Chamber Symphony no.2 ‘The Australian’ / Cobbled Section After Cobbled Section.
This multi-component output consists of two closely related works (one for large ensemble, one for orchestra), each represented by a score and a recording, links to which are in the associated PDF.
- Submitting institution
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Guildhall School of Music & Drama
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- CRALAUA
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- 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
- No
- Additional information
- These two related works constitute a project investigating simultaneous layering, located within an aesthetic context that usually eschews it. The author’s practice, which focusses on the defamiliarization of commonplace musical material, is rooted in English Post-Experimental music’s engagement with Morton Feldman (Thomas, 2016), particularly his “primary concern […] to sustain a ‘flat surface’ with a minimum of contrast” (Feldman and Friedman, 2001). In his more recent works, the surface has remained ‘two-dimensional’, but with a more rhetorical approach to structure. In particular, violent disruptions of continuity have become more common.
Re-encountering ‘Midwatch 1953’ by The Fall (2000), in which different strands of music are superimposed in shifting textures, both framed a creative problem and offered a model of how to engineer a pile-up of separate unrelated materials, as seen at the climax (b. 448) of ‘The Australian’. This constitutes an original use of the technique within this aesthetic.
Through the author’s customary process of rigorous testing and experimentation with material, the possibility of simultaneous layers beginning a work, rather than articulating a climax, opened up. This led directly to the interplay of layers at the start of ‘Cobbled Section’, moving from a blurred sound image (I. b.27) to a clearer presentation (I. bb.56-60). and an experimentation with a new degree of textual complexity, evidenced in the final section (bb.222-248), which allows for subtle shifts in listener perception between disparate superimposed lines.
The composition process therefore yielded further tools for defamiliarizing familiar sonic objects, here represented by cadential and valedictory gestures, which were, paradoxically, used to create continuities. The aim was to explore a scenario where materials seem to be in a perpetual state of resolution but where a proper conclusion never really happens because of the disruptive effect of the rhetorical devices that are used to shape the structure.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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