Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Manchester Metropolitan University
What Lie Within - original composition
What Lie Within is part of a portfolio of electroacoustic compositions that explores the development of ‘conceptual narrative’ musical structures. Andean, (2010) suggests that the electroacoustic repertoire has tended to concentrate on the ‘aesthetic’ rather than ‘narrative’ and suggests that Smalley’s primary concern is the ‘musical’ with Young’s primary concern being the ‘narrative’. Smalley’s ‘musical’ structures often rely on extensively transforming initial sounds, while Young’s approach in Pythagoras’s Curtain explores referential sounds to infer a connotative narrative of tactile excitation of objects; I also acknowledge Wishart’s Red Bird as a political narrative.
My approach in What Lie Within has been to develop a narrative strategy between these two positions. The ‘conceptual narrative’ of What Lie Within is the ‘search’ for objects and the exploration of the potential of an object once it is ‘found’ in relation to the development of a musical structure. E.g, in one section of the piece, the ‘search’ is achieved sonically by presenting the untransformed sound images captured through the excitation of objects within a wooden box. ‘Found’ objects are explored in the piece by utilising the untransformed captured excitations.
What Lie Within demonstrates an approach to a narrative strategy which focuses more on the relationship between sounds and possible extra-musical meanings than Young, but adopts a more open approach to potential readings than Wishart’s more programmatic approach. The composition also demonstrates an approach to acousmatic composition which relies on the use of untransformed sound to create musical dialogue.
What Lie Within suggests that ‘reduced listening’ can be encouraged by exploring the excitation of objects at the production stage in a more overt musical way. For example, exploring the rhythmic potential of objects in order to create the musical ideas of a composition.
What Lie Within was performed at ICMC 2013, Perth, Australia.
