'Athróa' for string orchestra, duration c.12 minutes.
- Submitting institution
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Royal College of Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 18
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2018
- URL
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http://researchonline.rcm.ac.uk/id/eprint/494/
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- 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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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- As both composer and visual artist, my music explores the creation a truly merged artwork that initiates from the sound, from meditation on the sound, of line drawn on paper. It sees and hears the act of creating an otherwise purely visual artwork as creative action in itself, and thereby as sound/musical event which is then treated as material for compositional action. Working with art marker pens (brush tip) on paper, I had produced a new series of mono-chromatic pictures. These are made by drawing a long thick line slowly and in free hand, then another directly below, ‘following’ and ‘touching’ the previous one and so on, until a whole framed area is covered on the paper: creating a variety of single-coloured textural surfaces. I then applied a similar process to the composition of my work Athróa (which reworked an earlier piece for a smaller group of string players, Athróo) and set out to build each musical line from the micro scale, again ‘drawn’ in free hand perhaps, layering these lines on top of each other and creating harmonic progressions and delicate polyphonic textures that come and go by means of iteration and fluctuation of density and movement. The title means ‘crowded ones’ and also relates to herds of animals or swarms of insects. The main building technique of the music is what I call ‘note-swapping’ (different instruments swap between the same notes, creating a kind of bleached and homogenised Klangfarbenmelodie). My work with the marker pens also helped me appreciate some further possibilities in this note-swapping method as, by incorporating both micro-scale movement and shifting timbre in the music, I realised that I could create sound textures that carried a strong parallel with the visual content of the finished marker-pen pictures.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -