7 years of new music on this domain: from 2009 to 2015

The 2009 to 2015 span is the answer to the 7 years of new music on this domain, and it is the history this page tells, because the festival is the event the domain was built for and the 7 years are the span in which it ran. This page is a retrospective of the domain's own era, and it is written from the fact sheet, the record of what the domain carried from 2009 to 2015. The 7 years of new music on this domain is the answer to what the domain was, and the Bangor New Music Festival is the answer to what it was a home for, so the history is the whole of the page.

The 7 years from 2009 to 2015 are the documented span, and the page treats them as the record supports, because a retrospective is more useful when it is honest about the span it covers. The Bangor New Music Festival was the dedicated new music event of Bangor, Wales, and the 7 years are the period in which the domain carried it, so the 2009 to 2015 run is the whole of the domain's new music history. The 7 years of new music on this domain is the answer to what the domain was, and the Bangor New Music Festival is the answer to what it was a home for, and the reader who wants the detail of the festival itself has the page on the Bangor New Music Festival to follow, which covers the festival as an event rather than as a span of years.

The 7 years the domain carried new music

The 7 years the domain carried new music run from 2009 to 2015, and those 7 years are the whole of the domain's documented span for the new music, the period in which the Bangor New Music Festival was the home of the contemporary and experimental music of the field in Bangor, Wales. The 2009 to 2015 run is the answer to the 7 years of new music on this domain, and it is the span this page covers, because it is the span the record supports. The 7 years are the answer to when the domain was a home for new music, and the Bangor New Music Festival is the answer to what it carried, so the 2009 to 2015 run is the whole of the domain's new music history, and the 7 years are the span in which the domain was a festival site, a period in which the pages existed to serve the event as it came round each year.

The span also tells you what the site was not. It was not an archive of the wider field of new music, and it did not try to be. The pages around the festival served one purpose: to carry the event forward in the town, season after season, across the 7 years between 2009 and 2015. That is a smaller claim than a national history of contemporary music, but it is the claim the record supports, and it is the claim that makes the 7 years a story instead of a list of dates.

What the Bangor New Music Festival was

What the Bangor New Music Festival was is the answer to what the domain carried for 7 years, and the festival was an annual event of contemporary music held in Bangor, Wales, the dedicated new music festival of the town from 2009 to 2015. The festival brought the new music to a Welsh audience, and the regional context is the whole of its character, because a festival in a town like Bangor is the answer to where new music reaches beyond the capital. The what is the answer to what the festival was, and it is the answer that makes the 7 years of new music on this domain a story rather than a date, because the festival is the event the domain was built for and the 2009 to 2015 run is the span in which it ran. The Bangor New Music Festival is the heart of the domain's new music history, and the 7 years are the answer to when it was.

The regional character of the festival is the point of the retrospective, because new music is often told as a story of the capitals, and the 7 years on this domain belong to the other story. The festival stood in a line of practice that reaches back further than the domain did: the London Sinfonietta, the English contemporary chamber orchestra founded in 1968 by David Atherton and Nicholas Snowman, had already made contemporary music a performing art in its own right, and its inaugural concert in 1968 gave the world premiere of Sir John Tavener's The Whale. A town festival like Bangor's is the smaller end of that same practice, the place where the contemporary and experimental repertory met an audience that was not travelling to a capital to hear it. The 2009 to 2015 run of the Bangor New Music Festival is that practice, kept local, and the domain is the record of it.

Why a town festival counts as new music history

The festival counts because new music is a practice of performance, not a catalogue, and a town that programmed it for 7 years participated in the practice for 7 years. The field itself is older and stranger than the festival span. Iannis Xenakis, the Romanian born Greek French composer and engineer who lived from 1922 to 2001, built a body of work on mathematical models, set theory, stochastic processes, and game theory, and music of that kind is the kind of music a festival of new music exists to bring to an audience that would never meet it in a standard concert. When a festival in Bangor, Wales programmed the contemporary and experimental, it joined that practice at the regional scale, and the 2009 to 2015 span of the domain is the documentation of that join. The page on the Bangor New Music Festival carries the festival's own detail, and this page carries the span, so the two together make the history complete.

How the 7 years connect to the new site

How the 7 years connect to the new site is that the domain that carried the festival from 2009 to 2015 is the same domain this site now lives on, and the new music history is the reason the new site is built on the new music rather than on something else. The 2009 to 2015 run is the answer to what the domain was, and the new site is the answer to what the domain is now, so the 7 years are the bridge between the two. The how is the answer to how the history connects to the present, and it is the answer that makes the 7 years of new music on this domain more than a date, because the domain that carried the Bangor New Music Festival from 2009 to 2015 is the domain that now carries the new music reference, so the 7 years are the whole of the bridge, and the new site is the continuation of the domain's new music story.

The bridge also explains what happened to the old festival links and why, because the old pages of the festival era were built to point at the event as it approached, and the event is over, so the links now resolve against a reference site rather than against a season. The path From the old festival site to the new music is the same bridge told from the other side: the domain kept the subject it was built for, dropped the apparatus of the annual event, and kept the 7 years of 2009 to 2015 as the record of what it was. The page on what happened to the old festival links explains where the domain's old links went, and the page on the Bangor New Music Festival covers the festival itself, so the reader who reads the 7 years of new music on this domain has the whole of the bridge in reach.

What the record supports, and what it does not

What the record supports is the 7 years from 2009 to 2015, the fact that the domain carried the Bangor New Music Festival as its subject, and the fact that the festival was the annual contemporary music event of Bangor, Wales. What the record does not support is any finer account of the seasons within those 7 years, and this page does not invent one, because a retrospective that pads its span is worse than one that names its limits. The 2009 to 2015 run is the whole of the documented span, and the new site carries it forward as history rather than as a live event, which is why the 7 years of new music on this domain reads as a retrospective and not as a programme, and why the domain's own era ends where this page begins.