Symphony No 2 'Sacred Places'
- Submitting institution
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University of Aberdeen
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 69048953
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- June
- Year
- 2016
- 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
- Yes
- Additional information
- The symphony as a way of thinking about music has been a life-long interest of mine. My first musical experiences of Sibelius have led me to consider the symphony as a form of expression which is both rhetorical and intimate. Sonata form with its heavy reliance upon the Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is an attractive form to me and, in my research, listening, reading, thinking and composing, I have tried to find a way of re-contextualising this for the twenty-first century. Berio, MacMillan, Norgard, Maxwell Davies, Casken, David Matthews, Elizabeth Austin and Sally Beamish are part of a twenty-first century re-imagining of the symphony and my work can certainly be seen as being part of that tradition; however, in this, the second of my symphonies, I wanted to move away from the large, Mahlerian and Berio-esque rhetorical statements of my first to a more intimate, Sibelius and Elizabeth Austin-inspired focus upon the moment, the line and the importance of micro-structure.
This symphony is a distilling and re-imagining of the structural tools I used in my first symphony. Here, the dialectic of opposites is examined in greater and more complex detail – soloistic, virtuosic, complex rhythmical cascades in the tuned percussion and piano are placed against walls of expanding added note harmonies, slowly moving chorales of sounds in the strings. Also, the organic growth form of the first symphony makes way for a more monolithic structure. The form of this symphony, I hope, appears ‘found’ and constantly commenting upon itself both forwards and backwards and circularly with gestures never really fully developing in a classical sense – a large, mobile form similar, though much more complex than, the smaller mobile forms of my first symphony.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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