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Note to self...NEVER FORGET TO BUY COFFEE BEFORE A SNOW STORM!!!!!! Hackney Girl lesson learned, yes. ME being an absolute wimp? Makes the Margate Winter blustery wind chill look tropical (seaside town in the UK where I been living). What about that ICE, Layers upon Layers of SNOW i folks keep their head down. Ground so slippery. Folks stay in. BUT So very beautiful. Evidence of Winter Wonderland adventures below - in the end it worked out for me. I learned about the ice and snow, trekked in the snow storms, had my face bashed around a bit with hail. ice skated on a real pond. These are important things too. All a weirdo explorer from London could ever want :)
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A major highlight of my time at NEC was performing Stay On It by Julius Eastman.
Every Monday I got to work with Anthony Coleman in his weekly ensemble, Survivors Breakfast. You can imagine why the name... One day Hannah Dunton, a killer bass player in the Jazz department asked if we could work on Stay On It by Julius Eastman. Me being such a folky weirdo I embarrassingly hadn't come across his music before. It is an incredible piece of music!!!!!!! Eastman was such a strong proponant for doing things his way, and being Black and Gay in the Avant Garde in the 70's in the US made him even more of an outsider. I wish we'd gotten to meet. You can find out more about him, his work and contribution to everything here and here. Luckily Anthony had access to a score deduced from some of the favoured recordings of the piece, as it was never written down by Eastman in his short lifetime. So we worked on it, at first it didn't make sense, but then eventually - as is often the case with some of the best things - it feel into place, we found a pace with the piece, we found a way of listening to and playing with each other and finding our own voices within the parameters of the vague yet specific instructions for each section. It's a hefty length of a piece to perform and with Anthony's guidance we pulled it off. It was a super fun way to get to know fellow improvisers and experimenters at the school and I loved performing the piece. What an energy. Anthony really understood how to get inside the music, a rare skill which I appreciate so much. Check out the two seminal performances below of the piece. I think you will like. Thank you Julius for your amazing music and for being you and keeping it real in a time where it was even much tougher than now. An honour to collaborate with Kaia Berman-Peters, Solomon Caldwell, Miguel Landestoy & Sahana Narayanan on reworking some of Abbey Lincoln's seminal works including 'Down Here Below' & 'And It's Supposed To Be Love'.
I have been in love with Abbey Lincoln's music for a long long time. I am not a natural Jazz head and didn't grow up with Jazz but I discovered her music in my early 20's whilst on a road trip in the US. I didn't really understand what i'd gotten in to but I knew it was special and Abbey's music has been with me ever since. Years later I find myself at NEC, a path I chose for a multitude of reasons, but the best ones were the one's I couldn't have predicted. It turns out MacArthur fellow & NEC professor Ran Blake was a good pal of Abbey's and every year the Contemporary Improvisation department do a spotlight concert of her work. And It's Supposed To Be Love is one of my all time favourite songs, and to get to explore it, know it, break it down and mess with it was a privilege. I was coached by Ran, Anthony Coleman, Christine Correa & Eden MacAdam-Somer. I'd never really been through that process before. I really appreciate how seriously musicians treat other musicians and their work in the US. Going deep meant uncompromisingly going deep. I need that. Thank you pedagogy. I got to collaborate with new friends on the arrangements - a challenging but rewarding process. And we performing in the legendary Jordan Hall - a place where the seats are wonky and creak and the acoustics are second to none - esp. for CELLO! ha. You can listen back to the full concert above. xx SONG FOR A SHELL from Francesca on Vimeo.
I created Song For A Shell forwards and backwards across the seas. The film was make on Denman Island, an Island off Vancouver Island accessible by boat, after having stumbled across a Buddhist retreat on Denman on a site build by the original founders of Greenpeace. It was a still and enriching day full of adventure and new friendships, a short skinny dip (sea was cold!!!) and contemplation whilst watching the sun go down.
I started recording the main part of the song just before the Pandemic and wanted to finish it but somehow time stopped in an unhelpful way. Now, during the cold, long, and beautiful nights of January during a Boston Winter as I prepare for Semester two of my time at New England Conservatory, I found space to finish it and am really happy with how it turned out. Channelling some of my new musical breadth and with a hyper-focused spirit i'm happy to share Song For a Shell with you now. Enjoy. Francesca x
I AM SAFE INSIDE YOUR SHELL
LOOK INSIDE YOU WILL NOT SEE WASHED UP ON THE SALTY SHORE THEN ONE DAY YOUR’RE GONE GONE I AM SAFE INSIDE MY SHELL LOOK INSIDE YOU WILL NOT SEE WASHED UP ON THE SALTY SHORE THEN ONE DAY YOU’RE GONE GONE SHORE. GONE. SHORE. GONE. GONE. GONE Film - Francesca Ter-Berg Lyrics & Music by Francesca Ter-Berg Recorded & Mixed by Francesca Ter-Berg Filmed on Denman Island, BC, Canada Recorded in Margate, UK Mixed in Boston, USA
It was so fun to jump into the world of legendary New York Klezmer Clarinettist Michael Winograd's world of super productivity and creativity for a day. I joined him on one of his tunes for his weekly 1 Sitting 4 Songs project in Jan 2022.
Check it below. The music is always...GREAT. Support independent musicians! xxx Bough Talk, my multi-channel site-specific installation, commissioned by the Margate NOW Festival 21' is now up on Soundcloud. Be prepared to be fully immersed in strings, field recordings, loops, textures and more. A very magical realm to find yourself in - GO CHCK IT OUT VIA THE LINK ABOVE. Thanks to Anna Colin, Claire Orme, Dan Chilcott, Dan Scott, Shamica Ruddock & Nathan Ryan-Jones for your support :)
I love how seriously they take other peoples music at NEC. In my first few weeks in Boston whilst trying to adjust to my unfamiliar new environments the MacArthur Fellow and immense musician Mary Halverson was invited to the School as an Artist In Residence. I've never really gotten to study someone else's music in such depth, especially current and living composers and especially not people as groundbreaking and phenomenal as Mary. It was amazing to get inside her compositions and perform them. Later on in the year I got to hear her full band perform at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston which was again fabulous. Mary has such a strong and unique sound world - so self defined, personal and wonderous. It was a pleasure and honour to work on her compositions for a few weeks with her present at the end to share the experience. I definitely recommend you check out her music!
Very special to have collaborated with the Cliftonville Cultural Space curate and produce this awesome happening as part of the Margate NOW Festival '21 taking place in the Sunken Garden. This site specific SUKKAH was commissioned to be designed and built by visual artist Dominic Rose and Screen Printer / Artist Charlie Evaristo-Boyce. The brief was to challenge them to create a Sukkah (a structure built outside by Jews across the globe to hark back to the time when the Jewish Diaspora was wondering in the desert and staring out at the stars. It is also a harvest festival).
There were live performances including Guinean musican Falle Nioke, Klezmer musicians Jonathan Norton & Adina Pressman, Margate Djembe Drummers and local Roma musicians. Kids came and made pretty rosettes to hang off the sukkah made out of dried lemons (it is traditional to hang fruit and vegetables off the structure). It was a beautiful installation - a radical take on Succus, a way of reframing it to celebrate all people, culture, nature, music, art, the outdoors and community. More information on the event and commission here. Yeh yeh yeh!! submitted my commissioned piece - Bough Talk - for the upcoming 'Sunken Ecologies' themed Margate NOW Festival 2021, curated by Anna Colin. It is an honour to have been asked to make something for this beautiful festival. I went out to the Sunken Gardens in Westbrook, where the festival will take place, and recorded some of the sights and sounds, intimately capturing the ambiance and flow of the space using a mixture of specialist microphones for exploring and sonically experimenting. Bough Talk can be encountered in four parts located in different sections of the garden, at different times of the day. More details and information about my piece events across the entire festival here margatenow.co.uk/francesca-ter-berg
Hi Everyone - the big news (for now is...) I am currently in Boston, enrolled at the New England Conservatory to do a Masters in Contemporary Improvisation.
Officially the hardest thing I have ever done - moving countries, setting myself up, the paperwork, visas, making new friends, getting used to the weather. So hot and humid and then so cold - and the heavy rain. Interesting. CLIMBING UPHILL. A Journey of growth, strength, courage, insanity and ultimate wonder. You might think - why would you choose to move across the world in your mid-30s to go to an incredibly challenging and expensive institution? I'm here to challenge myself, learn things I have always wanted to learn, ask questions I have always wanted to ask, study with some of my favourite musicians and immerse myself in music school, practice cello, and figure some stuff out. A place where music really is the only thing that matters. Having never been to music college and feeling there are 'nuff gaps in my knowledge, I figured it was now or never. Greatful to the lakes, the trees, the birds and Felipe and Susanna who have been looking after me whilst I find my feet. I discovered a new term - leaf peeping - like trainspotting, this is the thing you do when you want to see the leaves turn - so that would make me a leaf peeper. Quite like that. I don't think we would ever come up with a term like that in the UK - it s too...hilarious. But also adorable. Wish me luck - see you in a few months!!! xxxx |
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