A Violence of Gifts : for soprano, baritone, chorus & orchestra
- Submitting institution
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Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 34525707
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- April
- 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
- 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
- ‘A Violence of Gifts’ is a 40-minute work for soloists, chorus and orchestra, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and first performed in 2015 by the BBC National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales. The work investigates: (i) how Haydn’s ‘Die Schöpfung’ can be used as a point of departure for a large-scale composition on the theme of creation; (ii) how compositional strategies might be influenced by current scientific understandings of the origins of matter, light and life.
The research was developed in collaboration with the librettist Owen Sheers. As a 21st-century response to Haydn’s pre-compositional process (his visit to the astronomer William Herschel, 1792), the project included a residency for Bowden and Sheers at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva as CERN Visiting Artists. This visit enabled discussions with CERN scientists of the latest developments in research into the early universe. Such discussions led to the collaborative development of the libretto’s content, focusing on current scientific explanations of the Big Bang and the emergence of life on earth, and also informed the generation of musical material (for instance for the opening Intrada).
The resulting composition, cast in two large parts each comprising three sections, employs a variety of novel techniques in terms of both the musical material and the music’s relationship to Sheers’s text. The compositional techniques include: contemporary deployment of deep isorhythmic structures which operate on both micro and macro scales; unique post-serial procedures; post spectral harmonic material; and developments of post-Bergian interval cycles and cyclic collections. The work is unified musically across the entire form through pitch procedures developed from a single nucleus (C—G—A flat) derived from the harmonic structure of Haydn’s aria ‘In native worth’.
Bowden was awarded the Welsh Music Guild’s Glanville Jones Award in 2015 in recognition of the cultural significance of the work.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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