Output details

Lamentations, stereo electroacoustic composition

This work investigates the projection of narrative in acousmatic music through the integration of a minimal amount of spoken text and digitally processed real world sounds. Within that frame a further imperative is evocation of a contemporary social-political theme, namely questioning of present-day international military intervention by Western powers. Two texts are used: a short extract from the introduction to We Will Not Cease, the memoirs of First World War conscientious objector Archibald Baxter and four verses from the Latin Vulgate Lamentations of Jeremiah. The Baxter text relates two dreams he experienced just before the outbreak of WWI. Formally the work aims to offer the dreams as images, the soliloquy of a ‘real’ person, imparting a context against which the musical material functions as an emotive cognate, corroborated by the Biblical text as an ancient consciousness embodying certain of the modern text’s sentiments. Layers of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ representations of experience, conscious and subconscious, are paralleled in the application of digital audio processing, particularly the forming of melodic strands through the precise spectral filtering of bell and vocal sounds. This mining of spectromorphological detail is central to the use of the Latin text, with its consonant attacks and noise spectra central to the articulation and colouration of many of the music’s extensions of timbre and gesture. In accord with the political message, Lamentations has been integrated with Lala Meredith-Vula’s images of post war Kosova in the audiovisual Are You Everybody? In that, the ending has been recomposed to accommodate the essential ‘survival’ narrative of Meredith-Vula’s photographic essay, substituting a tonally ambiguous closure of interlocking spectra for the syntactically open questioning punctuations of the original. Commissioned by the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges. Premiered by the Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre, George Cadbury Hall, Birmingham, 16 January, 2010.