Two performance pieces: Clubbing and Phonetic Venn
- Submitting institution
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Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 41241179
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2018
- URL
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https://figshare.com/s/a2981e82eeb0e9ee3b50
- 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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2
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This portfolio comprises two pieces exploring the implications of using speech as compositional material. The works investigate the effect of approaching languages and dialects as limited sound-sets, shaped by insights from phonetics and speech science.
‘Clubbing’, a collaboration with choreographer Keren Levi premiered in 2015, follows a recent renewal of interest in the musicality of speech, investigating how new developments in the perception and modelling of speech can be creatively generative of musical and choreographic material. After presenting the transformation of a phonemic sound-set from German to Japanese, ‘Clubbing’ broadens the process to involve a range of sound sources – concrete as well as abstract, embodied and mimetic (including the titular Morris-dancing ‘clubs’ and kitchenware alongside conventional instruments). The inherent interdisciplinarity of speech and its evocation of the domestic and incidental registers of language (as well as those of geopolitics and conflict) give rise to new kinds of hybrid art practice. The accompanying piece ‘Phonetic Venn’, premiered in 2018, applies the same process as the opening of ‘Clubbing’ to Basque and Glaswegian.
After the work of Pina Bausch and Lloyd Newson on the choreography of speech, there has been renewed interest in the voice in dance performance, congruent with work by Peter Ablinger and Jennifer Walshe pushing at the disciplinary borders of musical composition. The pieces offer insights into how, in musical performance, language can progressively escape from its grammatical and semantic moorings, and how this procedure can condition the transient interdisciplinarity of a work. ‘Clubbing’ and ‘Phonetic Venn’ reaffirm Mladen Dolar’s influential post-psychoanalytical conception of the voice as ‘the bridge between language and the body’ whilst accommodating new thinking in speech perception, embodied cognition and linguistics.
‘Clubbing’ and ‘Phonetic Venn’ (videos) are submitted for assessment. Contextual information includes score extracts, a research talk, and the list of dissemination.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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