Day Two: Friday 8 November
Bathway Theatre
12-1pm: Concert 3 – Acousmatic
Manuella Blackburn – Home Truths
Interruptions dominate this composition, acting as pauses, abrupt stops, moments cut short and held breaths. These moments represent the many interruptions experienced in my daily life, in work, activities and composing. Interruptions are temporal states where continuity is ceased but then resumed or returned to after the interrupting event is over. In this work, interruptions are positioned as the main event; acting as focal points and instances to explore the creative potential of these typically unwanted occurrences. There are many different types of interruptions constructed throughout the composition. These show the different outcomes between successful versus unsuccessful interruptions, those that form segues to those that forcefully threaten and break down sound’s continuous presence. This creative experimentation with many interruptions is set within the context of home life and home sounds. These sounds tell a story, imitating interruptions to flow, being in the home for extended periods and all this entails.
Manuella Blackburn is an electroacoustic music composer who specializes in acousmatic music creation. Her music focused on intricate details and the clustering and careful arrangement of small sounds within clear, polished sound worlds. Her sound recording of everyday objects, environments and instruments make their way into new pieces through the transformation of the ordinary into the fantastical. Manuella’s music has been performed at concerts, festivals, conferences and gallery exhibitions in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. Manuella is currently based at Keele University (England, UK) and is a Reader in Electronic Music and Sound Design.
Ivano Pecorini – Momento
‘Momento’ is an ambisonics composition for pipe organ and electronics. The piece utilises the organ of St.alfege’s Church in Greenwich, London, as well as the reverberations and acoustic properties of the church itself. The composition is designed to sound as if it were played inside the church and was written using only sounds whose fundamentals are frequencies that resonate and are emphasised inside the church.
Ivano Pecorini is a composer and sound artist based in London. His works move across experimental approaches and aesthetic investigations, focusing on the manipulation and mixture between field recordings, synthesis, and acoustic instruments. His compositions maintain a strong spirit of exploration and experimentation, creating unexpected electronic soundscapes. In 2018, Ivano graduated in Electroacoustic Composition at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome, and, in 2019, he post-graduated in Electronic Music Composition at the UWL in London. He is currently a doctoral candidate in music composition at the University of Greenwich.
John Gibson – In Summer Rain
In Summer Rain explores the sound of a rainstorm, from realistic soundscape to remote transformations. Rilke’s poem, “Before Summer Rain,” evokes the odd feeling we get when we sense that rain is coming. My piece begins like this, in a typical suburban setting, but soon the downpour rushes us into an imaginary interior world, where harmony colors the rhythm of rainfall, and thunder and lightning take on new forms. The opening gesture — the sound of someone leaving the confines of indoor space to welcome the sweet summer air — occurred during pandemic isolation, adding another dimension to the meaning of the piece.
This is one of a series of my pieces that weaves in and out of natural soundscape, using it to prompt memories and associations while experimenting with its ability to take on harmonic color and animate rhythm. I think of this music as a form of magical realism, and I hope listeners enjoy entering and leaving the make-believe realm.
Much of the pitched sound you will hear comes from recordings of rainfall, subjected to precisely tuned filters and a process of spectral analysis and recomposition.
John Gibson composes electronic music, which he often combines with instrumental soloists or ensembles. He also creates fixed-media audio and audiovisual works that focus on environmental soundscape. His portrait CD, Traces, is available on the Innova label, along with other recordings on the Centaur, Everglade, Innova, and SEAMUS labels. Audiences across the world have heard his music, in venues including the D-22 punk rock club in Beijing, the Palazzo Pisani in Venice, and the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. Presentations of his electroacoustic music include concerts at the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, the Bourges Synthèse Festival in France, the Brazilian Symposium on Computer Music, the Australasian Computer Music Conference, and many ICMC and SEAMUS conferences. Significant awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Paul Jacobs Memorial Fund Commission from the Tanglewood Music Center, and a residency in the south of France from the Camargo Foundation. He was a Mentoring Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in May 2017. Gibson is associate professor of music and director of the Center for Electronic and Computer Music (cecm.indiana.edu) at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
Saadi Daftari – Unhomed
There is a departure, an arrival and a life changing journey. One that repeats with each passing car, with each landing plane, with each squeaking train. One that transports but also transforms. One that rips you from one place and throws you into another. Unhomed is the second piece in an audio and audio/visual trilogy revolving around concepts pertaining to the conditions of the itinerant which is part of a broader research-creation project that focuses on sound as an agent of knowledge and how listening-as-knowledge can be used to examine some of the contemporary social struggles. Unhomed examines the conditions of migration and bodies in movement via the particular ontology of sound and its material conditions. More specifically, notions such as the fleetingness, the precariousness and the travelling nature of sound are used to lay out a vague and poetic narrative about disappearance and being absent, the rupture of migration and the trauma of leaving home behind, the fragmentation of identity and being torn between a bygone past and an ever approaching yet unknown future. It navigates through the metaphorical inside and outside space, and the sensorial experience of the front and the back to construct a fragmented and tense universe that undulates between the two worlds of here and there before settling for the here and now. Unhomed underscores the violence of movement and migration, and chronicles a cycle that resembles that of life, one that starts from obscurity and ends in obscurity.
Saadi Daftari (he/him/his) is a researcher and a sound/video artist currently completing a master’s degree in music composition and sonic creation under the supervision of Nicolas Bernier at the University of Montreal. His research-creation draws on ways of thinking outside music to examine how sound art can instigate the knowledge production qualities of sound. He seeks a sound art that is in active dialogue with the environment it is situated in and emerges from its relations. One that evokes inquiry into knowing the environment by listening and elicits paying attention to the revealing aspects of sound and how they relate to the unseen, the non-represented and the unheard. Saadi holds a master’s degree in science and a graduate degree in digital music. His research-creation is partially funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Wei Yang – couloirs…
The title of the piece is borrowed from Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad, where the words and the memory that contains them distort, filter, corroborate, and even construct each other, resulting in the observation that “conversation took place in a vacuum, as if the words meant nothing, as though they could have no meaning. A sentence would be suspended in space, frozen in its flight, and then could resume its journey there or elsewhere.” All sonic materials are derived from a vibrato F above middle C played on the concert flute, which serves as the metaphor for couloirs, both for their resemblance as well as the fact that they are essentially filters—couloirs being the filter for the memory in the film and the flute being the filter of the air and musical note. The piece can be regarded as a process of excavating from the flute various words and voices that speak and sing incomprehensibly but are nevertheless full of expression. Structurally, the composition was conceived as an aural cinema, taking much inspiration of nonlinear narrative editing techniques that are prevalent in the film, which to me might have borrowed from musical forms. This “reverse” mode of working enables certain gestures in the piece to gain recognizability and to be perceived as some tangible objects, which serve as the structural device to push the “plot” forward.