Camden Reeves’s new album, Blue Sounds for Piano, will be released on the Metier label on 13 May 2022. The record was recorded by pianist Tom Hicks, after around 10 years of collaboration on three substantial piano works: Tangle-Beat Blues, Nine Preludes and Blue Sounds for Piano. Tom has toured these works extensively over the years, including in a profile recitals of all three works, in London and Chicago, in 2019 and 2020.
The album with be released in CD form and digitally on streaming platforms (including Amazon and Spotify).
Tom Hicks will give the premiere of BLUE SOUNDS for piano at the Galvin Recital Hall, Bienen School of Music, Evanston, Chicago on 1 November. The recital will feature three of Reeves’ piano works – this new work, together with Tangle-Beat Blues and the Nine Preludes together with waltzes by Chopin.
Camden’s music is full of colour and atmosphere. His new work ‘blue sounds’, a meditation on the colour, is an original and daring work and I look forward to premiering it at the beautiful Galvin Hall. The Chicago skyline will make for an atmospheric backdrop to this special programme.
Reeves’s three motets, Spells, Remedies and Potions, inspired by the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612, will receive a second round of performances this autumn. They will be at the Pendle Heritage Centre on 31 October (Halloween), at Lancaster Castle (where the trials originally took place) on 8 November, and at the Anthony Burgess Centre in Manchester on 15 November.
The motets were premiered at the Pendle Heritage Centre last year. They are for 13 sopranos, symbolizing a kind of inverted and demonic Last Supper. The words are taken from the Malleus Maleficarum – the 16th century witch hunter’s manual, outlining methods for the detection, trial, torture and execution of witches. Boiling bodies to make soup, copulating with Satan, twisting limbs and cracking bone, drinking from skin, eating babies and more.Think Megadeth, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Wes Craven and George A Romero…but for sopranos!
Reeves’s new orchestral piece, LIGHT SPEED WITH TIME CANONS, will be performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Simone Young, on 6 November 2019 in Media City. Live Broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
The music was composed in celebration of the centenary of the experimental proof of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Einstein published his theory in 1915. The experimental proof was made under the leadership of Arthur Eddington in 1919.
Juanmanuel Flores will give the world premiere of Camden Reeves’ Scordatura Squid III, for detuned solo violin, in Monterrey, Mexico on Wednesday 26 June 2019. The concert will take place at the Alfonso Reyes Hall of CONARTE.
This is the third in my cycle of works for detuned violin inspired by the Googly-Eyed Glass Squid (Tuethowenia pellucida). This weird creature has the ability to inflate its transparent body and fill itself with ink, thus rendering itself invisible in the darkness of the abyss. Stretched out of shape, like the animal itself, the strings of the violin are tuned one tone higher than normal, such that the music sounds glassy and distorted.
Scordatura Squid III is proudly available from Composers Edition
The Siqueiros Piano Trio will give the Mexican premiere of Camden Reeves’s second piano trio, The Dead Broke Blues Break at the Carlos Chavez Hall of the UNAM, in Mexico City, on Saturday 8 June 2019.
Camden says, ‘This trio was inspired my the clunky, funky, jazz of Thelonius Monk. The ‘break’ of the title refers to a crazy pizzicato cello part, written in the manner of a jazz-bass solo, that gradually overtakes and breaks the musical textures apart.’
This short elegy for cello and piano was written in memory of my grandfather, Douglas Richard Reeves, who passed away in 2016, aged 92. Douglas was an accomplished jazz guitarist, trumpeter, pianist and arranger. His sound and harmonic sophistication on the piano were unmistakable, and it was he that inspired my deep love of Bill Evans. I have tried to capture something of this harmonic world here.
Reeves’s three motets inspired by the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612 will be premiered at the Pendle Heritage Centre on Saturday 13 October 2018. The motets are for 13 sopranos, symbolizing a kind of inverted and demonic Last Supper. The words are taken from the Malleus Maleficarum – the 16th century witch hunter’s manual, outlining methods for the detection, trial, torture and execution of witches. Boiling bodies to make soup, copulating with Satan, twisting limbs and cracking bone, drinking from skin, eating babies and more. Think Megadeth, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Wes Craven and George A Romero…but for sopranos!
Camden Reeves
Camden Reeves
