Projects

Carnyx & Co is actively seeking funding to initiate a variety of musical, educational, and archaeological projects. These include:

Headspace

HeadSpace is the culmination of a project which commenced in 1999, when Carnyx & Co., working with funds donated by the Diageo Foundation, commissioned composer and sonic inventor Rolf Gehlhaar to create a new musical instrument which would enable a quadriplegic musician to engage with fellow performers at the highest professional level. Head=Space is a highly sophisticated and powerful electronic musical instrument, controlled by subtle movements of the player’s head coupled with small, but delicate and precise air column, as in a wind instrument.

The musician for whom Head=Space has initially been developed, and who uses it to perform in the premier of my piece, is Clarence Adoo. Until a car accident left Clarence paralysed from the neck down, he was a fine professional trumpet player. All the characteristics which define Clarence as a person, and as a musician, remain unaffected by his accident – but the medium through which he used to express himself as a musician, the trumpet, is now denied him. It has always been our hope that Head=Space could become a medium through which any person could potentially express themselves. In Clarence’s case, the instrument is being driven by a professional musician of highly developed skills and aesthetic sense – but it is obvious that Head=Space also represents an extremely potent educational device, which any person with movement related special needs could learn to control and express themselves to their full potential.

Rolf Gehlhaar developed Head=Space sufficiently for Clarence to start working with it in 2001. Like any musical instrument, one can’t just pick it up and perform immediately – you have to practice, long and hard. Once the instrument existed in a useable form, it was essential to simply leave Clarence to “get on with it”. When Ian Ritchie, director of the St. Magnus Festival, broached the idea of John Kenny composing a piece for the 2005 festival, Kenny suggested involving Clarence and Head=Space. Ian Ritchie immediately took the idea up, demonstrating their mutual enthusiasm for the carnyx as a symbol: the head, as the true centre of our personality and passion, the totemic beast of our ancestors reborn as a 21st Century musical medium, is a wonderful analogy for the development of Head=Space – and to play it in the festival named for Orkney’s decapitated patron saint would truly be “The Entertaining of the Noble Head”.

The headspace ensemble after performance at the Sage Centre

HeadSpace is a quartet for trumpet, trombone, the head=space instrument, and sound projectionist. The musicians who premiered HeadSpace at the 2005 St. Magnus Festival, and subsequently for a BBC documentary filmed live at the SAGE Gateshead, are: Torbjorn Hultmark playing trumpets and flugal horn, John Kenny on trombone and carnyx, Clarence Adoo on Head=Space, and Chris Wheeler as sound projectionist. The textures created in the piece derive from a search for shared sonorities, but also in the rhythms and cadence of speech, or proto speech, which is implied by any concentration on the “head”. The piece unfolds in one continues movement, containing fourteen sub sections.

In 2006 the HeadSpace Ensemble has gone on to develop new repertoire, and now offer themselves for recitals and workshops featuring Clarence Adoo and the Head=Space instrument.

John Kenny

Gundestrup Bowl Image

The most famous representation of the carnyx appears on the fabulous Gundestrup Bowl, unearthed in a hoard in modern Denmark. On this vessel, three carnyx players are represented playing in formation. We aim to build a third carnyx, and to play the instrument in ensemble. This necessarily requires that more players be introduced to the instrument, the skills already developed passed on, and extended.

Commission of new work

Many composers have now written for the carnyx, notably John Purser, Nigel Osbourne, Etienne Rolin, John Kenny, Steven Montague, Morris Pert, Edward Maguire and James MacMillan. Opportunities are continually sought to commission and premier new works, in collaboration with existing festivals and concert promoters.

Reconstruction of other ancient instruments

Already the success of the carnyx project has attracted experts in the fields of Egyptology, Classical and Near East civilisations. Discussions are under way to collaborate with musical archaeologists in several nations to use our experience to help bring other ancient lip reed instruments back to life. The skill of the silver and bronze smith will be revitalised, and a new generation of craftsmen encouraged to develop skills necessary to create complex instruments of hand beaten metal. Most notably, the discovery in September 2005 at Tintingnac, France, of several almost complete carnyces which predate the Deskford instrument make it imperative to reconstruct and compare these instruments.

Carnyx Youth Brass

The Carnyx Youth Brass Ensemble offers talented young brass players in Scotland the opportunity to perform both contemporary chamber music and established main stream repertoire, combining talented school and university students who frequently compose and perform their own music. Directed by John Kenny, professor of trombone at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and Royal Scottish Academy, Carnyx Youth Brass is a continuation and development of the highly successful brass ensemble which he has directed at St. Mary's Music School, Edinburgh, since 1997.