'Antisphere' (2019) – for large orchestra (17')
- Submitting institution
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Royal Northern College of Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 28A
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- September
- Year
- 2019
- 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
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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1 - Composition
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
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- Additional information
- ‘Antisphere’ is the third work in the ongoing series ‘Orchestral Geometries’ (originally conceived as a triptych). This research builds on and complements two earlier ‘Orchestral Geometries’ that explore different curvatures: Euclidean geometry (‘Torus’, 2016) and elliptic geometry (‘sphere’, 2017). The work draws on ongoing conversations with mathematician Marcus du Sautoy about geometry as a language to describe higher dimensional shapes, and considerations of local ‘musical’ space, informing notions of higher dimensional global ‘mathematical’ space, which are otherwise impossible to visualise (e.g. 4D).
‘Antisphere’ is concerned with musical implications that arise from considering hyperbolic geometry (‘The Shape of Space’, J. Weeks (2016), CRC Press) within two different models of hyperbolic space (the ‘Poincaré disc’ and the ‘pseudosphere’ or ‘antisphere’) simultaneously. Notions of negative curvature and shrinkage (for the angles in a triangle add up to less than 180° in hyperbolic space) correspond to musical parameters, which are transformed as though through a saddle-shaped lens. Regular pulse, the overarching musical structure and elements of traditional tonality are estranged in this manner (for example, a circle of fifths becoming a circle of four and three-quarters).
‘Antisphere’ also draws on the notion of a strange loop (Hofstadter, 1979: ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach’) with materials including chord sequences from Howard’s earlier ‘Euclidean’ work ‘Mesmerism’ (2011) cycling incognito through ‘Antisphere’s negatively curved musical space, in the composer’s most extreme musical exploration to date of the notion of infinity versus the infinitesimal.
‘Antisphere’ was commissioned by the Barbican Centre for Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra for a premiere on 14 September 2019; was subsequently broadcast on LSO YouTube (September 2019); streamed live via LSO YouTube as part of the LSO Digital Programme ‘Always Playing’ (June 2020); broadcast online for LSO’s project with ‘Fundation Corpartes’, Chile (Autumn 2020); and is available online worldwide via PRiSM.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
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- English abstract
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