Transience. Composition for String Quartet. Commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and Quatuor Diotima. Premiered by Quatuor Diotima in Shoreditch Church on Dec 2014, during the Spitalfields Winter Festival, London. Published by Verlag Neue Musik.
- Submitting institution
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Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- Hayden1
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- December
- 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
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- Criminology
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- Interdisciplinary
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- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
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- Reserve for an output with double weighting
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- Additional information
- ‘Transience’, is one of a recent cycle of pieces which combine conceptions of material related to ‘spectralist’ traditions and algorithmic compositional approaches. My aim was to create an acoustic composition that could not exist without the extensive mediation of digital music technologies using IRCAM’s OpenMusic (all programming by the composer). My research and development of bespoke computer-assisted compositional tools led directly the creation of new musical ideas, sounds and modes of expression. The computer interpolates between two kinds of ‘found objects’: inharmonic spectra (unique 24TET scales, computer-generated using Xenakis-like sieves), and harmonic spectra based on the overtone series. OM programming fundamentally shaped the sonic conception, notation and approach to form as gradual transitions between these materials became the main structural device. A dialectical relationship resulted between these two compositional strategies, the piece oscillating constantly between dense, rapid, energetic and hyper-virtuosic gestural materials and moments of relative stasis and sustain (or intermediate states), but never settling one way or the other. The materials feature many subtle combinations of timbre, microtonal harmonies and glissandi placed within OM-generated metrical cycles of varying durations and their poly-rhythmical subdivisions. The sonic surfaces are in a constant state of flux, existing on an unstable continuum between pure tone (often harmonics and sul tasto) and saturated noise (often extreme sul ponticello), inharmonicity and inharmonicity, as boundaries between timbre and harmony are explored. The members of the quartet are in constant dialogue, at once asserting their individual autonomy and their collective inseparability in a tension that is never resolved, although the overall formal evolution is from energy to (relative) stasis. My intention was to create a piece with the maximum surface diversity whilst maintaining an underlying formal OM-mediated coherence. The piece is in seven movements, although each movement is self-contained, so smaller combinations are possible.
http://samhaydencomposer.com/compositions/archive/transience-for-string-quartet
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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