The Price of Curiosity.
The output is a nine-minute work for large orchestra, provided in the form of a score with commentary on excerpted examples as contextual information. Commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
- Submitting institution
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Guildhall School of Music & Drama
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- BAKRICB
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 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
- Yes
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- There is no recording of the output to accompany the score. The live BBC Symphony Orchestra concert/radio broadcast premiere scheduled for 27/03/20 was cancelled at the start of the first COVID-19 Lockdown, and BBC Radio 3 have been unable to reschedule a performance/broadcast to date. A MIDI rendering of the whole piece was felt to be unhelpful. However, a number of illustrative MIDI examples are provided in the contextual material document and video.
- 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
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This output draws on speech rhythms and melodies from Hitchcock’s film 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' (1956) in order to explore two central themes: i) the instrumental rendering of traumatic vocalisation, and ii) compositional techniques as a means to interrogate the cultural pathologizing of emotional manipulation. By adapting material from Doris Day and James Stewart’s dialogue for an orchestra, 'The Price of Curiosity' (2019) works to radically re-signify Hitchcock’s gaze in order to relocate the material not only into a different artistic medium, but into a space of artistic commentary prompted by contemporary debates on coercive control.
The analysis and transcription of speech to generate musical material has been explored by, inter alia, Clarence Barlow, Jonathan Harvey, Joanna Bailie and Peter Ablinger, who writes of his cycle 'Voices and Piano' (1998-) that ‘music analyses reality’. Whilst the methodology here draws on techniques Harvey and collaborators developed for 'Speakings' (Nouno et al, 2009) as well as common ‘frequency-based composition’ techniques (Hirs and Gilmore, 2009), it is aesthetically original. It also adds a further dimension to the composer’s ongoing artistic research into mining personally resonant extra-/intra-musical artefacts for structure and/or material.
A sketching process involved cutting and splicing dialogue with diegetic music and sound in Logic, exploiting repetition to reveal each actor’s speech-rhythms whilst hewing closely to the dramatic structure of a key scene in the film. Audio was transcribed both by ear and using IRCAM software AudioSculpt and Open Music. Syllables from the song ‘Whatever will be, will be’ were orchestrally resynthesised, their fundamentals sustained to form a cantus firmus which was counterpointed with homophonic material created from transcribed speech-melodies and (acoustic) ring modulation.
A video presentation including the source material and illustrations of the researcher’s process is provided with the supporting contextual information.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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