Output details

The River Sings

Interactive sound installation. Concept and sound design by Paul Moore, score by Frank Lyons and live electronics by Brian Bridges. Premiered by countertenor Mark Chambers at the Void Gallery, Derry/Londonderry, as part of the City of Song Festival, September 2009. Subsequently performed by invitation at the Phonography Colloquium (Goldsmiths, 2011). Also featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme "Open Country".

This piece plays on the notion of interface: between analogue and digital; traditional and experimental; physical and virtual; real and mythical.

The River Foyle bisects the sectarian topography of Derry, and the idea of it singing is here filtered through the idea of it as a neutral and uncontested space in what has otherwise been an area of conflict. The choice of the countertenor voice (which inhabits as it were a ‘border’ musical region) to lead the refrain of the piece responds to this, as well as to the ethereal, otherworldly aspect of a river in the middle of a city.

The theoretical grounding for the work has two main elements. The first, most recently expounded by Allen S. Weiss (“Varieties of Audio Mimesis”, 2007), has a long pedigree, that of all music imitating nature. This piece explores, indeed reverses, that mimetic relationship by making nature mimic the human voice. The second is the (here eminently apposite) idea of the refrain as developed by Deleuze and Guattari (“A Thousand Plateaus”, 1980): that communities are linked by shared musical refrains which are passed across generations unwittingly through ‘echoes of the sacred’.

Audio material was recorded on the River Foyle and these recordings were processed by a Max/MSP patch to create phase-vocoded drones. In performance, the countertenor creates a refrain for these drones, working from an aleatoric score which facilitates a ‘flowing’ improvisatory quality.