Thomas Buckner gave a vivid account of his work with the American writer and composer Robert Ashley. He began working with Ashley after 'Perfect Lives', the opera which Ashley conceived for television (the work's proportions and internal durations being exactly determined by the requirements of the television format).
Thomas Buckner detects a gradual increase in complexity, over the years of producing new pieces, in terms of the treatments by Robert Ashley of his own original texts, whose declamatory rhythms underpin the compositional basis of each piece.
The rehearsal process on an Ashley piece involves six days working 10 to 6 to develop the characters. At this stage the composition is minimally notated. By the time it approaches performance, accuracy is at a very high pitch and a click track is used to determine the synchrony and timing of the layered speech-based performances. Thus, the working process moves from a framework for musical innovation towards a highly specified and determined outcome so that the audience can experience the piece just as it is on the CD.
For his recent work 'Concrete' Ashley initially excluded himself from the performances, but he realised the piece was flawed without him, so he rewrote it. Being a meditation on age, Ashley appears as the main character and the other performers are projections of his dreams.
Another work, 'Dust', resulted in a collaboration with a Japanese video artist, Yukihiro Yoshihara, who created a mosaic or collage of American TV on monitors above the performers. Simultaneous commentaries and translations illuminated the meanings of the spoken texts for the Japanese audience. Comprehension of text is a key concern for Thomas Buckner.
Prof. Nicholas Till (Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre, Sussex) commented that Ashley quite definitely is a writer, in a literary sense, and that his ability to work at both a detailed and realist level, and at an allegorical level, gives his work unique interest.
Thursday 29 October 2009
Wednesday 7 October 2009
Paul Whitty - Wednesday 7 October 2009
Our first speaker, Paul Whitty, is a Reader in Composition, Research Director for Film, Fine Art and Music, and co-director of the Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes.
Paul's compositions have been performed and broadcast widely. He has a particular interest in collaborative practice. His ongoing collaborative project Vauxhall Pleasure (2004-2009) with Anna Best consisted of a site event at Vauxhall Cross, London; an installation at the Museum of Garden History as part of their Tempered Ground exhibition; and two performances at Tate Britain.
Paul's talk was called '...i tried living in the real world...': collaborations and collaborative practices.
His collaborative work arose from his interest in other disciplines. While working with choreographers, he realised that there was a mismatch between tradition compositional procedures, and the speed with which a truly responsive composer needs to reformulate and revise when working collaboratively.
New ways of thinking arose in his collaborations with Aydin Teker and Anna Best. In works written for the South Bank Centre, and later Beaconsfield, he researched the environment and history of the spaces used while working intensively with colleagues to produce site-specific work that resonated with these spaces' associations.
The most ambitious of these projects has been Vauxhall Pleasure, with Anna Best, formerly an 18th century pleasure garden and now a major traffic intersection. They fused the arcadian music of Thomas Arne with data derived from the gyratory's traffic control system to generate multiple artistic outputs which reflect the dramatic change in environment. These outputs are: site performance; webpages; installations.
Paul commented that these collaborations have influenced his concert composition work, in which he continues to seek an accommodation between the materials which serve as a starting point (recently the Cesar Franck Violin Sonata for his 39 pages) and his radical methodology.
Paul's compositions have been performed and broadcast widely. He has a particular interest in collaborative practice. His ongoing collaborative project Vauxhall Pleasure (2004-2009) with Anna Best consisted of a site event at Vauxhall Cross, London; an installation at the Museum of Garden History as part of their Tempered Ground exhibition; and two performances at Tate Britain.
Paul's talk was called '...i tried living in the real world...': collaborations and collaborative practices.
His collaborative work arose from his interest in other disciplines. While working with choreographers, he realised that there was a mismatch between tradition compositional procedures, and the speed with which a truly responsive composer needs to reformulate and revise when working collaboratively.
New ways of thinking arose in his collaborations with Aydin Teker and Anna Best. In works written for the South Bank Centre, and later Beaconsfield, he researched the environment and history of the spaces used while working intensively with colleagues to produce site-specific work that resonated with these spaces' associations.
The most ambitious of these projects has been Vauxhall Pleasure, with Anna Best, formerly an 18th century pleasure garden and now a major traffic intersection. They fused the arcadian music of Thomas Arne with data derived from the gyratory's traffic control system to generate multiple artistic outputs which reflect the dramatic change in environment. These outputs are: site performance; webpages; installations.
Paul commented that these collaborations have influenced his concert composition work, in which he continues to seek an accommodation between the materials which serve as a starting point (recently the Cesar Franck Violin Sonata for his 39 pages) and his radical methodology.
The idea of the series
This year, Music, in the School of Media, Film and Music, at the University of Sussex, is discussing the idea of music in collaborative contexts of many kinds in a series of nine research seminars running from October 2009 to April 2010.
The aim of our series is to ask the following overall questions:
- why collaborate?
- what kinds of processes are involved in collaboration?
- what can we learn from collaboration?
Our speakers comprise distinguished practitioners (composers, performers) and theorists who have worked extensively in, and reflected upon, very different approaches to collaboration.
The aim of our series is to ask the following overall questions:
- why collaborate?
- what kinds of processes are involved in collaboration?
- what can we learn from collaboration?
Our speakers comprise distinguished practitioners (composers, performers) and theorists who have worked extensively in, and reflected upon, very different approaches to collaboration.
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