An Ethnography of Listening
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Papers
Creating and Performing an Ethnography of Listening.
This paper explores the expression of listeners’ significations after listening to a piece of orchestral music. It describes the dialogical creation and performance of an ethnographic evocation of the experience of listening – a Performance Ethnography of Listening. 40 members of 4 Listening Groups listened to a four-movement piece for string orchestra “Photography” by Errollyn Wallen and gave their responses which were taped and transcribed. A Source Text was created from the raw responses from which was written a Performance Script for two ‘voices’. The script was set within the time signature of the piece. A Listening Event was designed to enable, an audience including the Listening Group members, the composer, the conductor, the ethnographer, and the ‘voices’ (60 people) to listen to, and discuss a ‘triptych’ performance of the work – the central panel being the performed ethnography with the music. This paper describes the ethnographic process, includes the Performance Script and audio examples of the performed ethnography. It theorises our practice in terms of the work of: Nicholas Cook (1998) on the relationship between words and music; Anthony Gritten (2017) on intermedial practice; Lawrence Kramer (2011) on criteria for ekphrastic practice; and in the light of existing explorations in the HARK Project on, listening habitus, and listening repertoire – ‘auditory play’.
A Day With Errollyn Wallen - Program Note
The music of Errollyn Wallen embraces the sounds and the rhythms of the world around us. Her motto for her work with performers is ’we don’t break down barriers in music….we don’t see any’. She says of her composing ‘I am looking for something, like an unwisely curious explorer. I have the faintest scent, a curling wisp on the air, a trill caught in the breeze…I am inching my way along a long misty road, half blind I navigate the unknown’. She has composed fourteen albums, and Photography is her latest and dedicated to orchestral works. She was the winner of the Radio 3 Listeners/British Composer Award, was the first black women to have her work performed at the Proms, won the Ivor Novello Award for Classical Music and is an Honorary Fellow of Mansfield College Oxford.
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Listening Groups
We are focussing at the outset on listening to instrumental music and the HARK project has been influenced by a number of key writers in this area, in particular Lawrence Kramer, Jean-Luc Nancy, Julian Johnson, Michael Spitzer, Gemma Coradi Fiumara, Lydia Goehr and Emma Sutton. Lawrence Kramer is associated with the emergence of Critical Musicology – hermeneutic/interpretive listening modes – Fiumara and Goehr with the philosophy of listening, Nancy with the resonance of the listening body and aspects of ‘selfhood’ and Sutton with the interpenetration of literature and music. Here are a few quotations from these writers to stimulate and encourage you to consider participating in the HARK project: