Concretes - A CD of edited live studio performances
- Submitting institution
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The University of Leeds
: A - Music
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - Music
- Output identifier
- UOA33A-727
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
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- Year
- 2015
- 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
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- Criminology
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- Interdisciplinary
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- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
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- Reserve for an output with double weighting
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- Additional information
- The source recordings for the CD come from two recording sessions, the culmination of collaborative studio and live work over several years. Track 5 is an edited excerpt from ca. 70 minutes of live duet performance recording from 17 July 2012, but all other tracks on the CD derive from a studio session on 10 April 2015, edited from ca. 100 minutes of recordings of the live duet. The version of track 5 prepared for CD release, however, was neither broadcast nor performed live prior to release in 2015 (nor, by definition, were any other tracks on the CD).
Concretes explores the intersection between acousmatic music and free improvisation, responding to music, like that of FURT, where fixed, concrete acousmatic sounds are deployed through the gestural and figural language of free improvisation and, equally, work by Lars Bröndum and Per Gärdin, where the acousmatic dimension of Bröndum’s work remains ‘concrete’, but essentially static, hardly affected by Gärdin’s improvisation.
By contrast, Concretes asks: first, is there an ambiguous space between the acousmatic and free improvisation where acousmatic sound is concrete, but is also intertwined with the rhythm of free improvisation, neither becoming a form of free improvisation, nor remaining distant from it? Second, how can an acousmatic composer deploy concrete material in a way that remains truly acousmatic but which also sounds and functions responsively in the context of a dialogue with an unpredictable, reactive improviser?
Stefani’s contributions each deploy sounds derived from a single pre-determined sound source. A MIDI keyboard triggers and shapes sounds dynamically: these are processed and re-ordered live, responding intuitively and expressively to Hession's drumming. Collaborative workshopping between 2012 and 2015 developed an essentially percussive shared physical and sonic language alongside distinct but analogous approaches to live processing (Hession’s using analogue and Stefani’s deploying digital technologies), which allow for the creation of intersecting complex spectromorphologies by both participants.
This is one reason why it is important that the work is captured in a fixed, concrete medium, that of the CD, rather than a live performance such that the actual source of the sounds remains ambiguous, unfixed, where it becomes much less straightforward than might initially be imagined to disentangle what is being produced by each of the two contributors.
The Concretes CD was released in 2015 and a complete performance of ‘Vermeer Kankare’ was broadcast on Late Junction (BBC Radio 3, 2016).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
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- English abstract
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