Review Details
ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC FROM THE STUDIOS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN
Alan Cooper
04 December 2008
Cowdray Hall
There is little doubt that the current series of Lunchbreak Concerts in the Cowdray Hall stands proudly in the vanguard of contemporary music promotion. Nearly half of its concerts so far have been devoted to new or experimental music. Thursday’s was one such concert, its programme consisting of four pieces of electroacoustic music from the studios at the University of Aberdeen. Two of the composers represented, Professor Pete Stollery and Dr Miriama Young are members of staff for Aberdeen University Music while the other two, Patrick Keenan and Ross Whyte are graduate students.
What exactly is electroacoustic music? The term has been used to describe a vast area of compositional techniques but at least as exemplified by the four compositions which we heard on Thursday, there is a clear difference between electroacoustic and electronic music. The important thing about electroacoustic music is that it should contain some element of sound which is produced from acoustic sources in the real world while electronic music is entirely generated artificially using sine waves and so on. For me, it is Pete Stollery’s music that lays out the ideas and techniques he likes to use in the purest and clearest way. His piece Onset, Offset is based on sound recordings made in Union Street. Traffic sounds and the banging of van doors (at least that’s what it sounded like to me) are recorded then the composer moulds and shapes them electronically in the studio almost as a sculptor moulds clay, finally unleashing them in a firework display of sound which can set the listener and even the composer spinning off on a thousand tangents of imagination and conjecture. Stollery has a distinct style of composing, one which is very well controlled and shapely and it was his piece that seemed to have the most discernable form and development in time. As he said in his introduction, the basic background sound of Union Street resonates in C and at the climax of the composition, the sounds mutated almost into the sound of a resonant cathedral organ ringing out that note.
Ronium by Patrick Keenan was the closest in style to Pete Stollery’s piece. Here the composer took his source from the sound made by striking a metal bar. I had expected something quite loud and percussive but the opening of the piece was like the quiet tinkling of tiny bells. As the sound moved round the Hall, controlled by Keenan, his experiments of timbres mutating through space developed into the chiming of larger and louder bells before finally you could almost discern the sound of unearthly voices singing somewhere in the background.
Both Wittenoom Lament #2 by Ross White and Miriama Young’s 1,000 Kisses had a certain affinity in that both used elements of the spoken voice and poetry. Ross Whyte’s piece was just part of a larger work written in memoriam of his grandfather and other workers who died as a result of working in Wittenoom in Western Australia. Now a ghost town, it was the site of a large blue asbestos mine.
Whyte’s piece began with a voice stating clearly the words “this is a recording” The mysterious ringing of a telephone led into the sound of a chiming melody played repeatedly on a piano. Alterations were subtly made to the sound though with the original source never quite lost. There was a fascinating link with the ideas of minimalism displayed in this piece.
1,000 Kisses by Miriama Young exploited the affiliation of electroacoustic music with another art form, namely cinema. The words of a poem of the same title were recorded by the poet Catherine Bowman while Miriama Young had provided a soundtrack that either melded with the words or stood in contrast to them. The sounds of small fluttering birds were balanced later on by the cries of geese or perhaps sea birds. Chimes, a child’s voice, and a sound that could have been a galloping horse, fingers tapping the microphone or even the warm deep purring of a cat were all part of a fascinating counterpoint to the spoken verse.
Music consists of ordered sound and although not everyone can respond in the same way to the sounds of electroacoustic music, it certainly fulfils the definition of ordered sound and if attended to with an open mind and more importantly, open ears, it can reveal an endless world of sonic vistas to the imaginative listener. This is a faculty that has been partly lost since television replaced radio, perhaps it is something that we should try to regain.