'Resonating Instruments' (2017), solo cimbalom and chamber ensemble (25’) and 'Reflecting Instruments' (2020) piano trio (17’)
- Submitting institution
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Royal Northern College of Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 27A
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- March
- Year
- 2020
- 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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- Research group(s)
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1 - Composition
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- ‘Resonating Instruments’ was commissioned by Psappha celebrating their 25th anniversary in 2016-7, funded by the Britten-Pears and Hinrichsen Foundations. It was subsequently performed at the New Music North West festival (2017) and broadcast on BBC Radio Three. The composer has presented on the work in York, Dublin and Graz.
Opposing a solo cimbalom against a five-member ensemble, this work seeks to establish new approaches to instrumental writing through mapping the cimbalom’s idiomacy onto the ensemble. Its layout is idiosyncratic, inherently logical lower strings becoming increasingly arbitrary higher up. Through researching and playing the instrument, the composer workshopped material extensively with cimbalist Tim Williams. Stravinsky deploys various cimbalom idioms, which only appear in other instruments, in his surprisingly underexplored, ‘Renard’. György Kurtág’s non-cimbalom works (e.g. 12 ‘Microludes’, Op. 13) similarly exploit musical ideas mapped from the cimbalom’s layout.
Musical materials emanate from the imposition of pitch material conforming with left-right positioning of the mallets, creating disparate ‘melodic routes’ depending on register. The cimbalom’s particular qualities are developed within the ensemble, for example, percussive attacks but also through intonational and timbral malleability. The register similarly informs the work’s structure, e.g., the opening four minutes’ music is confined to the lower 10th of the cimbalom, the timbre of the cimbalom changing above this.
This research is expanded in ‘Reflecting Instruments’, a Glasgow University McEwen Commission for the Nanhai Trio, premiered in March 2020. Pitch material and musical gestures, including timbral, are entirely absorbed from the cimbalom, an experimental translation of its affordances into a different medium. The trio’s sonorities evolve through an interplay of echos, resonance and subtle intonational inflections, achieved not by explicit microtones but rather through the collision of harmonics, registral displacement and the piano’s fixed pitch contrasted with the fluidity of the bowed strings.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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