Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Middlesex University
Symphony 2
Premiere, Embassy Theatre
This work seeks to bridge the worlds of sound sculpture/sound art and music composition (both electronic and notated). The theoretical and critical discourses of fine art and music are characterised by difference, notwithstanding the aesthetic similarity of certain practices at the edges of the disciplines: sound art and 'classical' electronic/electro-acoustic music; sound sculpture and 'home made' invented instruments/percussion ensembles. The status of the premiere performers—a mixture of composers and professional performers—is also worth noting.
The brief for the commission required reference to Futurism (the performance was organised to celebrate the centenary of Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto). As a starting point I took a specific Futurist document: a fragment of graphic score by Luigi Russolo. The opening of Symphony No 2 is a transcription of this ca 30" fragment. As well as creatively interpreting Russolo's visual design, in creating this I needed to find equivalents of Russolo's intonarumori in Shiel's sound sculptures. Further research tasks included collecting 'concrete' urban sounds for the electronic component of the work, and also notating rhythms 'found' in the city, for acoustic performance.
Shiel's sound sculptures have been used by (amongst others) Tim Brookes, Denis Smalley, Tazul Tajuddin and Julia Usher. Symphony No 2 follows and builds on the experience and discoveries of my first composition for Sculpted Sound, Invocation (2003). The unique instrumentation makes Symphony No 2, along with Invocation, distinct from the rest of my compositional output.
Symphony No 2 was premiered as part of a conference on 'theatre noise'. This context adds a further multi-disciplinary dimension to the existing sound art/music composition dichotomy. The piece adds to the small but growing repertoire for sound sculpture in general, and Shiel's in particular. Through use of the medium it extends the Western acoustic instrumentarium, investigating new expressive potential in acoustic sound.
