Past Projects

Music Poetics is the term we use for a genre of writing about sound and music. This genre is an attempt to describe evoke and share the listening experience in another medium, usually, but not always in words. There are examples below — group responses to listening to ‘In Earth’ by Errollyn Wallen, and personal reflections on listening to the cello album of Leila Bordreuil ‘Not An Elergy’. A good example of this genre can be found in ‘Ways of Hearing: Reflections on Music in 26 Pieces’ (2021. Ed. Burnham, Seltzer & Von Moltke. Princeton UP) and some of the reflections in that collection include a photographic essay, poetry as well as prose.

In HARK we developed this ‘poetics’ approach through the Listening Groups: from recording verbal responses to the music; collating the results across groups; by content analysis we identified themes, metaphor clusters, strands of imagery; and we wrote these into a script. A dialogical process of distillation was developed using the script and a single person (the ethnographer JHLR) wrote a ‘prose poem’ which was further refined into a ‘libretto’ and written into the score of the music (see the images above). This was performed as a co-procuctive art-work with a twelve string orchestra (conducted by Bede Williams) with the ‘libretto’ being spoken by two trained voice performers in a ‘conversation’ over the relevant music. This methodology was used for all 4 movements of the composition ‘Photography’ by Errollyn Wallen. Listeners’ creative output resulted in the performed Ethnography of Listening. Thos project exemplifies the practice of emphasis in create work. This a transfigurative process whereby an art-work, by reception by others, stimulates the creativity of others such that they produce another art-work . Ekphrastic practice is discussed in the longer version of the paper below: Ethnography of Listening. The project is documented in the papers below and you can replicate our method for yourself — listen to Photography first, reflect on the images, words, sensations that arise, then listen to the performance of the Ethnography of Listening. All of this you can do from the audio files below.

The Ethnography of Listening Project was written up and presented at the FASS Conference at the Open University. A short version and full version of that paper can be found below. Here is the Abstract of the paper:

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 to a particular pice of music – 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 the side panels being a performance of the music alone. 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’.

The Documents and Sounds below are ordered to illustrate the subjects in this introduction.

Documents

These are papers written as Music Poetics

Music Poetics (1): Errolyn Wallen’s “In Earth” Listening Responses.

Music Poetics (2): Full Transcript of “In Earth” Responses.

Music Poetics (3): Liela Bordrieul’s “Not an Elegy”.

These are papers concerning the Project structure and the Listening groups:

Listening Groups: Structure, Composition and Program.

Listening Groups: Listening Curriculum.

Listening Research: Pilot Report.

Notes for Listening: Session 5

These are papers concerning the ethnographic work with the piece Photography:

Listening Notes for: Errollyn Wallen’s "Photography”.

Precis of Paper: An Ethnography of Listening.

Full Paper: An Ethnography of Listening.

These are papers theorising about Listening:

Repertoire of Imaginative Auditory Play.

Auditory Play Modes Diagram.

Sounds

The audio links below provide the four movements of Errollyn Wallen’s ‘Photography’ and then the text of the ethnography of listening performed with the music. Listen to the original piece first, then listen to the images and metaphors which our listening group members used to express their responses to the movements when performed with the music.

Also below in Music Poetics (3) the original album by Leila Bordrieul ‘Not An Elegy’ can be found on Boomkat in download or vinyl versions.

Finally I reproduce here (above on a link) a schema of listening modes that we have noticed in responses in the listening groups. These listening modes are often overlapping and are not mutually exclusive but suggest that our listening repertoire is focal at times and immersive at others and that attention oscillates with reverie. These modes map onto the perceptual-cognitive framework proposed by Iain McGilchrist in his work on ‘Attending’.

I began thinking about this project by looking at the light from stars. The skies above St Michel l’Observatoire in Provence, France , where I spend a lot of time, are, as the name suggests, clear and crisp, with little light pollution. Lying down in a field one night I sensed the expanse of the cosmos and my eyes accommodated to the light, the differences between the size and brightness of the stars became apparent. I reflected that this patterned net of light was coming to me, to us, over eons of years and yet this very moment, me lying here, now, will not be repeated. These stars are and were degrading, dying, have died — light comes, fades.

We are present in this drama of light. Yet in cosmic, geological time this is a fleeting moment. Two things struck me, and still do — what seems like an elemental foundation, the ground/earth/world is more an unfolding process, and that our experience of it is a partial and fleeting looking, and listening. This is of course the sensory underpinning of Gaia, but I want to stay with the sensory aspects of this perspective. The sensory is so immediate and striking and yet dissolves into silence in a moment. Things, matter is less stable than I thought. Wonder arises when we stop, look and listen. I write about this wonder below. At the Soundings event this perspective on time was explored in Tony Prave’s paper A Sermon in Stones which placed my sensory experience in a geological time frame, but for now….I return to the field in St Michel…….

Lying on the ground, I began to feel its heft and solidity and the hardness of the rock that underpins both me and the starry heavens. On this apparent solid and dependable ground I became aware that I was lying on limestone, a sedimentary rock made of innumerable sea creatures, a rock with small spaces in it, which is porous and dissolves in weathering. Here it is mixed with what is called ‘saff’— clay soil so compacted that it can feel and seem like rock, but if used in building dissolves over time in water and rain. The more I felt for the solidity of the rock the more it became like the stars an emergent process of change and transformation. Having a life in time. I wondered if stone and rock might disclose its qualities and we might perceive these changes, as stars send their light, by sounds and resonance.

I wondered about the way in which stone underpins so much of local life. The local quarry in Banon to the north of St Michel produces a stone that polishes with a fine light, a ‘travertine’ colour and has lines of sedimentary sea creatures showing through. It is the used as the floor of the glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris. Stone tables made from local stone, as whole pieces from limestone, can produce a fine ‘ring’ when struck. The arched ‘vouted’ ceilings of old stone barns have a pointing that allows the stones to seem balanced in a curve above one’s head, called ‘pierre apparent’. The Borries, are stone age, sometimes conical, buildings and towers which may have been storehouses or habitations but now lie often as mounds of stones. They are protected monuments but no one knows what they really were. To build stone Bergeries, the shepherd’s bothies on the Luberon mountains, stones were gathered throughout the year by the shepherds and left to over-winter — those that survived the freeze-thaw would be used, but with strict attention to their ‘ends’ — the striated book-end side being more porous would be placed inward facing in the dry stone construction. Local churches are made of large blocks of ‘freestones’ which are called that because they can be cut in any direction and increase their hardness when weathered. The ‘callade’ pavements and walkways in the area are made from hard stone placed with depth vertically and placed close up to the next ‘cobble’. They ‘bed in’ with carts, horses, and walker traffic and last for centuries. Callade can also have patterns and stones are used in various ways, round washed pebbles can be split and their flat sides used upward, or such pebbles can be used in their rounded forms. The stones of the Abbeys of Provence, Silvacane, Le Thoronet, Senanque, are constructed in Romanesque style with prepared blocks that create echoing surfaces in resonant spaces where light and sound combine in ever changing relation, the elements of surface, texture, sound, light and touch combine in a synesthesic cumulation of sensations in which sound is light, is surface, is stone. In such a silent place it is almost impossible to move silently such is the responsiveness of the stone space. It doubles down the need to be still while by contrast it amplifies the music designed for that very space. The polyphony and soaring melody of music such as the Allegre Misere is communicated to us by stone as an instrument in itself.. The image above shows Standing Stones in Arran (Scotland) marking a sacred space, a burial area and remain rooted in that place, connecting us across deep time and to the present earth.

There are vast literatures on respectively: the place and function of stone in material culture and the built environment, and on geology, geomorphology and environmental science. These knowledge deposits are background to my interest —the whimsical idea that just as stars give us their light from long ago stones might resound in some analogous way. SO we might imagine that the stones we see today are ‘in process’, they have a natural history a kind of ‘life’, they are subject to weathering, decay, breaking, mining, and construction of buildings where their functions are complex. The human activity in shaping the landscape also make or preserve stones in many ways. The life of stones has been intimately bound us with our history and ways we use them, and they and we have an intermingled life of interdependence.

So I researched ‘singing stones’ which appear in various places, in Tiree in Scotland and also the use of stones in making ‘musical’ instruments, particularly in Vietnam and China. Lithophones were being made 3,000 year ago. A famous local one was made with slate in the English Lake District in the C19th, is preserved in Keswick and has been played by Evelin Glennie. This is a ‘tuned’ lithophone with the stones being cut and shaped to ring at specific pitches.

So I was wondering how the properties of stone and rock might be sensed as sound. Stones and rocks have many qualities many of them sensory and in particular have different densities and different resonant frequencies. At a fundamental level geological structures are actually very long processes. Stone/rock is a instantiation of a set of relations of energy below matter. These relations at a quantum level suggest the holding together of what appears hard, solid, impermeable, by relations of energy and these relations are themselves curious being ‘entangled’, being in space-time dynamically in relation and not static. Can stones ‘disclose’ their resonant sound qualities over time?

This leads to the discussion of nature and art. Stones are indeed beautiful, varied and, in situ impressive — erratics perched in craggy places, water and sea penetrated stone, signs for journeys through landscapes, symbolic stones with ‘cup and ring’ marks. So there is no clear line between our lives and the lives of stones as they become symbolic and functional objects at the same time, and also become art thereby and in situ they have already become art-objects in the painted landscape, in poetry and music. Stones bridge us in space and time by locating our temporality. The stones of Standing Stones, and of Stonehenge were not local to the site in which they are now rooted and stand as if they have always belonged there. The creation of rooted material permanence can be seen in the construction of Cathedrals, for example the stones that were used to build, repair, and decorate Llandaff Cathedral in Wales came from 24 different sites in England, Wales and Northern France. So stones weather where they lie exposed yet move around and combine in art-works.

I was thinking of another conglomeration. I contacted Richard Bates, a colleague in Environmental Science who also runs a project called Music Planet and we decided to gather and to ‘sound’ all types of geological rocks of Scotland. We did this by gathering, with the help of Prof.Tony Prave (read his Sermon on Stones, below in the Soundings Day Programme Notes) a spectrum of Scottish stones — Dalradian Mylonite, Torridonian sandstone. Gneiss, Quartzite and many other types of rock.

We then considered their densities and resonance. What became apparent early on was that cutting and boring them made little difference to their sound. What did change the sound they make when struck was what they were struck with! So wood, metal, bamboo, all produced interestingly different sounds. We then took the stones to the Silo which has an acoustic resonance of 13 seconds. You can hear their sounds in the sound files below. Richard and I then constructed a Lithophone — a ‘musical instrument’ made from hanging the stones so they could be struck with different instruments. We decided not to ‘tune’ the stones but to use their natural tonality where it existed.

I then invited Alex Waber, a Swiss percussionist (Basel Chamber Orchestra) to create a piece of sound art in collaboration with a digital-acoustic composer Alasdair MacDonald (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) who would record the striking in real time and respond to the sound digitally and return it to the percussionist. This way an improvised exploratory conversation was created, and the sound was able to endure and build up in the space by this amplification. The audience (60) sat in a circle surrounded by speakers. The piece is an extraordinary sound installation lasting in performance 14 minutes. Listening to these sounds with headphones convinces me that it is indeed possible to explore the sonic qualities of stone and rock that are locked into their material structure and this can be sensed as analogous to the light from stars, and is just as cosmic and elemental.

This piece was played as part of a whole day exploring sound, rhythm and resonance. The whole day can be understood in the Program for the day below, which also contains reference to the inspiration of Stockhausen. I then used the recording to make an audio-visual art-work. I chose water as the visual element to relate visually to the sound of stones. You can hear the full piece Cosmosis under Etudes in Current Projects above, and a compressed version called Porous on the Openings page of the website.

The elements of the Soundings HARK Day were:

• Performance: music, pitched and percussive, several pieces played by Bede Williams, Alexander Waber and Jessica Haas

• Participation: working with Alexander Aber and Steve Foreman in an interactive presentation on Rhythm. (see Note of Rhythms below)

• Sermon in Stones: a talk by Tony Prave and Richard Bates (see text in Program Notes below)

• Improvisation on the Lithophone: sound-art made from the stones, sounded and interpreted by Alex Waber and Alistair Macdonald in an improvised sound conversation. (listen below)

• Silo: exploring the resonance of the stones in the Silo acoustic and long improvisation of percussion and conch by Alex Waber and Bede Williams (listen below)

Here are the links to the Working Notes written around the Soundings Project:

Soundings Programme Notes.

Lithophones and Ringing Stones.

Live Listening: Transfigurations in Rhythm.

There are a series of connections between the HARK explorations and a domain of experience that we might call ‘spirituality’.

Music and the Sacred: A Quick Look.

The attention we give to the video/sound art-works that we have created draws on deep traditions of ‘attending’. These have been explored by anthropologists particularly in the context of ritual studies. The practices that we might develop in working with our materials concern those of meditation, contemplation and various postures of (in)attention. We are able also to be reflexive — we can develop and deepen our practices of attending and also notice how we have been attending in the past, and how our experience is changing.

he knowledge-practice concept of ‘transfiguration’ in the gestalt of our sound and vision is the sensory aspect of the way our assumptions, preconceptions and habits are able to be suspended. This suspension makes space for us to notice other features and qualities and these subtle changes are what I ref to as ‘transfigurations’. We can also to notice what arises in our imaginations when such (head/heart/body) spaces are created.

This space is often ‘apophatic’ that is, it enables significance, value and curiosity to thrive without the need to put the ’experience’ into words or other medium immediately, or at all. I quote mark the word ‘experience’ because formally it is moot definitional matter as to whether one can have an experience that is entirely outside/beyond language. There is a space also between what we mean by sensation and experience.

This process is also connected to a key theme of the HARK project which is the engendering of creativity and expression, particularly in improvisatory, embodied, shared ways — we have used the concept ‘ekphrasis’ to describe this creative process and outcome.

These practices radically reframe our sense of the conventional binary between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, and ‘inside’, ‘outside’, and the relationship between the disclosure of the world as it is and our constructions, imaginations and creative rendering of it. We have explored these connections in some Working Papers, Current Projects and some ideas for future work. We would be interested to respond to anyone who is interested in taking these ideas further.

The Workshop on Music and the Sacred produced some Working Notes and a playlist and they can be found here below. As an introduction to what is a long playlist that goes with the text below, you can first listen here to some initial calls to prayer, showing the simplicity of the sounded invitations to enter a meditative space:

Music and the Sacred Text

The Beyond Babel prayer project was a sound exploration of the Lords Prayer recited by 16 different language speakers in the mother tongue in which they had learned it. This was a moving exploration for those who took part. The recitations were layered to create a sound constellation in which words themselves and the coalescing of the language timbres created a sounded ‘wordless’ prayer. One participant suggested: “So this is what God must hear!’ The title Beyond Babel, is ironic in that different deep mother tongue words when combined become ‘wordless’ sounds and yet remain a prayer. The constellation was used in the departure scene in the Opus: Hiraeth, on exile and migration. Some of the individuals languages and the constellation can be heard here:
An Ecumenical Prayer for Pentacost

Psalmody

The HARK ekphrastic methodology was used to imagine a project, designed along the lines of the later lockdown composing project, of working with the Book of Psalms. We collected many examples of poetic renditions of Psalms covering almost all of the Book of Psalms (in the King James Bible), we proposed that a new Psalter be written, the St Andrews Psalter, which would be composed of editions of groups of psalms chosen by poets who would re-imagine the Psalm and also be paired with composers who would compose a chant for that psalm. 10 -15 psalms would be completed each year for 10 years and perfumed at an Annual Event in St Salvators Chapel. The poets would have the source material already gathered by HARK which is a compendium of all the poetic re-imaginings of psalms ranging from The Venerable Bede, through Sir Philip Sydney, John Keble to Christopher Hill.

This ekphrastic approach has also been considered as a way of working with local church congregations along the lines of the HARK Listening Groups where, through listening and reflecting (and possibly performing) a piece of music (for example the Strathclyde Motets by James Macmillan) a liturgical prayer/meditation could be created and performed in the actual liturgy.

Both of these projects await initiation.

Acoustic Adventures was a small experiment to invite young pupils to the Silo acoustic space and working with Robin Mason (cello below) to explore playing and improvising with each other in the space. The experience was reported as enjoyable and we intend to develop this aspect of the HARK work further as performance opens up.