Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Birmingham : A - Music
Allele : for 40 voices
Allele for 40 voices
Allele was written as part of an interdisciplinary project, ‘Music from the Genome’, which brought together a scientific research study into the genetics of musical aptitude, with a musical work rooted in the materials of the study.
Its research content exists on four main levels:
1) how, and the extent to which, scientific materials can be used to lead to artistic production; in this case the work is based on sequences of genetic coding taken from the human genome mapped in various ways onto musical materials.
2) the consideration of genetic sequences as comparable to serial forms and procedures that derive from them - to research into the relationship between ‘the strict’ and ‘the free’ in the compositional process of a musical work.
3) building on previous research that involves the consideration of the relationship between present and past - through memory, allusion and quotation; here the material through which this is investigated is choral writing for large forces, stretching back through the 20th century to the Renaissance, in particular to Tallis’s Spem in Alium.
4) this leads to a further ongoing question: how can a work be at once explicitly referential/reverential and new? Through both its structures and sonorities, my work tests limits in this area, without seeking a solution to the problem.
