Perang Gagal: a Series of Inconclusive Battles
- Submitting institution
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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 2555709
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- University of Limerick
- Brief description of type
- Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- February
- Year
- 2020
- 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
- -
- 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
- 'Perang Gagal' explores the potential in allying the performance practices of livecoding, and devising music for gamelan, and asks the question: given the affordances and limitations of these two practices, what musical outcomes can be achieved? It combines two strands of my research. As a composer working both with devising processes and gamelan instruments, it has links to works such as ‘Prelude, Gantungan and Dance’ (2018) for gamelan, piano, and prepared piano, and from a livecoding perspective it draws upon several years of study and exploration of the SuperCollider programming language located within a diverse international online community of artists and technologists.
The potential for spontaneity in these performances is radically different and the methodology employed in developing the piece recognised that: some material was pre-improvised both in coding and on musical instruments, and a series of small musical gestures were “comprovised” in advance of the performance. These were communicated to the players as recordings and/or a hybrid between common practice notation and Javanese kepatihan, and at a short rehearsal the performers worked to combine these in a performable whole. The research process and performance confirmed the slowness and clumsiness of rewriting code in the moment of musical performance; in many respects, the technical clunkiness of the piece was rescued by the musical work of the performers.
The work was performed on 6 February 2020 at the International Conference on Livecoding at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and synchronously livestreamed, with the stream freely archived online for future viewing. I have made all the code, notation, and gamelan samples used in the performance available open-source on GitHub and within the collaborative livecoding platform Estuary, allowing them to be easily used in performance by other ensembles. This output comprises of documentation of the performance, and the associated digital resources.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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