Angus MacPhee.
This multi-component single output is represented by a score and a recording (hyperlinked from the PDF). A new work for orchestra, this BBC commission for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ilan Volkov, premiered at Tectonics Festival in Glasgow (2015) and was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 Hear and Now (2015).
- Submitting institution
-
Guildhall School of Music & Drama
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- NEWPAUA
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- 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
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The aim of this project was to use details from the life and work of Scottish outsider artist Angus McPhee as a framework for interrogating and challenging received hierarchies and hegemonies of the traditional orchestral world: in its music, culture and practice, as well as in the dynamics of power and authority between composer, conductor and performer.
The composer’s chosen methodology was an engagement with the experimental tradition of open scores. Open scores/forms delegate greater freedom and autonomy to the player(s) and offer potential models for alternative social organisation and structure. This open-work approach and the space it generates embody a “Reframing: To Power” (Miller 2018) loosely aligned with 'écriture feminine musicale' (Marshall 2018). Furthermore, the work investigates the literal giving of voice to the players themselves; they speak, hum and sing as a community. This element was conceived to resonate with MacPhee’s 50-year selective mutism, thought to be associated with trauma.
Open scores within orchestral repertoire are extremely uncommon. The late ‘numbers’ orchestral works of Cage are rare examples, and spoken word and singing are almost never found; when used—e.g. Berio’s 'Sinfonia'—trained actors/singers are employed to execute these parts separately. Orchestral players themselves are called upon to speak or sing only extremely rarely; 'Angus MacPhee' is particularly innovative in this regard. MacPhee’s art made use of grass and traditional weaving; this work takes the letters of his name and a Scottish folk song about flowers as its found materials. The work also questions musical conventions of continuity and flow: frequent silences punctuate and impede the directionality of the work, throwing the listener back on themselves. The intention was to create for the listener something of McPhee’s experience as an incarcerated psychiatric patient in Inverness, dreaming of his native Uist and weaving to pass the time.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
