Christopher Fox: Headlong Heather Roche

• 1 Stone.Wind.Rain.Sun⁴ 09:50
• 2 Straight Lines in Broken Times⁴ 08:08
• 3 ... Or Just After 06:50
• 4 Early One Morning 10:33
• 5 Unlocking the Grid 13:04
• 6 Escalation 05:43
• 7 Headlong 10:29
• 8 Divisions 08:57
• Total Runtime 01:13:34

Info for Christopher Fox: Headlong

The new album ‘Headlong’ contains all but one of Christopher Fox’s works for solo clarinet and like his previous Métier albums is an awe-inspiring mix of compositions which may be avant-garde and untraditional, but he has the gift of using relative simplicity and very often a wit which makes listening enjoyable and often good fun too. His position as one of the most individual and talented of today’s modernists is assured.

The brilliant Heather Roche is the sole performer on the album, playing clarinets in E flat and C, bass clarinet and contrabass, often overdubbing to duet with herself and with occasional electronics and sampling to create additional textures. An essential album for new-music fans but will also give less adventurous listeners a very pleasant and fascinating set of new discoveries.

Heather Roche, clarinet

Heather Roche
Born in Canada, clarinetist Heather Roche trained in England, lived in Germany for 7 years and now lives in London.

She has performed at some of the major European festivals, including musikFest (Berlin), BachFest (Leipzig), Musica Nova (Helsinki), Acht Brücken (Cologne), the International Computer Music Conference (Huddersfield, Ljubljana), the Dias de Música Electroacústica (Seia, Portugal) and the Agora Festival (Ircam, Paris). She has also performed solo programmes at the Zagreb Music Biennale, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the New York Electroacoustic Symposium, at CIRMMT (Montreal), Unerhörte Musik (Berlin), and with the Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre (BEAST).

She has performed with musikFabrik (Cologne), WDR Orchestra (Cologne), ensemble Garage (Cologne), ensemble interface (Berlin), the Riot Ensemble (London), mimitabu (Gothenburg), the Alisios Camerata (Zagreb), and ensemble proton (Bern). She also plays regularly across the UK in a trio with Carla Rees (flutes) and Xenia Pestova (piano) and in 2015 formed an duo with the accordionist Eva Zöllner, with whom she has played across Germany, the UK and in Portugal. She is a founding member of hand werk, a 6-person chamber music ensemble based in Cologne, and worked with the group from 2010-2017.

In 2014 she was awarded a DIVA (Danish International Visiting Artists Fellowship), and lived in Copenhagen for two months.

Since 2016 she became the Reviews Editor for TEMPO, a quarterly journal for contemporary music published by Cambridge University Press.

Her website is host to one of the most widely read new music blogs on the Internet. In 2017 it had 75,000 hits from around the world. She successfully crowdfunded in 2014 in order to host her first composition competition. Six young composers were chosen out of 270 applicants to write new pieces, which were premiered in 2016.

She is a fervent advocate of collaboration, and her PhD research at the University of Huddersfield (under the supervision of Dr. Philip Thomas) explored the nature of dialogue within performer-composer relationships. She has given workshops in instrumental technique and/or iPad use in performance all over Europe, for example in London, Munich and Copenhagen.

Heather completed her Masters of Music (Orchestral Training) in 2006 at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, studying under Joy Farrall and Laurent Ben Slimane, in addition to conducting with Sian Edwards. Following her degree she completed residencies with the International Ensemble Modern Academy, at IMPULS in Graz and with ensemble recherche in Freiburg, the Darmstadt Summer Courses 2008 and 2010 and the International Ensemble Modern Academy in Innsbruck, Austria. She has performed in masterclasses with Michael Collins, Ernesto Molinari and Shizuyo Oka, to name a few. She completed her BMus in 2005 at the University of Victoria, Canada, studying under Patricia Kostek.

Booklet for Christopher Fox: Headlong