Music

Acousmatic Composition - duration 15'00 Moving from human utterance to a dystopian wild landscape, natural sounds are interspersed with a range of sorrowful sonorities, eking out and building on the misery of the soundscape. Brief gestural sections punctuate the evolutions, allowing the composition to move into different textural realms.  Material was recorded at Lake Vyrnwy  (Llyn Efyrnwy in Welsh). This work can be seen as a sonic protest 'song'.  Lake Vyrnwy was created to bring clean water to the English city of Liverpool and was one of many reservoirs built (flooding valleys and drowning villages) in Wales during the 19th and 20th centuries.  The locals and Welsh MPs were rarely consulted and the decision was made from on high by the British Government.  This reached a pivotal momentum the 1960s with 'Cofiwch Dryweryn', a graffitied stone wall in Llanrhystud, Wales. Meic Stephens originally painted the words onto the wall in the early 1960s following the dec...

Practice-based music research is effective and affective, with its research and dissemination having broad ranging impacts in the education, socio-economic, arts, sciences, and political domains. This essay will look at dissemination methodology and effectiveness of some early 21st century academic composers’ research.

#95_reductions endeavours to illustrate dichotomy between consciousness and Nature using imbrications and attenuations, and ‘lens-like’ logarithmic dynamic tonality. The style is a noise-art diverging canon, onkyō inspired sound-art and an off-shoot microtonal minimalist post-modernism with temperament modulations/dynamic tonality and logarithmic dynamic tonality. The text score: 1) Record sounds in nature. 2) Write a melody with dynamic tonality and record it. 3) Convey reductions/imbrications/attenuations. 4) Balance/equalise tracks with production.

From use of upper structures in bandoneon (concertina)/piano/synth to rich dialogue and experimental vocal utterances, both are semiological, storytelling, playful, and evocative. Moods change melodically and harmonically in both as much as texture, and while the whole gestalt of each is balanced there are distinct subgenres within the diminutions of time, some more like radio drama, whilst others are avant-garde, experimental, classical, Latin chant, transcendental or even rock-fusion complete with 60's distorted organs! At 46:50 of l'Opera, for example, Chion has a distorted chord and rotovibe/wurlitzer organ followed by a synth pulse, jazz trio, objets sonor and 7-note aeolian diatany clash, then followed at 49:45 by speaking and atmospheric timbres and atonal beeping. The bandoneon is played by Juan Jose Mosalini. The enchanting atonal flute and zither/xylophone piece at 39:59 is one of the most evocative parts of l'Opera, with atmospherics of a night-time outside wooded space, birds, insects, bells, while the tuning is appropriately non-standard, giving a Japanese style compositional impression. The closest comparison to this in Instants is the mysterious sounding section at 16:18 with min7(b5)s, dom7s and tensions on bandonian with a falling string section, though ends by 17:00 and is not quite the full piece that Chion incorporates. Both share particular noises like talking en Français, processed objet-sonores, hooves, wind, laughs, interferences-type sounds and upper structures, wind-type sounds, It would be fair to describe Teruggi's Instants as a scaled down version of Chion's l'Opera in many respects. Both use pre-existing recorded material in multi-faceted ways. Teruggi utilises the accordion and objet sonores for the harmonic field and the accordion for the unprocessed melodies/harmonies throughout, whilst Chion's unprocessed timbral harmonic palette is far more expansive, including strings, different organs, pianos (some prepared), percussion and orchestral instruments. Instants uses the lydian(b7) after 13:14 [at mid-composition] and there is a flute lydian-ionian modal interchange passage in l'Opera at 55:37 at the end. Instants has many falling slurs on the main instrument, the bandoneon. L'Opera is bereft of any one main instrument, although the narration en Français are prominant in both. The upper structures for the bandonian in Instants [22:06] exist in l'Opera through objet sonores (sound objects), for example at 51:30, which has a richer timbral depth: noises that sound like dials and radio receivers swooping and feeding back. Although in L'Opera there are atonal passages at the start, 49:45, and 35:51, there are none in Instants, although upper structure tensions after 22:06 incorporate atonality. Ambience is used in both: in L'Opera at 6:43 as an overlay, railway station ambience (or similar) occurs in L'Opera at 31:53, and 33:42 [a hospital-esque hall with clinks and footfalls], at 43:53 it is seemingly highly masked as acousmatic sound, and in Instants at 4:37 which is, again, masked acousmatically. The flute features three times in L'Opera at and at the end at 35.51, 42:17 and 60:44. Frequency sweeps are heard in L'Opera at 48:46 over an organ sound, whilst volume sweeps are heard at 26:17 in in Instants. Decorative trilling occurs in Instants at 17:03 and 26:58 [on banoneon] compared to flute trilling at 60:36 toward the end of L'Opera. L'Opera starts with some atonality, prepared piano, acousmatics, U.S. Pilot, talking, and dialogue en Français. There are many objet sonores cuts such as trains...

In juxtaposing and contrasting the Russian symbolist composer Alexander Scriabin and the American early modernist Charles Ives, light may be shed on the impacts of a weaving historical line of thoughts, how and why there are impacts on art and music, and to what degree, the thoughts of the composers and public, and why impacts followed generationally. One aim is to  examine what is so compelling in the literary and philosophical works of Transcendentalism and Romanticism that altered these composers’ conceptions and ideas, translatable to the musical medium/idiom, just as the writer Henry David Thoreau was inspired by Hinduism and studied Greek and Latin grammar and Ralph Waldo Emerson had met Wordsworth, Coleridge and Carlyle and was especially influenced by Carlyle.
  How does perspective change historically in audiences and artists with regards to esoteric, philosophic, mystical and theosophical matters and how does perspective alter their socio-political artistic reflections? Although classification as re-invention, even in seminal works in the Transcendentalists and Romantics, is contentiously part of originality, for today’s composers using similar techniques re-worked in a new light it is interesting to note the contemporary textual to music related dimension, and their ensuing forms. The aim here will be to not only gain insights into similarities and differences in aesthetics and thought between Scriabin and Ives, but also through the works and ideas of some contemporary composers and writers, to uncover the most compelling aspects of this ongoing history such as its ontology, epistemology, semiotics and aesthetics.
  Semiosis is an integral part of intertextual cohesion and fragmentation, along with the metatextual, paratextual, hypotextual and architextual domains, thus the shifts in the Romantic's background and philosophic history compared to the American Transcendentalists', and finally the modern and postmodern; all are necessary to understand before engaging the aesthetic, ontological and epistemological questions around differences and similarities between social-political and aesthetical impacts on Scriabin's music, those impacting Ives' music, and those impacting Ferneyhough's music and Westerkamp's sonic art later on.
  Nature, the individual and mysticism play a role in contemporary composition, but what exactly is different; what ontologies have changed (if any), and what surface-depth aspects of questioning and aesthetic creation have changed? What are the similarities, and what are the main compelling aspects taken from and used by the Romantics and Transcendentalists in their thought and music that may be in use today by composers, artists and writers?

A composition involving listening to the architectural spaces and morphological structures of churches, temples and mosques in Oxford set to researched sacred world musics and musics of peace and transcendentalism: 'A montage of architectural spaces of places of peace set to peaceful and researched sacred musics'. The spaces may include outdoor places near to the architectural sites themselves (e.g. pools, trees, people, walkways, bell towers) and the work will examine and utilise the structure of the spaces and the sounds occupying those spaces that interact with space. Aesthetics and sociology are inseparable. Music's most ancient function is locating its sacred spaces. 'Contemplative vision [is the] original source of true and balanced art'. Ritual and artistic expression are  the cornerstones of civilization. My research seeks, through a social-scientific stance, cultural understanding through differing viewpoints, with a love of esoteric knowledge and understanding beyond surface depths through allegorical perspective shifts, exploring the past and modernity across cultures. In my work I will try to highlight different individual and social means of worship through music-making, while blending a coherent fabric with a researched compositional thread. There are sociological, spiritual and metaphysical dimensions in the nature of the work, and my interests also include the political and aesthetic.

The research investigates the relationship between acousmatic music and instrumental music, using developments in 20th century western art music to define its context including the compositional practices of Arnold Schoenberg (d.1951), Claude Debussy (d.1918), Nikolai Roslavets (d.1944), Luigi Nono (d.1990), Iannis Xenakis (d.2001) and Natasha Barrett (1972-). This was a practice-based PhD resulting in the creation of a series of new compositions for a variety of forces that addressed the following research questions: 1. What have been the problematics of the development of compositions for acousmatic and acoustic instrumental forces and how are these present in the work of the key practitioners referenced above? 2. What are the cultural conditions that have precipitated the perpetuation of the problematisation of the relationship between acousmatic and acoustic compositional practices? 3. Is it possible to generate a series of original sound compositions that explore and provide potential solutions to the problematic at the core of the research? The pieces that where investigated and referenced were: Claude Debussy: Nuages, movement 1 from Trois Nocturnes Arnold Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10 Nikolai Roslavets: 5 Preludes, In the Hours of the New Moon Luigi Nono: Intolleranza 1960, La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura Iannis Xenakis: Pour la paix (musique concrète/choral), Diamorphoses (musique concrète) Natasha Barrett: Submerged (acousmatic), Little Animals (acousmatic) The research determined which techniques work well together to create original and balanced art music, and explored different ways of creating dialogue between sound-objects and instruments. The techniques under investigation, to use with music for orchestra and tape, are Debussy's chromatic mediant relations, Schoenberg's 12-tone serial techniques, Roslavets's transpositional near symmetry by quints, extreme orthography and synthetic chords, Nono's narrow-banding of note groups and the idea of democratic lines, Xenakis's atonal architectural techniques like unions (intersections) and differences of sets, and Natasha Barrett's coarticulation of sound-objects.

In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, public response was characterised by an inability to accept the reality of the situation. Contemporary cultural theorists Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek have suggested that the bombing of the World Trade Centre in particular constituted a symbolic destruction of an entire construction of reality. William Basinski's ambient music series The Disintegration Loops was released in this context, becoming part of a post-9/11 cultural discourse that allowed emotional response to take shape. This essay draws on Kant's theory of the sublime (as expanded upon by Thomas Weiskel) in order to examine how the relationship between noise and silence in The Disintegration Loops offers a means by which to deconstruct the sublime 'blockage' of 9/11; it presents change as a dialectical process, rather than as an incomprehensible single event.