6 research outputs found
Who Vibrates?
No full textOn the music of Carolyn Chen and how New Materialist theories of vibration, vibrancy, and animation intersect with histories of race and subjecthood
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always extra folds: A Composition Portfolio
No full textThis portfolio dissertation brings together a selection of the musical work I produced over seven years (2013–20). My work during this time evolved to embrace new modes of engaging with performers and audiences. I sought to question the physical relationships between performers and their instruments, to consider the frame of the concert experience, and to reevaluate the collaborative and co-compositional strategies that a written score may produce in rehearsal and performance. The eight scores included represent the range of approaches I took during my time at Harvard, from traditionally notated scores for familiar instruments to text scores for more or less flexible groups of performers. They also reflect my interests in self-built instruments and extending performance possibilities through audiovisual digital media.
Tomorrow I will build a house here, if I can hold still (2014) — the first work developed at Harvard — demonstrates an increasing focus on touch, fluidity of instrumental and sonic gesture, and marks the beginning of my embrace of longer durations and sustained sonic textures. A trio of scores — rumour — distant land (2014), always extra folds of birds of paper and you could move your finger along the length of them and have witnesses (2017), and I began the day inside the world trying to look at it, but it was lying on my face, making it hard to see. (2018–20) — document an evolving practice of score creation that takes a dynamic and open working relationship with performers and performance contexts as its point of departure. These text scores often permit flexibility when it comes to the precise instrumental resources required, but they also aim to change the purpose of rehearsal and performance. These scores are designed to be discarded during the rehearsal process, opening it to collaborative acts of creation, sharing responsibility between composer and performer. A series of closely related works — local bond (2015), union–seam (2016), and union|haze (2016) — demonstrate a notational practice that prescribes a formal and temporal flow, while leaving space for carefully balanced moment-to-moment adjustments as performers adapt to each other and their instruments. Core to all three of these pieces is a viola and cello hybrid instrument, which at times requires four performers to work together to produce a single sound. The 2018 ensemble work, this line comes from the past, in some ways synthesises many of the approaches I have explored over the past years. It marks a return to a more traditional instrumental writing and fixed form, but seeks to draw on the sonic and instrumental research of earlier pieces, translating those for a different setting
INTO THE LION'S DEN: HELMUT LACHENMANN AT 75
No full textIn April 2010, the Guildhall School of Music recognized German composer Helmut Lachenmann's expertise in extended instrumental techniques, inviting him to give the keynote speech at a research day dedicated to contemporary performance practice; in May, he had a Fellowship of the Royal College of Music conferred upon him for his achievements as a composer; in June, the London Symphony Orchestra performed Lachenmann's Double (Grido II) for string orchestra, in doing so becoming the first non-BBC British orchestra to have performed his music; and in October, the Southbank Centre presented two days of Lachenmann's music including performances by the Arditti String Quartet and a much expanded London Sinfonietta, the latter broadcast on Radio 3. Outside London, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group gave a performance of his most recent work, Got Lost for soprano and piano, and the University of Manchester presented a mini-festival dedicated to his music. This roll call of events might be seen then as the celebration to be expected as a noted composer passes a milestone, but Lachenmann is a composer who – despite his age – could until recently have escaped such attention in Britain. In 1995, Elke Hockings wrote in these pages that, while enjoying ‘an exalted reputation among a small circle of English contemporary music enthusiasts, […] to the wider English music public he [Lachenmann] is little known’ and critical reception has been mixed, often extremely negative. Introducing Lachenmann to an audience at the Southbank Centre in October, Ivan Hewett described him as ‘a composer we don't know well in this country, an omission we are gradually repairing’.</jats:p
Two Pietàs: William-Adolphe Bouguereau & Lisa Streich
No full textTwo Pietàs in different media, the first by French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) and the second by Swedish composer Lisa Streich (1985-), permit an examination of the Pietà trope itself by laying open a range of its symbolic aspects. Bouguereau’s Pietà (1876) is discussed in terms of the grief and joy that are both present in the theological and mythological Virgin Mary at the crucifixion and allows us to touch on a potential functioning of the painting, while Streich’s Pietà (2012), for cello, motors and electronics, takes this apparent dichotomy and combines it with a more active reflection on Christ’s crucified body. This latter also allows us to ask: what is depicted in a piece of music? And suggests that the visual & physical dimensions – the instrument as canvas or stage – are as vital as the sonic dimensions in the apprehension of this work
Into the Lion’s Den: Helmut Lachenmann at 75
No full textIn April 2010, the Guildhall School of Music recognized German composer Helmut Lachenmann's expertise in extended instrumental techniques, inviting him to give the keynote speech at a research day dedicated to contemporary performance practice; in May, he had a Fellowship of the Royal College of Music conferred upon him for his achievements as a composer; in June, the London Symphony Orchestra performed Lachenmann's Double (Grido II) for string orchestra, in doing so becoming the first non-BBC British orchestra to have performed his music; and in October, the Southbank Centre presented two days of Lachenmann's music including performances by the Arditti String Quartet and a much expanded London Sinfonietta, the latter broadcast on Radio 3. Outside London, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group gave a performance of his most recent work, Got Lost for soprano and piano, and the University of Manchester presented a mini-festival dedicated to his music. This roll call of events might be seen then as the celebration to be expected as a noted composer passes a milestone, but Lachenmann is a composer who – despite his age – could until recently have escaped such attention in Britain. In 1995, Elke Hockings wrote in these pages that, while enjoying ‘an exalted reputation among a small circle of English contemporary music enthusiasts, […] to the wider English music public he [Lachenmann] is little known’ and critical reception has been mixed, often extremely negative. Introducing Lachenmann to an audience at the Southbank Centre in October, Ivan Hewett described him as ‘a composer we don't know well in this country, an omission we are gradually repairing’
