Microtonal Project’s Records are releasing a track monthly until the summer on all major streaming platforms. Paul Rhys’s ‘Dialogue is now also out!
‘I am delighted to have (so far) given three performances of thiswork- at Churchill College (Cambridge), at EUROMicroFest (Freiburg, Germany) and Hyperchromatic Festival (London). Now more people can access to this piece, which has been a joy to work on with Paul over the last few years.’ (Stephen Altoft)
Paul Rhys – Dialogue for Trumpet
In this piece a 19-note trumpet enters into dialogue with a computer soundtrack created using granular synthesis by fractal organization. The soundtrack uses two brief recorded sounds, one of them a single drop of water. I am grateful to Anglia Ruskin University for funding the research leave that enabled the creation of this piece. I am also very grateful to the extraordinary trumpeter Stephen Altoft who developed the 19-note trumpet and has since encouraged a wide community of composers to write for the instrument.
Paul Rhys was born into a musical family but read sciences at Oxford before turning to postgraduate study as a composer in the UK and US. He has taught at Reading University, at Clare College Cambridge, and currently teaches at Anglia Ruskin University. His early electronic work Ebb and Flow gained a Bourges Residency prize. Soon after, a Wingate Foundation Scholarship funded a year of study at Northwestern University in the US where he completed Chicago Fall for mixed acoustic and electronic ensemble, later performed at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. His virtuoso piano solo Not I follows the structure of Samuel Beckett’s monologue and has been performed internationally by pianist Ian Pace, who also premiered Rhys’ Piano Concerto in London. Since 2017 he has been composing music in 19 divisions of the octave, gradually developing theory, practice, and software in a series of works for voices and instruments setting sacred texts from the Baha’i writings.