Popular Contexts, Volume 7: Public domain music

Abstract

Popular Contexts, Volume 7: Public Domain Music
2016, 25 minutes, For 5 musicians with samples

Popular Contexts, Volume 8: five soundscapes for a contemporary percussionist
2017, 25 minutes, For solo percussionist with samples

Popular Contexts, Volume 10: Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony in context
2016, 16 minutes, for musicians and samples

This set of multi-movement works integrate instrumental music with recorded-sound that is triggered in performance with sampler software. Whilst the recordings share the commonality of being readily identifiable from popular and everyday culture, they take an array of forms, including: field-recordings of natural and cultural locations (e.g. seaside, cafes); music (e.g. Karaoke backing track, football chants); musemes and icons from industry sound libraries; and sound within media contexts (e.g. canned laughter, documentary voice over). The work explores ways recorded sound inflects experience of music, and vice versa, to enhance understanding of how meaning derived from art is influenced by context and listener subjectivity as well as its internal qualities. Furthermore, the work aims to create contextual shifts – especially across high and low –to invoke the comical, surreal, transgressive and bad taste. For instance, Situation Comedy treats the scherzo of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony as the text for a TV sit-com, and Session Drummer transplants Debussy’s early twentieth century orchestral ‘masterpiece’, with its depiction of graceful female form , into the recording studio with an added drum track that engenders a cultural collision with the macho end of 1980s rock drum practice. Jazz in the Park and Seaside Construction present musical lines and recorded tracks in isolation before superimposing the layers to create an artificial construction process that undermines the arrival at a scene that would otherwise appear natural. The kalimba music performed in Exotic tourism in recorded sound history is presented as a fictional historical musical document, which playfully explores the paternalistic colonialism that was at the heart of early twentieth century comparative musicology, with its romanticised notions of uncorrupted authenticity projected on to the music of pre-industrial societies. Performances across Italy, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Poland and the UK.

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