Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Birmingham : A - Music
The Impermanence of Things : for piano, ensemble and electronics
This work was a commission from the London Sinfonietta. It was part of an ongoing primary research project into memory and fragmentation (which included the AHRC-supported works On Memory and A Pebble in the Pond of 2003/4).
Its research content exists on four main levels:
1) how, and the extent to which, quotations of, and allusions to, past music can be used to explore the processes and emotions of memory.
2) the relationship in music between ‘intra’ and ‘extra’ – how musical structure may be at once an internal network of relationships, and refer to an external network of signifiers.
3) a study into the formal and expressive uses of the fragment, engaging with both the 19th-century view of the fragment and postmodern plurality.
4) part of an ongoing development of a musical ‘grammar’ which spans a wide spectrum of dissonance and consonance (including ‘acoustic dissonance’ by means of the use electronics), and in so doing contribute to the development of ‘21st-century tonality’.
