I’ve made a YouTube video that tries to elaborate on my own approach to composing music. This entails what I think about what we call “Avant garde” music or “contemporary classical music” today. By all means, check out the video on my YouTube channel. In this video, I outline some practice-led research (from my own PhD in Composition) that led me to conclude that the ‘Avant Garde’ music scene is just one massive adherence to a bunch of unspoken established rules and, essentially, a ‘style’. It’s a style so much so that it can be quoted and even the subject of pastiche. This video (and this blog post) should also go some way to showing how composition IS and CAN BE research (am looking at you, Croft).
I’m going to talk about a particular collection of pieces I started writing during my PhD. This collection of pieces is called ENERGY CANNOT BE CREATED. You can listen to these pieces online. So far there are four pieces in this collection. It’s important to note that I wrote all these pieces for a student ensemble. This had an influence on how I wrote the pieces because I had to keep in mind the students’ capabilities at all times.
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Interstice is an artwork and iPhone app that enables users to record, and listen to, an audible representation of their heartbeat. It also allows users to select a musical fragment to accompany their heartbeat. As such, users from all over the world are able to collaborate in the formation of a composition comprising an intricate cacophony of audible heartbeats and musical fragments.
The acts of composing and performing are central processes to the formation of a musical work. Performance is a medium through which music is formed. It is a significant part of a work’s compositional process and, as such, forms a symbiotic relationship with the act of composing. An iterative cycle between performance and composition comes about when the composer performs their own work or composes through performance. Performance in this manner can be seen as a form of practice-based research that can guide the compositional process.
Primarily engaging with music of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, (Per)Forming Art: Performance as Research in Contemporary Artworks focuses on performance as a type of compositional technique and as a mode of practice-based research for the act of composing a work. It addresses how performance and composition are reciprocally entwined and what role this hermeneutic relationship plays in creative practice today. This publication is the work of multiple authors from academic institutions around the world; each approaches the topic “(Per)Forming Art” from their own perspective. As such, the contents of this book will appeal to a variety of academic interests pertaining to various “styles,” traditions and cultures, all of which are unified by the relationship between performance and composition.
I would like to thank the following researchers for contributing to this book: Michael D. Atkinson (Sheffield Hallam University); Gabriele Cavallo (Goldsmiths, University of London); Hans–Peter Gasselseder (University of Aalborg); Jacopo Gianninoto (Assumption University of Thailand); Maria Kallionpää (University of Oxford); Marina Liontou Mochament (Leiden University, Orpheus Institute); Adilia Yip (Royal Conservatoire Antwerp); Cornelia Zambila (Orpheus Institute Ghent)