Compositional Methods in Electroacoustic Music - Adrian Moore ...

Undertow
Harrison, Jonty
University of Birmingham
Plunging beneath the waves we discover a world teaming with life and pulsing with energy. But we cannot
hold our breath forever. (And not only that, there seem to be cars down here, masquerading as breaking
waves!)
Undertow (2007; 12:17) was commissioned by La Compagnie Pierre Deloche Danse for Océan-Cité, a civil
spectacle premiered in Lyon. Thanks to Martin Clarke for additional sea recordings made in Shetland.
Resonances
Emmerson, Simon
De Montfort University
Resonances was commissioned by the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges and
realised in their studios in April 2007. It was first performed at the Festival Synthse, Bourges on June 6th
2007.
What is ‘modernism’? Music was late to have an answer compared with other arts. We hear glimpses of music
we think we know; no melody or rhythm, just an instant of ‘colour’, frozen and moving - ‘eternity in a moment’.
Colours may be vivid and clear, or sometimes dark and opaque. As Adorno said, it all began with late
Beethoven. Then friends and enemies meet in love-hate relationships, Wagner and Debussy, Schoenberg and
Stravinsky ... there are others. Need the listener know who? Of course not! (If it’s too obvious I think I have
failed.) This is a personal choice from my memories of a repertoire I love but which may not last another century.
Memory changes perspectives, transforms and shuffles. There are unique resonances in each of us.
Lucent Voids
Nyström, Erik
City University and SAE London
Lucent voids is an eight channel fixed media work composed during 2012. The work relies heavily on transformative
textural synthesis processes, and aims to create a spatial polyphony, exploring morphological formations
over larger timescales, magnitudes and acoustic contrasts, transforming perspectives, and structures of
spectral space.
Lucent Voids explores the idea of an ever-expanding topological fabric emerging out of the uncertain, perhaps
as a metaphor for how the fragility of human cognition feeds imagination and creativity. We are transported
through a reality within which we cannot rely on the permanence and linearity of space as we normally perceive
it, but where the terrain keeps warping as we journey through it; seemingly distorting our own physical
presence to negotiate unlikely combinations of the microscopic and the macroscopic, interiority and exteriority,
the temporal and the non-temporal. Our experience of the present is elastic, as time acquires a spatial
dimension when we feel the future approaching, or ourseves projecting towards it; and the past accumulating
in a complex topography. A counterpoint of malleable textures outline peripheries, contrasts, foci, and voids,
in the spectral coloration of a visual world which is alien in essence, although we encounter strange vestiges of
the familiar, and face the suspect reflections of humanity.
Nebula Sequence
Moore, Adrian
University of Sheffield
Creative motivations: Wednesday 30th November 2011 was the first day in my working life that I went on
strike. I thought I was being hypocritical taking my recording equipment with me but with hindsight I experienced
a sense of place, a feeling that I was personally doing the right thing, and an enormous sense of the
support that those on strike were giving to their colleagues under pressure. I also captured elements of the
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