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Concept and Direction - David Prior
Production - David Prior and Dugal McKinnon
Material Composed by - David Prior, Dugal McKinnon, Ian Chuprun and
Antti Saario
After a year of thinking about a piece which might explore the role
of recording media in our preservation of memory, the opportunity to
create such a work came quite unexpectedly. While I had anticipated
writing a music theatre piece on my own over a typically protracted
period of time, my catalyst to begin work came in the form of a commission
from Resonance FM, a temporary London wide radio and internet station
run by London Musicians Collective as part of John Peel's 'Meltdown'
festival at the South Bank Centre. I was now faced with the prospect
of producing my promised thirty minute piece in not much more than two
weeks and it did not take me long to realise that my original plans
would have to be somewhat modified! I needed help and as part of a thriving
community of composers and sound artists based around Birmingham Electro-acoustic
Sound Theatre (B.E.A.S.T), it seemed obvious to enlist the talents of
my colleagues there in order to make the project possible.
 Ways
of Hearing - 30:00
The underside of my interest in recording as 'preservation' was my suspicion
that recording simultaneously destroys the essence of the moment recorded
through the very act of immortalising it. I was drawn to Roland Barthes
writing on photography and in particular his fascination with the moment
of the photographic act; the chemical inscription of a fleeting event
onto a fixed and deathly-immortal print. This theme became my primary
point of departure for a sound based piece which focused at a micro
level on this act of capturing and preserving a moment of sonic activity.
I began by unearthing old cassette recordings of my father recording
my sister and I as small children and then through a series of interviews,
explored other peoples experience of recording as a means of preserving
memory. It was about this stage that Dugal McKinnon joined me as co-producer
and from there, we asked further contributors (all of whom composers
who work primarily with fixed media) to compose discreet sections of
the piece which might serve as personal reflections on their experience
of recording and what it meant to them.
It came as no surprise that throughout the work, there seemed to be
a heightened emphasis on those elements of a recording which give it
place, often the very things which established sound recording practice
seeks to eliminate: the humming fridge in the background behind an interview,
the hiss and wow of the old cassette recordings and the peculiarly disarming
acoustic spaces often chosen as the setting for the source recordings.
These elements became intrinsic to a narrative which almost wove itself
into the resultant scrap book of intensely personal sonic postcards.
I believe these fragments go some way to capturing the inherently contradictory
essence of what it is to preserve a moment of life in the eternity of
a fixed media.
Dugal Mckinnon
Born in 1972 I spent my childhood in Thailand, returning to New Zealand
to attend high school. From 1991 I attended Victoria University of Wellington,
New Zealand where I studied instrumental and studio composition with
Jack Body and Dr. John Young, graduating in 1996 with a First Class
BMus (Hons). I also hold a degree in literature/cultural studies. After
a year spent working at the Sound and Music Centre of the National Library
of New Zealand I moved to Birmingham, England to begin a PhD in studio
composition under Dr. Jonty Harrison. Presently I am employed as a teaching
assistant at the University of Birmingham Music Department whilst working
towards the completion of my doctorate (expected in October 2001).
At present I am writing a work for orchestra and tape commissioned
by the Victoria University School of Music, Wellington. The piece, as
yet untitled, takes as its inspiration the windy and capricious climate
of Wellington as well as its tectonic instability. The source sounds
for the tape part - breath and cymbals - are intended to reflect these
qualities of New Zealand's capital city. In essence the work is a concerto
but one in which the mass of the soloist - the tape part - outweighs
that of the orchestra, shaping and driving the orchestral accompaniment.
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