'The Raft Breaks' (2019), for solo violin, performative electronics, amplified objects, tape & video. 20’
- 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
- 42C
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
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- 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
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- Reserve for an output with double weighting
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- Additional information
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‘The Raft Breaks’ is a work for extended solo violin. The ‘expanded field’ of the piece (Ciciliani, 2019) encompasses live, ‘performative’ (performer controlled) electronics, the use of amplified objects and fixed audiovisual media.
Longitudinal collaboration with violinist Linda Jankowska was undertaken in order to develop a vocabulary of extended violin techniques and notational strategies.
This work is indebted to the writings of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and explores notions of presence, absence and tangibility. The hanging (or ‘dead’) violin, activated via a hidden transducer, shares its scordatura with the ‘live’ violin and is amplified in an identical manner. This hanging object therefore becomes the physical, tangible embodiment of the digital sound world of the work. Electronic sound is presented through this object, resonating its body and preparations.
The compositional process began in Poznan, Poland, Jankowska’s home city. Spectral analysis, transformation, resynthesis and automated transcription processes were used to create harmonic content, derived from recordings of Mass made in various Poznan churches. The sung text in the first movement is taken from Ezra Pound’s ‘Pisan Cantos’. The video in the first movement is of a forest behind Jankowska’s childhood home, a forest that was destroyed in a freak hurricane shortly after our recording sessions. This video and my ambisonic / surround sound recording are the only extant documents of this location. Thus, the focus of the process and piece became the recreation of this destruction as a metaphor for the destructive power of religious nationalism in contemporary Poland, and the world-wide prevalence of denialism. The process included procedural animation techniques (SpeedTree, Houdini) digitally to recreate and animate the forest.
‘The Raft Breaks’ was premiered by Jankowska at London’s Hundred Years Gallery in October 2019 with subsequent performances in Huddersfield, Manchester and Antwerp, and cancelled performances in Poznan and Berlin due to COVID.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
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- English abstract
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