Oliver Coates plays Hanne Darboven

Oliver Coates is a cellist and composer. He is a recording artist with PRAH and has released music on Warp, SLIP and is published by Domino publishing. He is an artist in residence at Southbank Centre where he curates Harmonic Series and is programming a festival called DEEP∞MINIMALISM for St John’s Church Smith Square in June 2016. He works regularly with Mica Levi, Jonny Greenwood, London Contemporary Orchestra and has performed with a range of artists such as DOOM and Steve Reich. He was given the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award 2011 and wrote the soundtrack to Lawrence Lek’s 2015 Dazed x Converse award winning work at the Royal Academy, Unreal Estate (2015).

Hanne Darboven was a German conceptual artist, best known for her large-scale minimalist installations featuring handwritten tables of numbers. In the 1980s, Darboven further expanded her scope by including musical arrangements in her displays. In her so-called “Mathematical Music”, she converted the numbers contained in her rows and columns into sounds. Numbers were assigned to certain notes, and numerical series translated into musical scores. With the aid of a collaborator, Darboven adapted them into performable compositions for organ, double bass, harpsichord, string quartet, and chamber orchestra. She said: ‘My systems are numeric concepts that work according to the laws of progression and/or reduction in the manner of a musical theme with variations’.