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Eight Voices

Eight Voices was commissioned by EXAUDI vocal ensemble with funds from the Britten-Pears Foundation and was first performed at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, Germany, July 2012, conducted by James Weeks, and subsequently broadcast by Südwestrundfunk (SWR-2). The project was further supported by a University of Huddersfield Research Fund grant that supported research and development workshops with EXAUDI as well as public outreach activities at local schools. The work extends research into textural density and repetitive metric organisation, finding new formal focus through the use of a series of discrete, juxtaposed ‘panels’. It considers how aspects of textural writing employed in the previous instrumental pieces might be expanded and reinterpreted in the context of writing for voices and takes into particular consideration the implications of tessitura and phrasing. The materials themselves are constructed from cycles derived from contingent pitch classes, which are spread over several octaves and looped to create larger sound panels. The implications of working with cyclical structures and discrete panels of materials is discussed in the book chapter ‘Interview with Bryn Harrison’ (2009) in Saunders, J. ed. The Ashgate Companion to Experimental Music, Surrey, Ashgate, pp.282-292 ISBN 978-0-7546-6282-2. The book chapter ‘Listening Through Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories’, in Harrison, B. & Glover, R. (2013) Overcoming Form: reflections on immersive listening, Huddersfield University Press, offers a perceptual analysis of the role of repetition and memory in Triadic Memories, providing a wider contextualization of the function of exact and inexact repetitive panels in my own work.