Output details

Endings

Ending is a creative collaboration between composer Jeremy Peyton Jones and electronic composer and sound artist Kaffe Matthews. The collaboration combines material for voices and ensemble with live electronic manipulation, focused on a series of vocal settings of the final paragraphs of works of modernist literature. The programme also featured the large-scale work And the days are long for electric guitar, live electronics and amplified ensemble.

The purpose of the research was to bring together the usually separate styles and idioms of acoustic and electronic music, and to explore new means of combining them which address the problematics inherent in both. The research explores the interface and tension between contemporary live electronic music which typically doesn’t rely on traditional notation and involves improvisation, and more traditional acoustic music relying on notation and fixed scores.

Electronic music often lacks a strong live performance element and its improvisatory nature can be obscured or lost in delivery, whereas acoustic music has great potential for re-contextualisation through the extension of the spatial, textural and timbral elements using electronics. An additional purpose was the exploration of the collaborative process and an analysis of the changing roles of notation, experimentation and improvisation in contemporary performance practice. The combination explored here is different from what is conventionally understood as electro-acoustic music, and is transferable to any kind of live music which seeks to explore new means of presentation and collaboration.

The research questions include:

1. Where do the boundaries between composition and performance lie when electronic music intersects with acoustic?

2. What procedures, techniques, resources and knowledge do composers of different genres draw upon?

3. How are the relationships defined between notation and performance, experimentation and improvisation?

4. How does experimentation through collaboration work, between composers and between composers and performers?