Present: DB, EF, TR, JG, FS, SJN…
Danny Bright notes (by SJN):
- Ghosting Sonic Heritage: how can sound and music works interrogate sonic memory and temporality in relation to ruined, disused and re-purposed industrial or post-industrial space?
- ‘Sonic ghosting’, a creative act deliberately conjuring up, composing or making foreground secondary images, whereby the form of these ‘images’ is expressed using a combination of sound and music.
- Notions of temporal removal felt to be inherent to composition
- Juxtaposed asynchronous moments – Edensor
- Sonic ghost – unmoored from its temporal reality, separated from a singular perspective
- Between conjury and ventriloquism
- ‘Un-moored” and “illusive” (elusive) but “grounded”
- Alternative and multiple heritages
- Multimodal presentation and process
- Theme and variation – can be explored through different media as much as through harmonic variation, intra-medium
- Battle of Orgreave, 1984 (Orwell et al), protest and historical songs
- Multimodal installation/ performance output?
- Encourage engagement with an idea – allow a way to see the possibility of different approaches…
- Avoid authoritative single perspective of traditional heritage
Evelyn Ficarra notes (by SJN):
- Excerpts from video of “Dissonant Futures” performance (EF with Ian Winters, Myra)
- Dissonance – relationship-driven, how many multiple relationships can there be?
- How to define consonance?
- Futures – the piano as historic, culturally “resonant” object that can be reinvested to develop new “futures”?
- Yearning for the object, whilst working with digital resources
- Giving voice, questions of scale. Video projections in piece play with scale, in the same way as much of Evelyn’s work builds on a tension across scales.
- Notions of past and future – memories and expectations
- Composing is future projection
Evelyn Ficarra (her own notes):
Played extracts from recent ‘Dissonant Futures’ collaboration with improviser/ composer/ pianist Myra Melford <www.myramelford.com> and video artist Ian Winters <www.ianwinters.com> . Showed clips from the video documentation of the event in the Meeting House at Sussex on Wed 19th of Feb. Dissonant Futures is for amplified/prepared piano, live video projections, and electronic sound. The piano is wrapped / enfolded in white fabric, like a tent, and images are projected onto it. Myra prepared the piano in elaborate ways with magnets, metal and wood. Ian is using a video controller made from wood and strings with conductive metal strips. He designed and built the controller himself. I am contributing sonic layers using pre-recorded sounds from Myra deployed in real time through Max MSP, in response to her, and following a prearranged structure on which we improvise.
Themes: the nature of dissonance, how to define dissonance beyond harmonic considerations (dissonant timbres, rhythmic dissonance, audio-visual dissonance). Dissonance as context related, as contingent, as a question of relationships and expectation. Futures – what is the future of the piano in the 21st century, how does the concept of the future relate to music composition. Danny spoke of sound as being always in the past – music relies on memory and expectation – music as a question of shaping our expectation of the future and our constant re-working of these expectations in the light of continuous change.
Possible common threads across both presentations? (SJN)
- Sense of composition’s being temporally “removed” – projected – future?
- The haunting of an object/ instrument’s past, residues of practices, behaviours?
CCPRG 