Performance of 'Stunt Double IX - A Thousand Eyes See the Sky Full of Stars' by Gordon McPerson
- Submitting institution
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Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 11204270
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- Stevenson Hall, RCS, Glasgow
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first performance
- November
- Year of first performance
- 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
- This output is the first performance of a work with guitar and tape by leading Scottish composer – Dr Gordon McPherson, premiered at RCS on the composer’s 50th Birthday.
'Stunt Double IX' is highly demanding and required a unique approach to performance preparation. My investigation centred around how the challenges of the work could be realised in practice.
McPherson’s guitar writing is busy, complex and relentless. He is, however, not a naïve writer for the guitar and there was comparatively little of the editing that can be necessary when premiering a new work by a composer who does not play the instrument (a few seven-note chords, and a small number of notes above the usual range of the instrument aside). The listener is bombarded with sound, and the tempi are extreme – either very slow or very fast. In 'Stunt Double' the idea is to explore a "meta practice" - a concept McPherson describes as the near-impossible – by including a "double" (an electronic version of the guitar) that combines with the live performance to create a "super" instrument that can play the impossible.
Although most musicians are familiar with click-track performance, 'Stunt Double' pushed this to the extreme with highly virtuosic, high tempo, demands. The discipline required to realise this music demanded a different form of preparation, in which I worked to "de-programme" myself from the instinctual real-time musical decision-making that characterises conventional performance. I was required to integrate my performance fully with the tape part. The payoff, however, was the curious and pleasurable experience of playing (or seeming to play) the impossible.
The performance was reviewed in The Herald by Michael Tumelty, who described 'Stunt Double' as "a kind of sleight-of-hand duet between guitarist Allan Neave, playing the near-impossible, in duet with a digital axe playing the totally-impossible".
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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