David Prior, Dugal McKinnon, Ian Chuprun et Antti Saario - Ways of Hearing (1998)

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.

http://web.bham.ac.uk/djp552/colab.htm

Ian Chuprun
ianc@sympatico.ca

Dugal McKinnon
dcm763@novell5.bham.ac.uk

David Prior
djp552@isdugp.bham.ac.uk

Antti Saario
ass776@novell5.bham.ac.uk

© Productions electro Productions (*PeP*) 1999