ROBIN HAYWARD

ELEGY TO A FAILED INSTRUMENT (2019)
Eight-channel sound installation.

SEPTEMBER 12 – OCTOBER 12 2019

The sixth instalment of  SONIC SPACE features an eight-channel (plus subwoofer) sound installation by the English, Berlin based artist Robin Hayward.

Elegy to a failed instrument explores the poetics of failure. It is a conversation between recent and seemingly obsolete technologies. An interaction between the ages, that affords the listener an entry point into a past vision of the future…

 

Photo: Henri Falk

The tuba player and composer Robin Hayward was born in Brighton, England in 1969. He studied classical music at the University of Manchester and tuba at the Royal Northern College of Music, where he graduated in 1991. In the following years he was active in the improvised and experimental music scenes in Manchester and London. Since 1998 he has been based in Berlin.

He has introduced radical playing techniques to brass instruments, initially through the discovery of the ‘noise-valve’ in 1996, and later through the development of the first fully microtonal tuba in 2009. In 2012 he invented the Hayward Tuning Vine, partly out of a desire to visualise the harmonic space implicit within the microtonal tuba. In 2005 he founded the ensemble Zinc & Copper to explore brass chamber music from an experimental music perspective.