Lauren Redhead

imagined community

My newest choral piece, imagined community, will be performed on Wednesday in Leicester by Humberstone Choral Society. This piece was commissioned by conductor and choral director Motje Wolf. The details of the concert can be found here. The piece has two versions: one with fixed notation, and one with more open notation. The first version has an optional solo part, and the second version must have a solo instrumental part. In the concert, the choir will perform version two, and the solo part will be perfumed by saxophonist Dylan Menzies. I’m really looking forward to hearing the piece in the concert on Wednesday.

Below is something I wrote about the piece for the choir’s newsletter, with a few added links. The theme of the concert is Folk Music, and so my work needed to respond to that theme. I also blogged about beginning to write this piece a while ago, here.

When thinking about making a choral piece related to folk music, there were lots of examples of settings of English folk music, often well known, that I could have looked to. Indeed, quite recently I wrote a long choral piece about the town of Grimsby which included settings of a folk tune ‘Grimsby Lads’ written by living composers John Connelly and Bill Meeks. You can hear a recording of that piece, performed by Grimsby Philharmonic Society here:

But this time I wanted to do something different. I looked to folk music that I find very inspiring: in particular music from the arctic circle. Three groups of people live in within the arctic circle: the Inuit people in North America, the Saami people in Northern Europe and the Tuvan people in Northern Russia. All three groups have a similar kind of folk music that involves throat singing and other vocal techniques that are not common in Western classical music. This music is part of a ‘living’ folk tradition because it is still widely performed in its original contexts; in addition, many performers have become well known as pop musicians as well. Within the Saami community, traditionally performed song and melodies are often assigned to specific people, denoting their identity. This is an attractive to me because the music is both a folk music, belonging to all the Saami people, and an individual music belong to people’s specific identities. As a western musician, it is not possible for me to re-create this music authentically. Instead, I chose to transcribe the aspects of the music that interest me within a choral piece with a solo instrument. The music doesn’t require the singers to throat sing or use any of the unfamiliar techniques from the Saami songs. It does use a more open notational scheme allowing some aspects of the piece to be different each time. I chose the title of the piece, imagined community, as this is a term used to describe the way that groups are held together without physical or legal boundaries. It describes how it is possible to identify with particular groups even without physical proximities. It also articulates the strong link between choral singing and community in England, which remains important no matter what the influence of the music.

Six Photographs

Today’s #CreativeMay post concerns some of the material for the third piece of three that I am working on. Here are six photographs that I took in Furness Abbey when I was working at Octopus Collective earlier this year. They will all play a role the creation of 12 graphic scores that will form an installation/ensemble piece. Today I have edited them so I can print them for use in the creation of the notation.

Thinking about a new work…

Today’s #CreativeMay task was to think about how to approach the live instrumental parts of a new work, which will be performed by BL!NDMAN in September. I won’t re-post all my notes here, but summarise what i decided:

1. The score will have some relationship to the score layout I posted yesterday. In particular, all performers will play from the same, part-open, score which they can order in the way that they wish.
2. The performers will play from a position where they cannot see each other an rely on aural cues.
3. There will be a system of categorisation of sound, from text to music, which will inform the sections of music that they have to play.

All decisions help me to move forward in each piece, because I don’t work in a bar-by-bar way (in fact, often there aren’t bars), but sort of from the bottom up: all decisions which help shape the concept help shape the piece.
These three points, trivial as they may seem, help me understand the music itself within this piece, and facilitate me writing it.

I don’t have any photos yet, maybe tomorrow…

‘entoptic landscape’: Score Layout

This is my first #CreativeMay post.
It probably doesn’t seem like a big achievement, but it’s actually quite an important one for my practice and for enabling me to write the piece.

Today I produced the score layout for the piece entoptic landscape. It looks like this:

This is quite an important thing for me to have done because the layout of the score, and hence the notation, is derived from the nature of the material that I am making the piece from. The work is a combination of linked segments, which are also somehow separate and not placed in a fully linear temporal structure. This score layout expresses that to me.

It also allows mw to explore further some other threads in the notation of my work. The first is the examination of the use of frames, framing, and thinking about parergonality in artworks. I’ve previously used boxes in scores such as the one for the piece concerto which you can see here:

It also links with the use of magic squares in some of my compositions. I have developed these to move them beyond the ordering of material, to be a determining factor in the nature and structure of the material. In the piece /’(h)weTH this even worked its way into the notation as well:

Whilst I was making this I thought about an excellent paper given by Richard Glover about the use of grid structures in the notation of experimental music. I wondered if his observations about grids might also apply to the piece I am writing. I also thought about Feldman’s notation both in his early works and also his later, fully notated, pieces. The original editions of his scores preserved the 9 x 9 grid structure of bars that he prepared on each page. As a student looking at his works this really helped me to understand the music. In later editions (only after his death—whilst alive he forbade this) Universal Edition had the pieces typeset in Sibelius and this important aspect of the notation was lost. This led me to think about how making this layout is important to me in shaping the music properly, and therefore the notation is as much a part of the piece as the sounds when heard; it is not merely a communicative device.

A final point: this is the first piece for a very long time where I don’t notate silence by a blank space, but with an object. All silences will consist of an empty box in the grid. This, to me, denotes that silence within the piece is an intentional object; a sound within itself. There’s probably more to think about there, but that was an interesting revelation within this process.