Output details

deeper than all roses

Medium Orchestra, Choir, 4 vocal soloists and rock group

Duration 25 minutes

Funded/Supported by Ohio Northern University, Ada, Ohio, USA

In collaboration with Lloyd Butler of Ohio Northern University

The central aim of the commission from the music department of Ohio Northern University was to create a work that would recontextualise the oratorio genre incorporating rock music gestural archetypes. The work also formed part of a wider research project - the EU funded Fascinate project - exploring interactive 3D camera editing and integrated 3D sound. The piece was used in the launch of the Fascinate project at Media City UK, incorporating new interactive TV editing technology. The sound space was orchestrated to change dynamically over time, and also taking into account how the 7.1 surround sound mix would be consumed by the listener using stereo headphones or speakers.

The piece responds to works that combined orchestral/rock group instrumentation: Steve Reich, Peter Gabriel, and Sonic Youth. The vocal writing drew upon the folk-inspired and at times drone-like compositions of composers such as Bronius Kutavicius and Onute Narbutaite, and the Liber Usualis.

These gestures were organized using a Markovian hierarchical process as in outputs 1 and 3, and once again explores the theoretical ideas of Eduardo Miranda in a compositional practice-le context. Using ‘PWGL’ algorithmic composition software, I constructed a network of ‘patches’ that assisted in the modelling of the work on the micro and macro levels. Chant lines for the vocalists were re-modelled as ‘riffs’ for the rock band in accordance with the unfolding intervallic nature of the underlying Credo; on the macro level the contextualisation of ‘rock-like’ music gestures along with those outside of this genre were controlled by probabilistic algorithms.

http://www.fascinate-project.eu/index.php/partners/partner-biographies/uos/