Hartley Residency - Juliet Fraser Seminar

Day 1: Tuesday 26 February

11.00-12.30, Room 6/1077: Introductory seminar for postgraduates. Material that students should read in advance will be circulated on or shortly after 12 February.

14.00-15.30, Room 6/1077: Workshop 1 – 'Creativity in Collaboration'. Participants will be chosen in advance, but all are welcome to spectate.

16:00–17:30, Room 6/1077: Formal presentation: Juliet Fraser. Chair: TBC.

Title: 'The voice that calls the hand to write: exploring the adventure of agency and authorship within collaborative partnerships'
This paper explores the topic of composer-performer collaboration, beginning with a brief look at some of the received wisdom around collaborative practice(s) and then examining two recent collaborative projects I have had with composers Rebecca Saunders and Cassandra Miller to tease out some questions and possible models of agency and authorship. The paper will include short extracts of live performance.

17:30, Drinks reception in the Arlott Bar.

18:30, Dinner at the Cowherds (if you would like to attend then please notify Amy Williamson, A.Williamson@soton.ac.uk).

 

Day 2: Wednesday 27 February

10:00-12:00, Room 6/1077: Workshop 2 – for composers. Participants will be chosen in advance, but all are welcome to spectate.

14.00-14.45, Room 6/1077: Formal Presentation: Brona Martin. Chair: Chenyin Tang.

Title: 'Community Engagement: Creativity and Collaboration'. 

As an Electroacoustic composer who creates works that explore specific soundscapes I spend a lot of time listening and recording sounds of the environment, gathering materials for my compositions. Outside of teaching at the University of Southampton I have also been involved in many community engagement projects where I have delivered workshops in field recording, sound design and composition.

When introducing others to soundscape composition I often begin with a soundwalk, an excursion that involves listening to the sounds of the environment, exposing our ears to the various layers of the soundscape such as manmade and natural sound. Participants then have the opportunity to make field recordings of sounds that they find interesting which they can then use as the material for their composition.

This collaborative activity facilitates dialogue between participants as they discuss the soundscape of the surrounding area. We discuss questions such as:

What is the quietest sound that you can hear?
What is the loudest sound you can hear?
What sounds do you associate with your home environment?
How would you describe the soundscape?
What sounds do you find calming?
What sounds do you find stressful?

These questions open up a discussion about the soundscape and invite participants to think about their relationship with their surroundings through sound and also how the soundscape has changed over time due to industrial and economic change. This becomes a collaborative project where participants share recordings and discuss them afterwards. The field recordings are pooled into a sound library and shared amongst the participants, so they have a bigger library of sounds to choose from.

This paper discusses the affordances of community engagement projects and how these projects promote collaboration, inspiration and creativity.

 

14.45-15.30, Room 6/1077: Formal Presentation: Jamie Howell. Chair: TBC.

Title: 'Shifting Perception: Repetition in Lois V Vierk’s Red Shift (1989)'

Much recent scholarship on musical repetition has focused on minimalism, electronic dance music, pop and historical classics. The fact that there has been less engagement with New Music in this field might be explained by the studious avoidance of repetition found in most 20th century approaches to classical composition (for example: serialism, sound mass, New Complexity, collage). In recent decades, however, New Music has been engaging anew with repetition through the music of composers such as Bernhard Lang and Cassandra Miller which intersects with the broadening out of the minimalist project seen in post-minimalist composers such as Lois V Vierk. Repetition in the New Music of the post-minimalist era is often used in subtle and oblique ways which present analytical challenges, but also the opportunity to open up new perspectives on our understanding of the use and perception of repetition in music.

This paper presents an analysis of repetition in Red Shift by Vierk. I will demonstrate that the piece presents processes and repetition at a variety of levels, and I will discuss the listening experience engendered by these elements of the composition.

This analysis will draw on the study of repetition across psychology, musicology, popular music studies and philosophy referencing the work of Elizabeth Margulis, Richard Middleton, Rebecca Leydon, Olivier Julien, Peter Kivy, and others. Using frameworks and approaches from this scholarship, my aim is to find a vocabulary to discuss the role of repetition in the piece, and the effects of its repetition strategies on the listener.

16:00-17:30, Room 6/1077: Closing roundtable: Title 'Sharing the cultural capital'. Panellists: Juliet Fraser, Brona Martin, Ben Oliver and Jelma van Amersfoort. Chair: TBC.