Graveyard Slot (with guest appearance)
- Submitting institution
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University of Southampton
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 66751853
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- October
- Year
- 2019
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- 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
- Graveyard Slot is distinctive in the way the research suggests, in a disorientating fashion, a quasi-theatrical scenario through music and sound, without recourse to image or text. Imagined as a fantastical television variety show taking place in the “graveyard slot”, a time suggestive of dream-states and supernatural events, each ‘act’ is framed by an anticipatory refrain (m1, m95, etc.) and an ‘applause sample’ signalling the presence of a virtual-audience. Rather than seeking to break the fourth wall through, for instance, engaging the audience by direct address, the effect of the virtual-audience is here more ambiguous: the research disrupts listening experience and draws attention to the work’s constructedness, but at the same time creates the sense of a fictional world taking place in a different time and space. If the virtual-audience functions as metatheatrical device, it does so in a manner more surreal than critical. Each ‘act’ is pointedly dissimilar, which is extended when the ensemble functions as backing band to a pre-recorded female voice at m219 (the “guest appearance”), and the ‘comedy routine’ (with canned laughter) at m366. The sense of the bizarre is heightened at m476 by a chromatic ascent cheered by the virtual-crowd. From here the work changes tack, opening out into a shifting soundscape where previous elements take new forms, such as the frozen refrain chord (m614); recorded-voice combined with saxophone solo and off-kilter electronic drums to suggest a hazy nightclub scene (m639); and abstraction of the recorded applause in the clapping ‘cadenza’ (m733). Broadly situated within a post-Kagel landscape, the research is original in the way it engages televisual presentation modes and devices (e.g. the shift of frame in gameshows when the camera cuts from stage to room) within a musical context where the visual element is imagined rather than literally projected.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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