1001 Nights

This work revisits the enchanted and magical world of the classic Arabian Nights in light of current events in the Middle East, highlighting in particular some intriguing parallels between the time-wasting narratives deployed by the crafty Shahrazad to distract her King-consort from taking her life, and some other equally engaging ‘narratives’ that circulate in Western culture, serving a rather more convoluted agenda. As research, 1001 Nights provides a significant contribution to the debate on ‘liveness’ in mediatised performance: liveness cannot be understood either as an intrinsic property of media (e.g. Phelan, 1993), or as an historically-determined factor (e.g. Auslander, 1999). Instead, 1001 Nights shows that liveness is a relational concept: what matters is the particular structural relationship between media in a given artwork – the same content may be classed as ‘live’ or not depending on how it functions semantically within the work, i.e. how it participates in the construction and communication of meaning. 1001 Nights includes video projections that simulate live computer interactions: the vocalist-actress is seen on stage operating a computer; the audience follows her actions relayed on a giant screen. The fact that such computer interactions are in reality pre-produced videos becomes totally irrelevant for assessing their ‘live’ status. This is because that particular theatrical action, in that particular structural context, is in effect articulating facts related to the present moment: what the audience is watching is not merely a video – they are witnessing the specific theatrical action showing a character (vocalist-Shahrazad) who, at that very moment, is performing the action of operating a computer. This shows that context is crucial in determining the nature of media as either ‘live,’ articulating the ‘here and now,’ or as mechanical re-production of past events. It shows, further, how such relationships can be purposefully manipulated by an author to construct meaning.Final Published versio

Electronic Dance Music in Narrative Film

As a growing number of filmmakers are moving away from the traditional model of orchestral underscoring in favor of a more contemporary approach to film sound, electronic dance music (EDM) is playing an increasingly important role in current soundtrack practice. With a focus on two specific examples, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998) and Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998), this essay discusses the possibilities that such a distinctive aesthetics brings to filmmaking, especially with regard to audiovisual rhythm and sonic integration

Making the act of music visible : theatrical considerations in music composition

There are a number of audio/visual materials connected to this thesis which can be downloaded or ordered from the British Library's EThOS service: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=96&uin=uk.bl.ethos.431941This research investigates the music-theatre phenomenon for the purpose of: clarifying how that differs from more traditional forms of musical theatre, i.e., Opera and Broadway musical; discussing its aesthetic bases; explicating its modes of operation in relation to both music and theatre. The writing is structured in three main parts. The first concern of the discussion is to clarify the connection between music and performance. To that end, Part One starts by reflecting on the nature of music and how its perception has been changed by modern technology, throwing live performance into question. The notions of physicality, embodiment, and gesture are then invoked in order to re-position music firmly within the performing arts. Part Two then delves into music-theatre touching on issues of terminology, artistic scope, positioning, production, funding, structures, institutions. Part Three, finally, offers some conclusions and recommendations. The Thesis is then followed by a commentary to the portfolio of compositions accompanying this research. The musical scores and audio-visual material relative to the works therein discussed are included on 1 separately bound volume

Authentically Badly Crafted by Professional Amateurs : Lo-fi aesthetics in noise and words

© Aras Edizioni srl unipersonale All Rights Reserved.On account of its self-conscious rejection of professional-standard playing and production techniques, and of its emphasis on the home-made, lo-fi practice is often discussed in terms of its authenticity. However, while the concept is widely discussed across popular music genres, what is meant by ‘authenticity’ remains elusive and much open to being twisted to suit one’s own ideological cravings. In this essay, I examine more closely how the concept of authenticity is commonly employed in lo-fi discourse, highlighting the tensions and contradictions surrounding the usage of the term, and evaluating ways in which the concept may be more usefully understood in the context of lo-fi practice. The central thesis informing my analysis is that technologically reproduced sound cannot escape re-presentation, and therefore any ideology that regards specific processes and working practices as marks of authenticity can only incur in logical inconsistencies and technological mystifications

Sangsara : music-theatre for 4 acting percussion players - approx 50 minutes

Sangsara contemplates the notion of an ‘intermediate’ state between existences as outlined in the Bardo Thödol, a text that has much intrigued Western scholars (particularly CG Jung) for its universal symbolic value beyond its literal meaning. The work interweaves text from the Thödol with text from several ancient classics of Eastern sacred and esoteric literature, including Upanishads, Laws of Manu, Buddhist Ethics, and other works from the Tantric lore, drawing the rich symbolism of all such sources into an original synthesis that adds further layers of complexity and interpretative possibilities to the crossing of the ‘intermediate state’. Sangsara is a hybrid artwork combining music and theatre in a very distinctive way, creating a strongly audio-visual whole in which all performers are equally engaged in both instrumental playing and theatrical action. As such, the work points to a new direction for authors who are seeking an alternative to the traditional codified forms of opera and musical. Formally, the work is conceived as chunks of theatrical action structured according to an associative and cumulative, rather than narrative, logic. It is not a theatre of dialogues, nor a musical theatre of songs and arias. It features, instead, discrete lines of rarefied text enunciated in a stylised manner, integrated with musical gestures and meaningful theatrical action. In the (rather scarce) repertoire of ‘new’ music-theatre work, Sangsara stands as a singular work for both its subject matter and for its formal qualities and compositional solutions. The effects of important aesthetic developments in the fields of music and theatre can be observed at work in this piece, taken on and fulfilled in an individual way, offering significant insights into an insufficiently theorised field, opening the way to a better understanding of the form, and pointing to a vast underexplored region of unlimited possibilities

Dea et Luna

The soundtrack to Dea et Luna marks a departure from the conventional approach in which music and foley constitute two separate strands occupying two distinct planes (typically, music as non-diegetic underscore, versus foley as diegetic sound directly connected to the screened images). This work, instead, exploits psychoacoustic principles and electroacoustic techniques to make the musical material itself function as sound environment for the images, without ever resorting to the specific foley sounds that would normally be associated with the screened images (e.g. steps, wind, rustling, etc.). This is achieved by treating the musical material itself, through studio production techniques, so to provide auditory indices of space and setting (i.e. auditory information conveying the sense of space, perspective, motion, trajectory, etc.). The sung part in Dea et Luna, for example, though technically a non-diegetic element, is made to behave as diegetic sound through studio production techniques of spatialisation, i.e. the vocal part is not static, but moves and changes perspective following its visual counterpart, the female character with whom the vocal part is consistently associated (even though we do not actually see the female character singing, the vocal lines can be read as her ‘internal voice’). Similarly, the piano part seems to overflow and seep into the diegetic space through an interplay of resonance and silences that functions like an airy halo of distant echoes travelling through the stillness of the night. Such a consistent strategy results in a very distinctive soundtrack that inhabits a liminal, ambiguous space in the diegetic/non-diegetic continuum. This places the work in a more rarefied narrative space, dematerialised and floating rather than anchored in the empirical (sound)world. The silence and stillness of the night portrayed in the images are thus effectively brought out by the soundtrack and foregrounded as a main narrative element

Adagio No.8

The soundtrack to Adagio No.8 investigates strategies of synchronisation in the context of video material exhibiting a prominent visual rhythm. Rather than overloading the visual rhythm with sonic events tightly synchronised at the micro structural level, here the compositional approach is aimed at identifying, bring out and resolve larger structural points, so to achieve a unifying effect and lend a narrative shape to an otherwise abstract image sequence. Synchronisation has not yet been sufficiently explained or theorised, and all we have is an unclear and inconsistent picture of the phenomenon. Michel Chion’s ‘synch points,’ defined as ‘Audiovisually salient synchronous meeting of a sound event and a sight event’ (Chion, 1994) remain inadequate for explaining synchronisation in its full operative spectrum – a work may feature a significant degree of synchronisation without necessarily exhibit any point of particularly ‘salient’ audio-visual intersection. The soundtrack to Adagio No. 8 points to a broader understanding of synchronisation as a strategy of structural alignment between the audio/visual strands. Synch points are displaced (anticipated or delayed with respect to the individual micro events), and all (abruptly occurring) section changes are not immediately acknowledged by the soundtrack – the soundtrack is aligned to a higher structural level that evolves in relation to each film’s section while also articulating a longer gesture that bridges them all. Until the two, film’s and music’s discourse, finally meet decidedly at the switch between sections 7 to 8, the only moment in the film in which, unexpectedly, a hard synch point comes in, cutting abruptly the climax built up to then. The strategy of displacement is then resumed for the final section, reaffirming the relative autonomy of the audio and visual strands established in the piece through a calibrated structural alignment that gives rise to the repeated meeting and parting of audio and visuals