Trommelsprachen : languages of drums
- Submitting institution
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University of Bristol
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 94561863
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- May
- 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
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- A 90’–100’ composition for four percussion soloists and voice, with mixed transcultural ensemble. Based on drum languages of India, Turkey and the Middle East. Commissioned by Siemens Foundation and Hans Neuhoff for Eight Bridges Festival, Germany. 65% of material of the work was composed; significant sections were improvised by the 4 percussionists or drawn from individual collaborators’ existing ideas.
Key research question: how to integrate advanced drumming rhythms from South India, Turkey, Israel and ‘world music/jazz’ into a fully transcultural ensemble that includes musicians used to playing ‘advanced’ contemporary music.
Research process: the largest compositional problem was how to make the diverse forces effectively cohere. The composition aimed to integrate musicians from ‘oral traditions’ within a precisely composed structure. This was achieved through learning by rote, giving space for improvisation, or providing players with aleatoric or textual directions, while giving the Western instrumentalists the greatest dose of precise, ‘contemporary’ notation. The Raga Todi provides extremely important structural ‘glue’ in the introduction and throughout the work, providing a beginning and return ‘harmonic’ point for all other diversions, across a range of instrumentations. Fully composed material texturally and harmonically ‘frames’ virtuoso flights of the percussionists.
The most important research finding was that it is indeed possible to create rigorous structure and unify a work of great diversity through bringing the stamp (vision) of a composer into a group of highly creative improvisors and collaborators. Feedback confirmed virtuoso percussion going far beyond ‘world music’ types of standards and
acceptance of adventurous form, harmony, dissonance, surreal, collage-like juxtapositions and sa more ‘avant-garde’ feel to the work.
Premiere: 5 May 2017, Philharmonic Hall, Acht Brücken Festival, Köln.
Output: score, audio recording; Contextual information: see separate document for details and links, and files
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
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- English abstract
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