Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
About this portal
This portal brings together practice research in creative disciplines produced at Birmingham City University Faculty of ADM, comprising:
RAAD – the Centre for Research in Art, Architecture and Design;
BCMCR - Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research;
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire – Music and Performing Arts.
url:
https://www.bcu.ac.uk/arts-design-and-media
Recent Activities
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Venice 1629: Exposition of Research
(2020)
author(s): Jamie Savan
published in: Research Catalogue, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
This exposition takes the form of a portfolio of materials documenting the research questions, methods and processes underpinning the CD production 'Venice 1629' (performers: The Gonzaga Band, dir. Jamie Savan, released on the Resonus Classics label in July 2018). It includes 10 new performing editions, discussion of performance practice issues including rhythmic proportions, ornamentation and instrumentation, alongside the full recording in streamable MP3 format and a fully referenced version of the booklet essay.
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Composition as Commentary: Voice and Poetry in Electroacoustic Music
(2020)
author(s): Edmund Hunt
published in: Journal for Artistic Research, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
What is the role of a spoken or sung text in an electroacoustic composition? Does it represent anachronism, assigning the role of communication to the voice and thereby depriving more abstract electroacoustic material of its rhetorical force? Does the disembodied, electroacoustic voice distance the audience from the communicative power of the words that are heard? Although Simon Emmerson argued that the disembodied human voice in acousmatic music can often seem frustrating, this sense of disembodiment might be turned to the composer’s advantage, as the basis of a methodology for creative practice. In the process of developing a methodology to address questions of text, language, voice, and electroacoustic technology, I created two musical compositions. Both works used the untranslated words of an enigmatic Old English poem, ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’. At first glance, the idea of using a text in an obscure or ancient language that carries little or no semantic meaning for the listeners might raise further questions. Is this a deliberate attempt at obfuscation, hiding the paucity of the composer’s ideas behind a veneer of archaism or even naive exoticism? As my investigation progressed, I began to envisage the process of electroacoustic composition as a type of non-linguistic commentary on a text. Rather than hindering the listener’s understanding of a composition inspired by literature, the electroacoustic voice might help to reveal different interpretations of a text, allowing multiple ideas and identities to be heard.
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From culture to nature and back. A personal journey through the soundscapes of Colombia
(2020)
author(s): Lamberto Coccioli
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies, Birmingham City University: Faculty of Arts, Design and Media
The purpose of this essay is twofold: to celebrate the astonishing richness and diversity of Colombia’s natural and human soundscapes, and to reconstruct the process through which my direct experience of those soundscapes has influenced my own creative work as a composer. Reflecting on a long personal and intellectual journey of discovery that plays out on many levels – musical, anthropological, aesthetical – helps bring to the fore important questions on music composition as the locus of cultural appropriation and reinterpretation. How far can the belief system of a distant culture travel before it loses its meaning? From a post-colonial perspective, can a European composer justify the use and repurposing of ideas, sounds and songs from marginalised indigenous communities? In trying to give an answer to these questions through the lens of my own experience I keep unravelling layer upon layer of complexity, in a fascinating game of mirrors where my own identity as a "Western" composer starts crumbling away.