Output details

Composition: Three Last Letters - Live sextet, voices and diffused soundscape.

This work was developed from the outcomes of three antecedent projects:

• The Cape Jeremy Affair (2010) http://capejeremyaffair.blogspot.co.uk/

• The Unchanging Sea (2010) http://theunchangingseaopera.blogspot.co.uk/

• A Sentimental Journey (2010-12) http://sentimentalopera.blogspot.com/

The main research questions were: to investigate the associations between a forensic ontology of found materials as the source for a composition and the more abstract materials created by an ensemble of improvising musicians; and secondly, to frame this discourse within a compositional paradigm created from networked autonomous computer generated scores, disembodied voices, and a generated soundscape created from source recognisable environmental sounds.

The composition was commissioned by the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, and premiered by the Open Work Ensemble at Barry Arts Depot, May 2012.

The ontological library of found materials contained extracts of letters, journals, images, period music manuscripts, and environmental sounds from Antarctica. These were embedded within an autonomous computer software environment that generated a visual score – one for each human performer – which provided the impetus for an improvised realisation. Each laptop communicated with the others through a network, evaluating the composition of each visual score. Additionally, each laptop contributed to the unfolding aural soundscape, generated from the audio elements within the library, from which recognisable sounds merge or emerge.

Through a rigorous process of devising, the live performers developed strategies in which they interacted with this environmental soundscape, transforming it into a continuously shifting image created from word, expression, rhythm, tonality, texture, spatiality and the representational simulacra of the found materials. This process, and the system of embedding compositional processes within the autonomous software environments, proved a successful solution to the problem of articulating large temporal scale in improvised composition with computers.