Ronda : The Spinning World
- Submitting institution
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The University of Huddersfield
: A - Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - Music
- Output identifier
- 54
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Multi-component: Score and Recording including Contextual Information
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- February
- Year
- 2017
- 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
- -
- 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
- The composition reflects on the syncretic musical thinking of Walter Smetak (1913–1984), a composer, instrument builder and philosopher who was highly influential in a number of Brazilian artistic scenes, though virtually unknown elsewhere. Smetak’s work belongs to an experimental or ‘maverick’ tradition of composer-instrument builders in twentieth-century music (e.g., Harry Partch). The work developed from a period of fieldwork carried out in Salvador da Bahia at the Museum Solar Ferrão archive, where I had access to Smetak’s instruments and papers and spent time with key associates and members of Smetak’s family. The project also drew its inspirations from direct observations of the cultural context of Bahian cultural life, facilitated by the residency program of the Goethe Institut. This cultural research around Smetak’s work as it is applied to a personal creative practice makes a contribution to new traditions of performativity that highlight issues around virtuosity, authenticity and the invention of performance practices. The research makes a contribution to transcultural creative practice, particularly in terms of exploring a Brazilian epistemology of sound and a poetics of listening expressed in its spatial ensemble dynamics. That the project is about a questioning and problematising of traditions of performance and ways of hearing was articulated in a review in Der Tagesspiegel, which noted how the work questions the constructs that surround reception in music. The work was commissioned by Ensemble Modern and DAAD Künstlerprogramm, supported by numerous German and Brazilian partners, in a high-impact cultural exchange programme of concerts, exhibitions, conference events and workshops in Germany and Brazil. It has also been performed by the ELISION Ensemble, Australia, with a new collection of replica instruments built by artist David Murphy, demonstrating the viability of ideas and instruments beyond the work’s initial context.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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