Angus McPhee. Composition for Orchestra. commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Tectonics Festival, Premiered in Feb 2015 at City Halls, Glasgow.
- 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
- Newland1
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- February
- Year
- 2015
- 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
- A BBC commission for the BBCSSO (conductor Ilan Volkov) for Tectonics 2015, Angus MacPhee explores the life and work of this Scottish Outsider Artist. The work draws on his use of local, everyday, found materials (grass) and the way he intertwined these materials using traditional skills to make extraordinary objects, garments, fabrics and textures. I borrowed the repetitive, patterned obsessive quality of weaving and also explored MacPhee’s prolonged silence which sprang from either a refusal or inability to bring himself to speak.
The work explores the phenomenon, physicality and presence of sound as well as its absence. The continuity is punctured with silences and pauses. My found materials are the letters of his name Angus Joseph MacPhee, the words and melody of a Scottish folk song about flowers, and the players and the instruments of the orchestra themselves.
Macphee was plucked from the small, relatively peaceful, self-sufficient community of subsistence farmers on North Uist and thrown into the horror and chaos of world war. I wanted to somehow address and explore issues of power, hierarchy and community within and through the collective body of the orchestra.
The conductor takes the role of leader only in as much as he largely starts and stops activity, the orchestral players often being relatively free to navigate their own line through each panel.
The works formal shape consists of a series of short movements/panels or we might say objects, which gradually become an alternation between imagined chorales and songs.
I speculated that MacPhee would have heard Hebridean psalm singing and this influenced the open nature of the score.
I wanted to give the players a voice (literally) and the power to shape the work - they speak and sing and hum as they play. The piece was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 16.05.15.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/e628gw
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
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- English abstract
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