Compositional Methods in Electroacoustic Music - Adrian Moore ...

compose for listeners, not for analysts and musicologists, and to gain access to this music, listeners need only
to be human (with all the baggage this implies) and to be prepared to listen (surely, even analysts and musicologists
are listeners first?).
We are organic beings inhabiting an organic world, a world constantly in flux; whatever the speed of our assimilation
of technologies that permit the deconstruction of that world into zeroes and ones, our organs of
perception and the cerebral machinery we employ to interpret what we perceive are also organic. Why, then,
should we expect our creations to be entirely ‘rational’ and to exhibit stable, repeatable, easily quantifiable
components? Concepts, schemata and pre-compositional strategies may contribute to our creative endeavours,
but their detection should not be the ultimate measure of musical success; the final arbiters here are our perception
and our ability to relate what we hear to what we understand ourselves to be.
Music is both concrete and ephemeral, and acousmatic music accentuates this dichotomy. On holiday (or anywhere
else), we use cameras (and recording equipment!) to try to capture the unique, fleeting moment, the
ephemeral experience of being ‘elsewhere.’ For me, composition (and the teaching of composition) is the process
of enabling such sonic snapshots to evolve into larger musical expressions of human experience - a process
that seems not only fittingly natural and organic, but also gives us something to celebrate. For, like a holiday,
life is fleeting enough.
Paper 21 - Composers Talking
15:30
Emmerson, Simon
Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, De Montfort University.
In 1991 I embarked on an unfinished project to write an article (perhaps a book) on how electroacoustic music
was really composed. One theme was to try to understand better those practices which claimed (post
Pierre Schaeffer) no preconceived ‘methods’ independent of the material sound’s quality. These adopted an
entirely empirical approach - ‘what works for the ear is right’. I sensed at that time (and still do) that this
veils from us a range of approaches and methods to an art of recorded sound. Such questions as - Does it
matter if you record the sound and hence are more likely to know its source/cause? How do you describe and
classify your sound library? And anyway what is ‘right’? And many more... In fact I had been interviewing
composers since the 1970s but not in detail about working methods. In December 1991 I thus invited myself
to the universities of Birmingham and East Anglia to talk to their studio directors and composers (postgraduate
students). In the summer of 2012 I discovered the tapes and digitized them - interviews (previously
unpublished in any form) with Jonty Harrison, Denis Smalley, Andrew Lewis and a group of Birmingham students
en masse. This paper seeks to unravel some of the ways composers talk about their working methods -
maybe differently alone than in a group. And this was 1991, transitional times from analogue to digital - no
mass storage or plug-ins, just some off-board digital processing and limited real time editing and mixing. How
has this shift changed the discourse?
Keynote - Paper 22 - ‘Lexicon’ behind the curtain.
16:00
Lewis, Andrew
University of Bangor
A detailed contextualisation and presentation of tonight’s work.
4.5 Concert 6
19:00
Three Cities
Stollery, Peter
University of Aberdeen
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