Material Indeterminacy as Composition - portfolio of compositions
- Submitting institution
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The University of Leeds
: A - Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - Music
- Output identifier
- UOA33A-4464
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- 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
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Material Indeterminacy as Composition represents an ongoing arc of research undertaken across five years, involving significant underpinning research into the contingencies of unstable materials, as well as intense experimental work with electronics and preparations. Each builds on and extends the insights of the last, developing strategies for folding indeterminacy into the structure of the piece, such that their unfolding in performance is constrained while remaining contingent. The three submitted pieces are written in an open form, but with substantial likely durations: one appears in a recording of over an hour in length, another approaching half an hour.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The primary research concern is ‘material indeterminacy’ (the theoretical underpinnings of which are outlined in the document of the same name in ‘supporting materials’), building on and engaging with Alvin Lucier’s ‘scanning’ technique—which seeks to find emergent phenomena in the resonance of material(s)—and, especially, Cassandra Miller’s ‘body scan meditation’ pieces (such as Tracery (2016–19)), which focus the player on listening and responding as forms of non-control.
Each piece structures contingent sound by guiding the player’s response toward further, and ongoing, engagement with the instrument’s materiality. Each explores emerging specifics of contingent sound through repetition and listening, bringing performers into engagement with the materiality of their instruments and guiding them in structuring emergent contingent sound.
In Resonant Paths and The Endless Mobility of Listening, electronics capture contingent sound. In the latter, resonance accretes around a fixed structure, fixed both through a set of interaction modules (‘tuning, seeking, chorale’) which repeat while the material instrumental space changes and also by a persistent relationship to a pre-set pitch, which acts as a ‘beacon’. In the former, the structure is open, but constrained by instructions to generate a beacon by following, then altering, strong harmonics which accumulate in the captured sound. Here, the beacon is not fixed but emerges through a continuous and responsive exploration of the inharmonic soundworld. The whole is encountered by going further into the parts uses an inharmonic and contingent instrument (the prepared bass or violoncello), but without electronic capture: it is structured through flexible modules which the performer uses in response to the contingent events of performance.
The Endless Mobility of Listening was premiered by Mira Benjamin in Victoria on 23 June 2016, Resonant Paths by Scott McLaughlin in Berlin on 31 March 2017, and The whole by Christopher Williams in Venice on 6 February 2020
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
