Output details

Four Shibusa

Four Shibusa is a 43-minute composition in four sections partly commissioned by Visiones Sonoras Festival, Mexico, and performed in 2011 at NoTAM in Oslo, INTER/actions, and at the Musik-Akademie Basel. It forms the centrepiece of a collaborative audio-visual project with the painter Pip Dickens, exhibited at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, London, 6th March – 17th April 2012. The collaborative research project was funded by a £12,329 grant from the Leverhulme Foundation, which supported Pip Dickens as Artist-in-Residence in the Music Department at the University of Huddersfield, October 2011 – September 2012. The research underpinning the composition is outlined in the following book: Adkins, M. and Dickens, P. eds. (2012) Shibusa – Extracting Beauty. University of Huddersfield Press, ISBN 978-1-86218-101-4. I co-edited the book and contributed the chapter, ‘Exploding Stillness pp. 3-21 (9000 words), which discusses the relationship between music and painting. This chapter is in three parts. The first part examines the historical association of painting and music and the scientific experiments undertaken to demonstrate a relationship between the two. The second part examines the influence of painting in the work of two composers, Bryn Harrison and Aaron Cassidy. The third part discusses the process of composition of Four Shibusa.