"Nocturne Aquatique", a 19 minute musical composition premiered at the Auditorium Saint-Germain, Paris, 24.01.15
- Submitting institution
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De Montfort University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 33009
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
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- 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
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- Number of additional authors
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- 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
- The research context begins with the composition's origin as an Ina-GRM commission for 'multiphones 14/15 festival. It contributes to my longstanding exploration of post-Schaefferian discourse, and notions of ‘hybridity’ of genre and style in concert and cross-arts works. After a sustained period of engagement with texturally led and quasi-static lowercase and minimal practices, the work reintroduces more familiar acousmatic gestural syntax and micro- and phrase-level spectromorphological sensibilities, whilst continuing my concern with moving beyond traditional musical relationships with hand and body. The poetic imagery informs the use of gestures and motions intended to offer surprising and highly fluid shifts of orientation, space, intimacy and distancing in its ‘immersing’ the listener. Sylvia Plath’s poem "Aquatic Nocturne" was a source of colouristic, kinetic, and kinaesthetic images, informing an iterative process of designing sound materials and relationships that could sustain a longer duration work. The work is founded on a core understanding of the re-creative aural imaginary at the heart of acousmatic poetics, whilst attempting some critique of visual topographic conceptions of ‘landscape’ in the repertoire and literature. The work thus revisits Francois Bayle’s notion of the figurative and his conception of the Acousmonium: projection, immersion and spatial polyphony. Some extensive time was spent researching archives of underwater hydrophone and marine zoological recordings (although such sounds do not appear literally in the work) which influenced the design of the materials and granular, filtering and convolution techniques developed. The aural imagery is enhanced in the four-channel concert version, with one of two stereo stems for projection in the Acousmonium tradition, valorising different loudspeaker colours and articulation, whilst allowing for pragmatic adaptation for performance in other concert-making contexts.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
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- English abstract
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