Remembrance Day : Orchestral Score - Post Maastricht Corrections
- Submitting institution
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University of Southampton
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 22735533
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- November
- Year
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Remembrance Day develops new approaches to musical memorialisation through the fashioning of a distinctive documentary model as the research basis for a musical work. Drawing on approaches from documentary film and a ‘sculpting approach’ that owes much to Mahler, the work features an assemblage of disparate musical scenes that are ‘edited’ together to convey the protagonists’ experience and set that experience against the backdrop of the times. The main text was written by Henry Lamont Simpson, a twentyone-year old who sacrificed his university education for war service and who was killed by sniper fire in no man’s land one week before the Armistice was declared. The piece is cast in two parts, based on a reversal of the pattern of movements of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, firstly setting passages from the Prologue in Heaven from Goethe’s Faust, and then excerpts from Peter Abelard’s Hymnarius Paraclitensis. There are several allusions to late nineteenth century and early twentieth century popular songs and ragtime throughout; such found materials are not so much quoted as ‘melted down’, re-cast and newly-shaped. Each of the historical elements is ‘jazzed’ and transformed to interpret the double layer of text. Popular songs are set against heightened passages that combine multi-layered choral polyphony with recordings of WWI battlefield gunfire. The cyclical repetition of short motifs (a technique common to nineteenth century symphonists such as Berlioz and Franck) provides continuity and cohesion within an otherwise disparate landscape.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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