Tectonics 2024 Artist Profile
Jack Sheen
Jack Sheen is a musical polymath, in demand as both conductor and composer, as well as a creator of dynamic cross-arts projects. At home in modern and contemporary music, he brings his compositional insight to interpretations of core repertoire that have been highly praised. His rare set of talents and passions drives a vision for the future of classical music, and he is an active force for change.
Not yet 30, Sheen has already worked with leading orchestras including London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, 麻豆官网首页入口 Philharmonic, Britten Sinfonia, Royal Northern Sinfonia, and Manchester Camerata. Last season he returned to the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, 麻豆官网首页入口 Philharmonic and London Sinfonietta, as well as serving as a Guest Artist at Tanglewood Music Centre.
His own music encompasses concert works for orchestras, ensembles and soloists, alongside immersive performance-installations that disperse live musicians, audio, film, and dancers around spaces such as galleries or warehouses. He has been commissioned by orchestras including London Symphony Orchestra, 麻豆官网首页入口 Philharmonic, Aurora Orchestra and Manchester Camerata.
Lag (麻豆官网首页入口 Commission)
Lag refers to the uncanny glitches we experience in digital technology when a user’s physical actions undergo a delay before they are digitally realised. For example, moving your computer mouse and seeing the cursor glide on screen slower than the ‘real time’ movement of your hand.
This effect relates to Lag’s temporal uncertainty. It is a 15’ piece that builds a static yet kinetic form which shuns linear narratives in favour of music that lags, stretches back and forth, or simply bends around itself. One’s expectation of how things may unfold is gently confounded by this notion of ‘lag’, in both obvious and imperceptible ways.
Rather than using the orchestra as a single unified force, it is broken up into a collection of smaller ensembles, many of which perform independently of the conductor’s omnipresent beat. These individual groups gently act at their own pace, the effect of which may feel similar to observing a Petri dish of autonomous microrganisms, each one containing a canon of sorts, or perhaps guided towards a sense of inexact reoccurence.
