Output details

The River Still Sings

For narrator, piano trio, live sound and visual processing. Text by Seamus Deane. Performed by James Nesbitt, the Fidelio Trio, Frank Lyons and Paul Moore at LSO/St Luke’s on 28 June 2013 as part of the City of London Festival and in the Great Hall, University of Ulster on 21 July 2013 as part of the Derry/Londonderry UK City of Culture celebrations.

Building upon the collaborative, interdisciplinary research initiated by Moore and Lyons in the 2009 “The River Sings” project, “The River Still Sings” addresses significant questions about the importance of cultural capital in helping to define identity in a post-conflict society. It does this by interrogating the key theoretical concept in the specially commissioned Seamus Deane poem, that of pervasive equilibrium, through the use of the sonic and the visual to develop a deliberately tense equipoise.

To investigate this concept in the sonic domain, Lyons explores tensions through layering and juxtaposition of acoustic and electronic resources, pitched and unpitched sounds, tempered and non-tempered tunings and conventional and extended performance techniques.

In the visual domain, Moore’s images were shot using the Lomographic Lomokino system, a complex and deliberately anachronistic process using 35mm film stock which, once developed, was transferred to the digital platform using a rig connected to an iPhone. These images were then superimposed on digitally coded images of James Nesbitt narrating the Deane text and on moving lines, both of which respond to audio frequency triggers routed from the live instruments.

In combining the sonic and the visual, constant variations in equilibrium are created by improvisatory concepts explored in the real-time control of both the live electronic sound processing and of the visual images using Lemur software running on iPads. These methodologies progress the understanding of research process across disciplines in collaborative practice by creating a new interface to accommodate the often conflicting conventions of highly sophisticated sonic and visual practice in the analogue and digital domains. The resulting creative practice articulates the core argument that the contemporary space has moved to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the old and the new in technological, cultural and social terms.