James Sibley Watson's The Fall of the House of Usher
- Submitting institution
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The Royal Academy of Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- RAM025
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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10.7757/persnewmusi.58.1.0023
- Location
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- Brief description of type
- Article based on an improvisation recorded at Arundel Cathedral
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month
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- 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
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- Forensic science
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- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This work explores how musical improvisation to silent film can interact with other academic discourses (Surrealism, psychoanalysis, performance traditions). The portfolio comprises an improvisation recorded as a concert performance, together with an article that explores how practice can be placed in an ecology of research context and differentiation. I discuss improvisation as a form of personal anthropology and knowledge-creation, through the sublimation and distortion of musical repertoire, and through differentiation from improvisational practices in the 1920s, extended through discourses of Surrealism and psychoanalysis.
Poe’s novella The Fall of the House of Usher was a siren song for the Surrealists, and for early psychoanalytic literature. I demonstrate how improvisation can be a means of continuing the Surrealist project in ways unlooked-for by its progenitors. In my improvisation I wanted to experiment with how the ‘mood’ of the film – with its fading, dissolving, and prismatic images – could be complemented by the distortion of time, of structures such as the whole-tone and octatonic scale to make a dirty ‘systematic hybridity’ that reinforces the Surrealist sense of disorientation. I also wanted to investigate how the non-relationship of the characters and their interior life could be configured through this ‘systematic hybridity’, density and intensity of sound. I therefore employed textures from French organ music to create a flat, terse and dream-like interior choreography for the work (important for the Surrealists), allowing film, musical practice, and forms of cultural history to complement and impact upon one another.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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