Tag: commissions

Re:Sound

duncan

Re:Sound

In preparation for this project at the Sound Festival in Aberdeen this weekend

“What is your favourite sound in the world that isn’t a musical instrument or piece of music?”

a couple of demo tracks containing

Dropping something heavy into water
Thunder
Pocra Quay (from Pete Stollery)
Birds
The wind at Malin Head
Children’s voices
Rain on a tent
Throwing stones onto a frozen lake
Walking in deep snow
Walking through a herd of cows in Switzerland

Chorus loops composed by Music and Communities students and played by synthesised sounds ……………
The Wind
Rain
Standing on Union Street
Child laughing
The sound you get when your head is underwater
glass smashing
walking in deep snow
falling leaves
the crackle of frying eggs
transferring liquids from a can into a glass

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Sounds from Rednote Ensembles “NoisyNoises” to be used in an installation on Sunday 4th

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more here

http://sound-scotland.co.uk/sound_events/resound/

Sound Spiral

duncan

 

SoundSpiral is a uniquely interactive audio playback environment, holding forty-eight speakers within a specially-designed inflatable venue.
The first work to be shown in the space will be Babel Spring, by Amie Slavin and Duncan Chapman.

The whole project is the brainchild of Amie Slavin who has made an extraordinary piece using multiple languages for it’s first incarnation. The music I have made takes fragments of these languages and using specially designed granular processing creates pitch based music out of them.

There’s much more about the whole thing here

http://www.soundspiral.net/?page=Home

My piece started off as 48 Midi files …….. here they are played by a Marimba sound

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and here (slightly rearranged) played by the granulated voices

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South Holland Sympony 2012

duncan

The South Holland Symphony is a project with the London Mozart Players and three communities in the South Holland district of Lincolnshire. Over the next few months I am going to be composing an orchestral piece for the orchestra based on material generated by participants in workshop sessions. The project aims to create a new piece of music which reflects the particular landscapes and people of the area.

May 12th Workshops………………

Here are a couple of things from last weekends workshops in Spalding and Holbeach.

The Spalding piece is played by a large group using instruments and voices speaking lists of sounds that they associate with their locality. This will become transcribed and mixed with drawings of horizon lines (as in the Field Of Sprouts piece) to create a section for full orchestra……

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Holbeach Fog

In a small workshop with three enthusiastic young people we created this section of music. At the end the fog will lift and become a very low sound (double bass rumble) and very high one (Violin harmonic) with transcriptions of birdsong in the middle. The fog music is always falling and is an exploration of the idea of the land becoming inundated , in the past by the sea and now by the fog……………..

This is an orchestral simulation played by computer so some of the sounds are not accurate representations of how it will sound when played by the LMP.

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Demos: As part of the preparation for this I created these two short pieces for string quartet which were performed at LMP concerts.

1: Horizon melody and a field of sprouts…….. uses the contour of the landscape in this photograph to generate a melodic line played by the first violin, the second violin plays an accelerating and decelerating pulse following the edge of the field while the lower parts play rotating material based on the shape of the plants…..

which sounds like this

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2: Rural Scene with Red Arrows……is an arrangement of this field recording for string quartet

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the quartet version

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sonogram of field recording

with thanks to LMP players

Nicoline Kraamwinkel (Violin)

David Angel (Violin)

Simone Van der Giessen (Viola)

Sebastian Comberti (Cello)

 

Found In Ladywood

duncan

A project for the CBSO with EC Arts

(from EC arts website)

‘Found in Ladywood’ will involve the Leo String Quartet, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.  The quartet will take its renowned classical repertoire out of traditional settings and into Ladywood Fire Station for an autumnal Shostakovich Quartet number 8 performance.  The project will also feature a unique commission in the form of an original composition for Ladywood.  The piece will be created and lead by Composer and Music Animateur Duncan Chapman collaborating with Ladywood residents in a series of artistic workshops and the Leo Quartet to produce the piece for the final event.

The project has been inspired by both the CBSO’s ethos to reach out and engage new audiences, and ‘Lost in Ladywood’ a 2007 project by artist Simon Whitehead, commissioned by MADE.  Found in Ladywood recognises that there is a large percentage of the community that have not experienced ‘live’ classical music – it aims to take classical music out of its traditional settings and into the heart of the community, making it accessible to everyone.

Event skills workshops.

The journey leading up to the performance will involve members of the community working with EC-Arts to identify a non traditional performance venue free of charge.  The aim of the project is to collaborate with members of the community to change perspectives of a non traditional performance venue by transforming it for an event.  A series of workshops will be implemented and delivered in Ladywood to teach a core group in the community event management skills.  The community group will plan and deliver the October event by participating within all aspects of planning leading up to including the event day.

Artistic workshops.

Simultaneously ’artistic workshops’ have been lead within Ladywood by Composer Duncan Chapman, renowned for his experimental approach and technologically advanced festivals.  A recent example of Duncan’s work was a Nintendo DS orchestra that took place on the beach at the Aldeburgh Festival. Duncan is working with members of Ladywood community to record the ‘sounds of Ladywood’.   The sounds will inspire and form part of an original composition specifically for Ladywood to be performed on the 10th October 2010.

The Leo Quartet (Byron Parish, Jane Wright, Mike Jenkinson and Kate Setterfield) is a quartet of leading players from the CBSO who formed in 2004 and have built a reputation for vibrant performances of diverse repertoire.

Here is a short film of the event (opens in a new window)

Found In Ladywood

Insects and the Abyss

duncan

For this concert of music by Rued Langgaard , I made an electronic insect interlude.

here is the programme from the concert

Insects and the Abyss

Mike McInerney – Piano

Michael Neil – Electronic Extensions

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An Homage to Rued Langgaard 

To many people, the music of the twentieth century avant-garde (which I so love) only exists as a soundtrack – to the strangeness of space (2001, A Space Odyssey) or to scenes of disturbed criminality (the shower scene in Psycho). Elizabeth Lutyens, one of the greats of English modernism, earned much of her day money writing soundtracks for Hammer House of Horror.

 Langgaard is at home in this b-movie horror scenario aspect of the avant-garde. His topics (insects, the abyss, the music of the spheres, the Antichrist) seem to relish the forbidden and perverse. His is no worked out system, in the vein of Scriabin; if a white-note chorale, which would not be out of place in the simplest of Victorian hymnals, suits his purposes, he will compose one; if an atonal melody of the most angular kind, then that is what he will use.

What is shockingly modern is his attitude to form, and to scale. Nothing ever develops in Langgaard’s music – ideas are either too short or, by the normative standards of the concert hall, continued too long without development. It is this combination – of an atmosphere of strangeness and spectacle with a sense of sound as continua of indeterminate length – which speaks to us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is an aesthetic which begs the use of new technology.

 Mike McInerney, Plymouth 2009.

 1. Real and Imaginary Insects

 Earwig(Langgaard 1917)

Chrysalis (Michael Neil 2009)

Locust/May Bug/Daddy Longlegs (Langgaard 1917)

Death’s Head Beetle, Feeding (Duncan Chapman 2009)

Dragonfly/Death-watch Beetle/Housefly (Langgaard 1917)

Flying Predator (Richard Douglas-Green/Mike McInerney 2009) 

Millipede/Mosquito(Langgaard 1917)

 2.  Into the Abyss (Michael Neil 2009)

 INTERVAL

 3.  Afgrundsmusik (Music of the Abyss) (Rued Langgaard 1921/24)

 4.  Abyss Transfigured (with Insects)(Michael Neil/Mike McInerney 2009)

 With thanks to Richard and Lucien Douglas-Green, of Green Studios, Plymouth, for endless technical support and advice.

 

Here are some of the things I made

Swarm

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millions of little critters !!

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Corrosion

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Corrosion


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 Artistic Director of Salamanda Tandem, choreographer and composer Isabel Jones was commissioned by Opera North and The Bonington Gallery to embark on a new period of research and development exploring the question ‘What is Opera?’ . To conduct this research Isabel brought composer and sound artists Duncan Chapman, together with sculptor and visual artist Gerard Renvez.

‘Corrosion’ treats the body, voice and material to an accelerated state of change and flux, organic and manufactured chemical processes interact …sounds decay, pulp dries out, metal disintegrates, bone imprints, stone crumbles, clay cracks, water evaporates…. In the accumulation, distillation, and sedimentation a transformation occurs…. Traces remaining are left behind and out of the corrosive debris arises something beautiful.

Installation and Performance Research
Artistic Director / Co -Composer / Choreographer – Isabel Jones
Co – Composer / Sound Installation Artist – Duncan Chapman
Visual Artist / Sculptor – Gerard Renvez
Singer / Composer –  Moira Smiley
Poet – Tony Baker

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Performers

Singer – Moira Smiley
Singer / Dancer – Isabel Jones
Live electronics / composition – Duncan Chapman
Singers – Bryony Jones, Richard Lindsay, Naomi Line, Aric Prentice
Costume Designer – Helen Segal
Poet – Tony Baker

Corrosion installation was performed at the Studio Theatre, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, and at The Bonington Gallery, Nottingham during March 2003.

Ambulatincula

duncan

A sound installation for Forbury Gardens in Reading.

I was one of 7 artists commissioned to make soundworks for the Gardens. For a year audiences could pick up a portable mp3 player and listen to specially created works for particular locations in the Victorian Gardens.

amb

Here is some information about my pieces from the catalogue

The sounds of bells and gongs signal significant events in our lives. Beginnings and endings, birth, death, and marriage are all marked by these sounds. Bells are a universal signifier of stopping, pausing and change. In the past, the days in the Abbey were structured around the sound of bells. A bell signalled the time for monks to rise at 2am to sing the Office of the Lauds, and other bells signalled the time for work, silent contemplation and meals. In the prison the bell marks the division of the day into work, mealtimes and sleeping.

A series of seven short works respond to the juxtaposition of the prison with the Abbey ruins. The sounds of bells and gongs correspond to different parts of the day, inviting the listener to pause, listen, contemplate, and move on, changed in some way. Combined with recordings of daily activities, and the crackling of candles at St James’s Church, the sounds of bells ultimately disappear into silence. Thanks to: Professor Brian Kemp and Tony Stokes

 The pieces

walk

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mother

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morning

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busy

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calm

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12 bells

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3am

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