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.