The Scream and String Quartet No. 5 : the intercultural voice.
- Submitting institution
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University of York
: A - A - Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - A - Music
- Output identifier
- 69168511
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- 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
- No
- Additional information
- These compositions (see scores for performance and commission details) are linked by their reimagining of Southern Albanian folk music and the subsequent ‘vocality’ of the string writing.
A challenge faced by migrant artists is ‘coming to terms’ with their position. Trained in composition in his native Albania, the composer spent years working with folk musicians at a time when the Albanian regime stipulated that folk materials should be presented only in transparent, unmediated ways. He relocated to the UK in the 1990s, but recently has faced the challenge of reconnecting with his heritage in a manner distinct from the regime’s prescriptions, while working within Western musical idioms. Although necessarily personal, this music offers insight into artistic migrancy: how the culture left behind is – or not – integrated within the new cultural environment. These artworks therefore provide a practical perspective on matters of culture and identity, manifested in musical sound.
The UNESCO-listed polyphonic singing of the Southern Balkans (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMR0K3H-8UM) offers the composer a unique perspective with which to approach contemporary string techniques: microtonal, heterophonic, and drone-based writing find a concrete source in these folk materials. The composer’s heritage offers an alternative pre-history for such sounds, connecting them to a source independent of the modernist tradition, thus allowing a fresh engagement with modernism and the possibility of new expressive trajectories through this re-imagined vocality. For example, in the Adagio doloroso of STQ5 the standard contemporary string techniques of glissandi and practice mutes are derived from the timbre and improvisatory elaborations of southern Albanian iso-polyphonic music (TS is in many respects a large-scale extension of this idea). This is not quotation, however: the ison (drone) fluctuates and the melodic lines are unrelated to any Albanian source. Rather it is the expressive world and approach to material that draws from folk origins.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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