News

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.

Tom Hicks

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.

Camden Reeves
Scordatura Squid III

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.’

The music is available from Edition Peters: https://www.editionpeters.com/product/the-dead-broke-blues-break/ep72435

Camden Reeves
Still Above Ground

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.

On 21 September 2018, Mexican violinist Juanmanuel Flores will play Reeves’s two works for detuned violin as part of the Norte Creativo 2018 Festival at the Escuela Adolfo Prieto in Monterrey, Mexico.

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!

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Reeves’s work for cello and piano, Still Above Ground, is an elegy written in memory of his grandfather, Douglas Reeves. Douglas Richard Reeves, who passed away in 2016, aged 92, 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 Reeves’s deep love of Bill Evans. The music is imbued with loss and echoes of the harmonic sophistication of modern jazz.