Ten Bellows. Composition for Piano and Electronics. Premiere at the Research Festival of the Orpheus Research Centre in Music, Ghent in October 2015.
- 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
- Jessen1
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- October
- 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
- No
- 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
- As a collaborative commission from pianist Catherine Laws (University of York), this project afforded an opportunity to make a play whose sound and movement were the primary conveyors of the drama. The
collaborative goal was to make a ‘solo’ piano work that presents the player as something other than a solitary figure who plays this large historic instrument without explanation. To that end, we had wanted to create a relationship between this Performer and a second woman, an Assistant, in which the piano playing was a single, although essential, component.
While there is considerable repertoire for speaking pianist and/or pianist playing inside the instrument, there are few works where the pianist is fully embodied as a fleshed-out character. Only a few canonical pieces exist—by
Aperghis, Lucier and Kagel, Juliana Hodkinson and Simon Steen Anderson—whose sound-centred dramatic works might fulfil this criteria.
The starting point, in developing a staged symbiotic domestic characterisation, was a series of British Pathé and Ministry of Information newsreels (ca. 1940s). These anachronistic instructional videos became a template for the
endlessly-tractable etiquette associated with ‘domestics’ and ‘ladies maids’ of an almost mystical past. A secondary goal was to utilise auxiliary audio as a prompting and organising device. We were inclined to build upon this aspect of tight interaction with audio from an earlier commission, Chambre 119 (2009), and to heighten that interaction between the audio and two performers. Thus, the research questions became: how to best create a staged manifestation of a legible shell game (to display the intricacies of a circular routine)?;-how to duplicate that logic into a recorded, auxiliary audio layer that prompts the dramatic interdependency in
exacting detail?; and-how to evoke the notion of significance within the accumulation repetition, gradually amassed by the Assistant character?
https://www.york.ac.uk/music/news-and-events/news/2015/catherinelawspremierestenbellowsforpianistassistantandelectronicsby/
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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