Output details

Ouija for violin and electronics (duration 20 minutes). Premiered by Peter Sheppard Skaerved, Sidney Sussex Chapel, Cambridge; subsequent performances at the Cambridge Summer Music Festival, Holywell Music Room, Wilton's Music Hall, Royal Academy of Music, City University London, and 2013 PSN conference (Cambridge).

Ouija explores a number of different themes which run through my work: the dramatic and theatrical dimension of musical performance; algorithmically self-generating melodic lines, and their combination into new forms of counterpoint in which different rates of flow evolve independently; dialogue with the classical repertoire and its rich culture of performative interpretation and reception. In Ouija the violin itself takes the central role, figuring both through iconic works from its repertoire – the Caprices of Paganini and Bach's Sonatas and Partitas – and through an imaginative engagement with the vast community of violinists who have played these works over the last two centuries, both renowned (e.g. Paganini himself, Joachim, et al.) and unknown.

This work employs extremely schematic notated materials whose aim, in conjunction with the suggestions and constraints posed by the electro-acoustic track, is to elicit but also guide improvisatory responses from the violinist, thus engaging the performer in a real-time creative process. This explicitly performative approach to composition, in which the primary function of the score is to prompt creative performance rather than to define a musical object, is one that I am exploring in collaboration with the musicologists Prof. Eric Clarke and Dr Mark Doffman (University of Oxford), whose study of creativity in the realisation of new music is being undertaken under the aegis of the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP).

A video archive has been created of all the rehearsals and the compositional and performance-oriented decisions that arose there, and this footage has been analysed by Clarke and Doffman in a series of publications and papers including the CMPCP Performance Studies Network conference (Cambridge, April 2013) and the ‘Tracking the Creative Process in Music’ conference (Montréal, October 2013). This work traces the development of Ouija from initial sketches through the eighth complete performance.