The Careful Plaiting of Weak Ties - composition for string quartet
- Submitting institution
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The University of Leeds
: A - Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - Music
- Output identifier
- UOA33A-2405
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
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- Year
- 2017
- 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
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- Additional information
- The Careful Plaiting of Weak Ties examines how physical preparations on bowed strings can create inharmonic multiphonic spectra to be explored as contingent systems: extended heterogeneous spaces, which are explored and revealed through performance. The piece’s notation balances an interpretive mode of ‘in-the-moment’ performance, which privileges the response of the player to the indeterminacies of the string, against a tablature mode, which defines and/or constrains the player’s actions.
The preparations create a physical coupling, which allows the vibrations from one string to modulate another. This creates a gamelan-like inharmonic multiphonic sound, but the bow makes the sound more open to manipulation, exploration, and contingency. A prototype is shown in the supporting materials folder.
Contingency is constrained in two opposing ways. Material [1] makes use of very slow harmonic glissandi (as in John Lely’s The Harmonics of Real Strings), intermingling emergent harmonic partials and inharmonic string noise. The use of the A and E strings implies an A spectral pitch centre, but this is in tension with materiality and playing techniques that privilege contingent noise and/or pitches. Material [2] uses the preparations to create inharmonic spectra, but organised such that elements of an A spectrum can emerge in performance.
The notation of material [2] is a graphic/tablature hybrid: the line represents the complex interaction of bow and string encapsulated as ‘intensity’, building on the ‘effort’ staff in my a metastable harmony (2010), for string quartet. This creates a productive tension between the stricter directed prescriptions of the action notation, and the nuanced textual instructions that ask the player to let harmonics emerge and ‘sing’.
The piece was performed by the Manon Quartet, within the 840 concert series in London on 6 May 2017. The background underpinning work on contingency, notation, and preparations has been presented in multiple seminar and conference presentations.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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