Output details

Gallup Memo. Composition for four players (percussion, violin, viola and contrabass), actor and auxiliary audio. Commissioned as part of the Blue Touch Paper Series (London Sinfonietta). Premiere: Carolina Valdés and members of the London Sinfonietta, 14th May 2013, Village Underground, London. Score and CD recording. URL and hard copy evidence date of dissemination.

In 1941/42, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air, performed a number of ‘suspense episodes’ for public broadcast. These radio plays were in the tradition of aural theatre with dialogue, music and sound effects supplying everything for an imaginative aural whole. In a single scene within one episode—abnormal for its complete absence of music—a character makes a transnational phonecall and time is suspended for just over three minutes. Coins are dropped into a payphone. Operators connect their exchanges. We hear the meditations of a man, focused on the meaning of the call. Gallup Memo is the retelling of this wordless scene with sound/music as the foregrounded narrative component. The piece establishes a manner of dialogue with the original recording, responding to its sounds and performing in tight coordination to the auxiliary audio. In consultation with Professor Sophie Scott (Head of Neuroscience at UCL and Senior Research Fellow at The Wellcome Trust), the interrogations of this work were based around wordless human sound (laughter, sounds of fear or danger, sound of empathy, etc.) The piece sets out to invert the importance of abstract sound to that of words such that the scene’s audio provides more descriptive narrative elements. The aural drama sets out an emotional location that could be understood in the first few seconds, and then through repetition, augments that sense into a differing range of aural retellings. The heightened refrains and additive layers exhibit an historic experience, but quickly becomes a separately-framed aural event.