TempoPub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040298223000256
Marat Ingeldeev
{"title":"Tim Parkinson","authors":"Marat Ingeldeev","doi":"10.1017/S0040298223000256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298223000256","url":null,"abstract":"deadly – the latter achieved in this music through a kind of labyrinthine repetition. At length, the piano striates time evenly and persistently to mark the conclusion, and to return us out of this beautiful world. pegaeae, for string trio, begins with a section more silence than sound. Stepping melodic statements alternate with lengthy gaps of silence, evoking the springs for which they are named. The source is unknown, the water magically appearing, dribbling or tumbling from the side of a hill, vanishing just as quickly. The silence between melodic dribbles is, however, artificial, and one can hear the fades to infinity as they were drawn into the DAW. Some are really quite aggressive in their shaping. It is a shame that this obvious technical error was made with this recording. Happily, the discourse modulates slightly to a lush netting of slow glissandi to which the previous dribbles have become ornamentation. Once this texture is established, the second half is more of the same. Yet, for that, it is the case that this is some of the most exquisite music I have heard for some time. I struggle to pinpoint how exactly. limnades, for piano, cello and vibraphone, involves some of the most extraordinary orchestration for a trio I know. It begins with a totemic gesture: C# to a repeated G, ripples on a silent surface. This music is very concerned with its materials, almost didactic. It quietly repeats pitches at different tempi, frequently in unison, sometimes two, and rarely three different pitches. Lithe gestures try to break out of the rippling repeated pitches, to no avail. These textures are spread equally across the three instruments with such grace that one hardly notices the virtuosity. The simplicity of the brilliantly handled materials makes me wonder if Iddon is trying to make this piece work, to make the work push out of itself. But like a lake, it is bounded. Eventually it gives in to the simplest, almost indulgent idea of steady pulses at 55 bpm of the same pitch in various octaves, including a beautifully and luxuriously captured piano in its lower register and concludes shortly thereafter. potameides, for piano, violin, viola, cello, bass clarinet, flute and percussion, consists of diaphanous rapidly flowing lines with dripping repeated pitches. Though this has the largest ensemble of the album, it doesn’t sound at all larger for it – in fact, compared to its slower predecessor, it sounds smaller. The music flows, simply flows and one patiently waits for an event. In the context of the album, it feels to me like a pure progression of time. I can’t help but wonder how it would read as an isolated piece of concert music. Gradually the roaming lines decrease in their density ever so slightly, and one notices the melodically sculpted nature of the repeating pitches. An ascending semitone is a palpable shift in the grounding of the local moment. eleionomae, for piano, violin, cello, bass clarinet and flute, concludes the album in a tota","PeriodicalId":22355,"journal":{"name":"Tempo","volume":"77 1","pages":"82 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43601015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
TempoPub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040298223000050
A. Moorehouse
{"title":"WHERE ARE WE GOING? AND WHAT HAVE WE DONE?","authors":"A. Moorehouse","doi":"10.1017/S0040298223000050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298223000050","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article discusses responses to the survey-score Where are we Going? and What have we Done?, which sets out to explore how Anglophone composers choose to ground the impacts of their compositional practice. The composers’ responses primarily centred around the psychosocial impacts of composition, and the article unpicks some of the implications of this focus. The article then details the effect the survey-score had on my own composing, before outlining the affordances of narrative approaches to the act of scoring, and their ability to shine a brighter light on the impacts of our practice, both retrospectively and also with regards to future performances.","PeriodicalId":22355,"journal":{"name":"Tempo","volume":"77 1","pages":"7 - 16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47452671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
TempoPub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040298223000074
Thomas Metcalf
{"title":"BETWEEN AUDIATION AND EKPHRASIS: PASCAL DUSAPIN'S ‘FALSE TRAILS’","authors":"Thomas Metcalf","doi":"10.1017/S0040298223000074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298223000074","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article investigates the prolific deployment of images in Pascal Dusapin's scores of the mid to late 1990s. Using Edwin Gordon's concept of ‘audiation’ and Siglind Bruhn's concept of ‘musical ekphrasis’, as well as Neal Curtis’ ideas on the agency and liveness of images, interdisciplinary interpretations of three Dusapin works are offered, using the score image as the main analytical starting point. Beginning with his Piano Études and Loop, these analyses will demonstrate how the score images, derived from the study of ‘catastrophe theory’, prefigure the control of various musical parameters relating to the relationship of variables in this mathematical concept and its forms. An analysis of String Quartet No. 4, notable for its use of both a score image (of a machine) and textual quotation (from Samuel Beckett's Murphy), will then demonstrate how the visual can interact with the verbal to construct a plurality of musical metaphors. The article concludes by positing that Dusapin's elusiveness on the role and function of the images within his work could amount to what W. T. J. Mitchell describes as ‘ekphrastic fear’: an anxiety that the composer's success amalgamating image and music might have broken down the ontological boundary between them.","PeriodicalId":22355,"journal":{"name":"Tempo","volume":"77 1","pages":"26 - 43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43926564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
TempoPub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1017/S0040298223000086
Sarit Shley-Zondiner
{"title":"STRIVING FOR THE UNDERNEATH: BODY AND PATHOS IN CHAYA CZERNOWIN'S COMPOSITION FOR VOICE IN INFINITE NOW AND HEART CHAMBER","authors":"Sarit Shley-Zondiner","doi":"10.1017/S0040298223000086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298223000086","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In her two recent operas, Heart Chamber (2017–19) and Infinite Now (2015–16), Chaya Czernowin uses vocal ensembles to embody a single character. In a 2016 article, she explained that she wanted to liberate the individual voice from its fixed emotional, social and individual conventions (especially its ingrained pathos), and to work with the voice as a free imaginative sonic material, using the ensemble technique to achieve this. This article argues that the voice ensemble technique amplifies and intensifies the pathos of the voice rather than eliminating it. Recognising that the voice has strong somatic qualities since it is produced in the body, I suggest a material-musical analysis, based on the theories of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Brian Massumi, that focuses on the body, the sensual experience and the physical space, and rejects the hermeneutic tradition that refers to meaning and interpretation only. What emerges is that the voices, instrumentation and electronics of the ensemble are designed to embody the inner body and the outer space at the same time. The voice ensemble may split and produce multi-layered mental–physical states, and express how traditional dichotomies, such as culture/nature, body/mind and subject/object, can meld into multi-perspective processual movements. It is in this intersection of sound and drama, manifesting the corporeal, that the unique power of opera is evinced.","PeriodicalId":22355,"journal":{"name":"Tempo","volume":"77 1","pages":"44 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47562540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}