Lawrence will play 2 sets of improvised piano pieces, he is a largely tonal composer/improviser who through his own music and as director of the Planet Tree Music Festival in London is giving voice to direct and straightforward expression and upliftment through music.

He has improvised on piano for over 30 years, recording almost 2000 pieces, and it is the essence of his creative output. At Faust-Harrison on 9 January Lawrence invites you to share the open process of spontaneous discovery. His music is, by turns, deeply reflective, very simple, often very intricate, sometimes highly animated, but comes always from the wish to express the essential and the transcendent.

His style owes something to many American composers, particularly Terry Riley's and LaMonte Young's influence over 30 years, he being one of the first British composers to significantly value their respective musics. To hear Lawrence play is to be challenged into a deep but active listening to a calm intensity - the emphasis is on depth and awe rather than on virtuosity.

Lawrence Ball and Lisa Sangita fuse their Western and Eastern classical roots into a fluid, lyrical and ecstatic expression. The music ebbs and flows between deeply reflective and highly animated moods, and between straightforward and intricately interwoven textures. These pieces begin from the raga format, but evolve according to the in-the-moment emotional pulse and interplay. Since the Oct.26th concert coincides with the huge anti-war rally in Washington D.C., we would like to dedicate it and the Oct.23rd one as well to the principle of working to create peace through non-violent cooperation. We would agree with one wise soul who has said that war is a failure of the imagination.

Lawrence Ball is a versatile and innovative composer who has a multiple focus as a composer,improviser and audio-visual creator. He has collaborated with healers, therapists and counsellors as well as writing for dance, film, orchestra,and choir and is as much at home writing a score as creating electronic or computer music.

He has developed techniques to deeply integrate audio and visual images with quantum physicist Michael Tusch, collaborating on this since 1993 with Dave Snowdon who created the software "Visual Harmony" to explore this arena; worked with healer/counsellor Isobel McGilvray in shaping harmonic tonescapes to aid relaxation, and has worked with choreographers/dancers (ex-Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet) Sheila Styles and (ex-Ballet Rambert) Rebecca Ham on several dance projects. Lawrence Ball has written for the pianist Yonty Solomon (2 Suites),for The Smith (string) Quartet, the Electric Symphony Orchestra, the pianist Tim Ravenscroft, the female vocal quartet Rosy Voices, and 6 pieces for the violist Robin Ireland (of the Lindsay Quartet). He has recorded almost 2000 piano improvisations as well as performing many live. Ball's creating in acoustic and electronic media, in composed and improvised methods is one of the broadest of any composer. He has performed in Canada, the US, France and Germany as well as in the UK. He has accompanied the international painting group Collective Phenomena who work 'more than one to a canvas' with marathon keyboard improvisations, at John Calder's La Fonderie in Paris and The Blackie in Liverpool, as well as a Planet Tree Festival appearance. Ball is a pioneer in music, having addressed meditative and healing presence and state-of-mind, primarily, for over 20 years. In 1996 he founded the Planet Tree Music Festival, which he also directs. He is also a highly sought after private tutor in mathematics, computer programming, physics and music theory. He lives in London.

Lisa Sangita who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area specializes in playing her electric sarod (a one-of-a-kind adaptation of the traditional classical Indian sarod) in unusual contexts, but has found the greatest satisfaction in the combination of sarod with chordal instruments. She studied with maestro Ali Akbar Khan for more than 15 years. The timbres of sarod and piano are quite similar, but they differ widely in the way they express themselves (piano being a very harmonic instrument and sarod being more strictly melodic). Together they create a whole new musical language.

Commentary links
The Infinite Piano: Lawrence Ball