Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus
- Submitting institution
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The University of Huddersfield
: A - Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - Music
- Output identifier
- 23
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- Multi-component: Score and CD including Contextual Information
- Open access status
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- Month
- April
- Year
- 2018
- 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 five-movement, 40-minute work investigates musical analogues to questions pertinent to the crisis of the Anthropocene – particularly plastic pollution in our oceans and species extinction. Temporality in music is used as a formal lens to reflect on the circulatory forces that magnify destructive processes in the environment. The work extends ways of thinking about temporal fields in music, particularly in relation to repetition and glitch, as well as through a multiplicity of musical and cultural references in the compositional materials that allude to forms of extinction and that quote from lost forms of knowledge and communication, including, for example, a recording of the mating call of a now-extinct bird (the Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō from Hawai’i), tracings of a ninth-century Chinese star map, and a ‘coarse sampling’ of spectral transcriptions of bars from Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path. The work makes an original contribution to notational representations of temporal folding through a novel use of asymmetrical ‘nested’ and interlaced repetition, allied with unusual timbral differentiations of musical materials. Of note is the particularly radical use of non-standard techniques in the writing for horn, trumpet and trombone to produce unusually fluid timbral results for these brass instruments, as well as the development of a contrabassoon tubing extension that extends the instrument’s range to F0, below the range of human hearing, linked to the work’s engagement with the writings of post-humanist philosopher Timothy Morton. The work was commissioned by one of the foremost European ensembles, Klangforum Wien, in partnership with the Wittenertage für neue Kammermusik (April 2018) and has since been presented six times by four additional ensembles. It has received extensive broadcast (WDR3, Kulturradio rbb, ORF, YLE Radio 1, etc.), and its recording on the Kairos CD label has received widespread international acclaim.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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