Output details

Anagram Live at the Old Customs House, Tampere, Finland: Composition and Performance (13 m)

This is an experimental live work, written for the Tampere International Vocal Festival 2010. It is performed by John Potter (tenor). The piece is 13 minutes in duration. Media: Video documentation of live event.

The purpose of this piece is intended as a follow up to the 'Being Dufay' project. It shares no material with the previous work, but retains the configuration of John Potter (tenor) and Electronics. Visuals for the piece were created by Michael Lynch. The source material under exploration here is Gombert's 'Musae Jovis' (1530). Unlike 'Being Dufay', very little of the original piece is retained: instead the idea of a dense and closely spaced polyphony, with one or two simple lines which stand proud of this density was the main creative objective. This translation from a literal, written out polyphony, to notions of sonic density and timbral colour were found through aurally informed experimentation in the studio.

Sounds with detailed internal trajectories were selected in preference to the often minimal timbral language of 'Being Dufay'. The live electronics part for this piece is assembled from short-term 'packets' of sound sourced from studio recorded soundfiles: although the start and end points for playback are defined, the internal content of these sections can be freely warped and redistributed. This system, written in Pure Data, is simple in nature but escapes the limitations in commercial live performance software.