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Arcadia
Get PDF12-month participatory arts/music project, based in Newcastle's historic Grainger Market
Kefala-Kerr, John (2018) Arcadia. [Composition]
Site-specific chamber opera for soprano, harp, soundtrack and projected video created specially for Newcastle upon Tyne's historic Grainger Market. Three public performances presented on March 24th 2018.
Kefala-Kerr, John (2018) Arcadia. [Performance]
Performance of Arcadia (site-specific chamber opera created specially for Newcastle upon Tyne's historic Grainger Market)
Sanctuary
No full textSanctuary is a smartphone app-based audio installation and musical composition commissioned by and conceived for the Amble Bird Sculpture Trail.
The work draws connections between the avian and the human by transforming people’s singing voices into ‘birdcalls’ and birdcalls into human-like vocalisations. Scored for a hybrid ensemble of singers, musical instruments, digital sounds and an unlikely chorus of people and birds, the work encourages reflection on the intersections between bird and human life in terms of how each has a common need for a safe haven.
Sanctuary offers bird trail walkers the opportunity to pause and experience the area around Amble Harbour and Little Shore as an al fresco concert hall. This spot is frequented by seabirds, and the work exploits the likelihood that while listening to the work, bird trail visitors will be treated to the various displays of bird flight—a dive into the water by a hungry tern, perhaps—and that such actions might synchronise in some way with the patterns and events in the soundtrack and, thereby, be interpreted as part of the piece’s overall drama.
Simple digital tools were used to realise the piece, altering the pitch and duration of audio material to bring birdcalls into the human vocal range and send human voices up into the birdcall register. Sounds were gathered from a variety of sources, including recordings of local people whose ‘birdified’ voices form part of the work’s sonic texture. Along with soprano Alison McNeil’s wordless singing (listen out for her brief duet with a skylark), and a hybrid score of orchestral and electronic instruments, these elements combine to make a modest contribution to a long tradition of bird-inspired music. Works by Frederick Delius, Olivier Messiaen and Maurice Ravel (whose Oiseaux Tristes is briefly parodied in Sanctuary) spring to mind, though my own approach differs somewhat in that I’ve treated human and bird utterances as interchangeable: transposing, juxtaposing and intermingling their ‘voices’.
In exploring the conceptual affinities between people and birds, I thought a lot about community, and how the participation of people living in Amble and its environs might contribute to the creation of the piece. Their inclusion 'situates' the work, makes it ‘indigenous’, and I also see this involvement as a response to that uniquely constrained period—the Covid-19 lockdown—when ‘wings were clipped’, so to speak, and while birdlife continued unhindered, humans were keeping their distance from one another (recorded material from Harbour Lights choir, for instance, was gathered remotely due to the social distancing rules in place at the time).
My research for Sanctuary involved observing and listening to birds, and reading various articles about bird flight, habits and habitats. I found migration a particularly telling metaphor for the contested ethics of human exodus and resettlement, and this guided me in sculpting the sometimes plaintive, sometimes playful music. As did stories about birds: in particular, The Origin of the Birds by the Italian author Italo Calvino. Calvino’s short tale highlights the otherness of birds, and I was especially drawn to a scene in TOOTB where the central character, Qwfwq, takes refuge from a flock of attacking birds by hiding under the wing of a giant bird. I equate this idea of a safe haven to the stretch of coastline that plays host to the Amble bird sculpture trail, and which provides a habitat and a shelter for birds and people alike
Writing Music: Adventures in creative musicology
No full textBy means of performed extracts from his recent work, composer/sound artist and writer John Kefala Kerr considers how 'words about music' might occupy themselves other than as exegesis, and how 'music about words' might challenge music's assumed self-sufficiency.
Uncommercial Plainsongs of the 21st Century
No full textOngoing collection of plainsongs for small ensemble
Arcadia
No full textSite-specific chamber opera for soprano, harp, soundtrack and projected video created specially for Newcastle upon Tyne's historic Grainger Market. Three public performances presented on March 24th 2018
Variations on a Theme of Agatha Christie
No full textVariations on a Theme of Agatha Christie is an audio-visual installation specially commissioned to accompany the ‘Investigating Detectives’ exhibition at The National Centre for the Written Word. The installation invites visitors to hear sounds/music that draw their inspiration from detective fiction.
Depictions of sound and music in crime novels create atmosphere, suspense and a sense of place. Sometimes they even provide plot-critical clues for literary detectives—as when a piano is used to hide a murder weapon or a ukulele string is used to kill someone. In deploying a varied palette of sounds, the work takes a musical composition by Agatha Christie herself as one of its points of departure. Some of the music is performed on a priceless violin (by Steve Morris), which was itself the subject of a sleuthing exercise, having hit the headlines in 2020 when it was stolen from a London train.
With a prominent role given to this (recovered) violin, the musical score includes a dramatic passage for virtual orchestra which embeds some of the conventional sounds of contemporary and hardboiled detective fiction—a Rebus cityscape, a Poirot railway carriage, the striking of a Marlowe matchstick.
With its varied palette of vocal, acoustic and digital instruments and sound effects, 'Variations' provides a rich and subtly ambient complement to the National Centre's Investigating Detectives exhibition, which opened in October 2021. Critically, the installation provides an ironic counterpoint to the exhibition by responding to Christie-related scholarship and identity politics in a post-Brexit UK context.
An online version of 'Variations' is on permanent display on the national Centre for the written Word's website
Book of Bells
No full textBook of Bells is a sound installation designed for presentation in libraries. Originally commissioned by Durham Cathedral and Durham International Festival to mark the 2013 exhibition of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the work comprises digitally manipulated brass, voice and bell recordings that provide an acoustical context within which visitor-participants are invited to read extracts from books and ring small bells. In blurring distinctions between actual and virtual sounds, the installation challenges the segmented nature of knowledge
Grexit: Hellenic Objects in Crisis
No full textThe economic and cultural effects of the current economic crisis in Greece are evoked in Grexit (Hellenic Objects in Crisis). The material was recorded using a cell phone in the Greek mountain village of Kissos. Source objects include a noisy refrigerator, a drainpipe with water running through it, a church bell, a traditional clarinet and a tin roof struck by rain. These are combined with the nasal tones of a mobile greengrocer making his daily rounds. The amplified (objectified) voice lists the various natural objects for sale—onions, carrots, melons, aubergines, peppers, lemons
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