Output details

Shangri-La/Room 101: work for solo accordion. Duration: 8:00.

First Performance: XII International Accordion Festival, Vilnius, Lithuania, 15/11/2008, Promoz Parovel (accordion) http://akordeonofestivalis.lt/index.php?id=74.

Shangri-La/Room 101 (the title is a play on the hotel and room where the first sketches were carried out) is one of a series of works that investigates the use of vectors of fast-moving musical gestures as ways of grouping musical materials into higher-level structures or phrases. The methodology draws on two disciplines – the idea of morphological ‘strings’ as developed in Denis Smalley’s seminal article relating to the analysis of electroacoustic music [1] and models that are based on phonetics, and the relationship between music and language elaborated by Patel [2]. These sources affected the compositional methodology, establishing links between these ideas and musical processes that can be readily identified in the score. These consist of: 1) the relationship between the rhythmic structure of the work and the ‘non-periodic’ rhythmic structure of ‘linguistic’ rhythm. 2) The division of the instrument into registral ‘regions’ as a parallel to a language with a series of ‘level tones’. 3) The use of melodic (prosodic) contour, in conjunction with tessitura, to convey both ‘expressivity’ and ‘modes of speaking’ in a gestural/linguistic sense, along with more conventional musical models of ‘tension and release’. Rapid ‘cross-cutting’ between different ‘micro-events’ – contours, textures, timbres and rhythmic detail (mostly lasting a bar each) – form the basis of this analogy to linguistic structure whilst, at the same time, the timbral evolution of the work follows the principles suggested by the compositional practice of electroacoustic music (e.g. manipulation of timbre, control of gesture, etc.).

[1] Patel, A., D. 2008. Music, Language, and the Brain, New York: Oxford University Press.

[2] Smalley, D. 1986. Spectro-morphology and Structuring Processes. In S. Emmerson (ed.) The Language of Electroacoustic Music. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 61-93.