Output details

Photographs of Water

Photographs of Water explores the difficulty of achieving emotional expression in electroacoustic music. The research is in two directions. The first investigates contemporary lyric poetry as a model for musical language. In this poetry, vignettes of personal experience, and description ostensibly of the real world, are objects for introspective contemplation. Just as first-person fiction is not assumed to describe the writer's own story, the material of lyric poetry may be invented; yet it carries a "truth" that invites the reader's participation. By analogy, the recorded materials for Photographs are drawn from my personal catalogue; but their real-world origins contribute an affective charge rather than information about specific origins. From the several poems the poets recorded for me (see programme note), I chose excerpts and assembled a libretto. The music does not "set" the poems but extrapolates and subsumes them, and the libretto organizes a contemplative rather than dramatic narrative. The source recordings are frequently presented with little apparent manipulation, except at pivotal moments, but subtler processing is pervasive.

The second research focus is on creating spatial perspectives, for multi-loudspeaker concert performance, that serve the intimacy of the material. Tools exist for synthesizing "spatiality", but in Photographs real and hyper-real environments are created by the orchestrational combination of many elements, brought together in the ear by compatible spectromorphology and/or referential connections. Many source elements were recorded in surround formats, the symphony orchestra directly in octaphonic format. Software was written for space-preserving spectral manipulation. The final medium is octaphonic plus three discrete channels. The compositional and technical strategies together aim to give resilient spatial perspectives for multiple listening positions in the concert hall.

Photographs of Water received its première at Bangor University, 7 November 2013, "Electroacoustic WALES" concert series; and its international première at Rutgers University, NJ, 12 November 2013.