from working in this way are curse tablets and fishfossilfake.
My music has been presented at international festivals including at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, TRANSIT, the London Ear Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival, Firenze Suona Contemporanea, Full of Noises Festival, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival and Radiophrenia.
I also perform contemporary music for the organ, and most often perform work for the combination of organ and electronics, very often in a duet with Alistair Zaldua. I also co-founded the collective ‘Automatronic’ with Huw Morgan and Michael Bonaventure. I also collaborate with other composers to present new works for the combination. Alistair Zaldua and I present and broadcast our work internationally.
In 2023 we were invited guest artists at the Registri organ festival on the Island of San Servolo, Venice, presenting a festival concert alongside installation performances of long-form organ works. In 2019, our performance of Mesias Maiguashca’s ground-breaking work — Nemos Orgel (1970 – 1992) — was featured at the Stavanger NyMusikk/Only Connect Festival and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and NRK 2. In 2021 we developed and presented a set for the BBC Tectonics Festival in Glasgow and online. Two programmes of our work have been broadcast on Deutschlandfunk Kultur’s Neue Music programme, one on unmeasured preludes for organ and electronics, and our performance of the 45-minute version of Annette Schmucki’s 54 stops, grèsillement, alphabet des rauschens.
Solo works by Lauren Redhead
Music for organ and electronics
