Five Memos : for violin and piano
- 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
- 30289238
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- May
- Year
- 2015
- 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
- ‘Five Memos’ was commissioned by London Music Masters and premiered at the Newbury Spring Festival in 2015. It explores how: i) a work for violin and piano can be composed in response to Italo Calvino’s 1984 lectures ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’; and ii) how the artistic virtues advocated by Calvino, and the written texts themselves, might inform the development of new compositional techniques. In exploring how an instrumental composition might reflect upon and augment ideas in a stimulus text, it builds on works such as Kaija Saariaho’s violin concerto ‘Graal Théâtre’.
The work is unified by a collection of pitch cycles constructed using a series of rotating intervallic relationships. The pitch structures and compositional processes were developed in response to phrases and ideas from Calvino’s texts. For example, ‘Quickness’ explores Calvino’s notion of how seemingly disparate narrative events can be connected through repetition, rhyme and rhythm: it uses contrasting musical gestures for the violin held together by common intervallic materials, and explores different perceptions of motion and speed within the piano part. The final movement, ‘Multiplicity’, develops Calvino’s concept of how the smallest starting point can spread to encompass vast horizons, and his connections back to the themes of his first essay. In the music, a tiny generative motif taken from the first movement acts as the source of all the finale’s material.
The resulting five-movement work employs a variety of new compositional techniques, including: unique post-serial procedures (‘Lightness’ and ‘Multiplicity’); post-spectral harmonic material (‘Exactitude’); note systems developed from an idiosyncratic application of Per Nørgård’s infinity series technique (‘Visibility’); and original applications of post-Bergian interval cycles and cyclic collections (‘Quickness’ and ‘Exactitude’).
The composition (score and recording) is submitted for assessment. Contextual information is supplied about the dissemination of the work, which received a British Composer Award (2016).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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