'In Limbo' for string orchestra, duration c.10 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
- 35
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2018
- URL
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http://researchonline.rcm.ac.uk/id/eprint/1105/
- 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
- -
- 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
- Besides being a composer and a film composer, I am a prominent activist for citizens' rights, specifically as EU advocacy lead of the group ‘the3million’, which represents EU citizens in the UK. In Limbo is directly influenced by my recent work at the EU Parliament and Commission, and in the mainstream media, speaking on behalf of people caught up in often traumatising challenges to their identities after the Brexit referendum. I first encountered Elena Remigi’s In Limbo: Brexit Testimonies from EU Citizens in the UK at an event at the European Parliament. For a commission for the 2018 International Spring Orchestra Festival, Malta, I responded to the descriptions of the anxieties and uncertainties, anger and sense of betrayal, described in the book. I pay homage to these testimonies through a single-movement work that aims to use musical means to capture my own emotional responses to, and also pay homage to the experiences of those to whom the book gives voice. I adopted a relatively simple model of assigning strongly articulated and recognisable melodic, harmonic, or textural motifs to each of a selection of episodes and emotions from the book. To portray individual voices, I included solos singling out the sorrow and melancholy of their testimonies. In a subsequent phase of composition, I took the opening motif (a long, slow glissando in the low register) and reintroduced it at the end, producing an overarching circular structure to the work, and suggesting a possible move from negative to positive, offering a glimmer of hope. This is further symbolized by the slow ascent of the violins and violas towards the high register at the end of the piece, through a canonic repetition of a 9-step scale that each section terminates at different moments to form a suspended but consonant chord.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -