Musical time Machines
‘Meet the Composers!’ Seminar Discussion.
A successful seminar took place with eae members (composers who were premiering new works) and first year music students from
The aim of the afternoon was to introduce the students to the composers and their works and to hopefully allow them to gain insight into the working methods employed by John Stead, Stanislaw Hansel and Nigel Bartram in writing their compositions.
As all three of the works belong to very different musical genres (Musique Concrete, Solo keyboard, and Electro-Acoustic composition) the students would hopefully find inspiration for their own works next year.
All the students taking part were composers who had written works for their AS music composition course this year and were considering possible music topics for their work in September.
John Stead addresses York college students demonstrating the editing, filtering and reverberating of fast particulate sounds in his piece ‘particles’.
A feature of this kind of educational event is to include performances in part of the works, and to show suitable images which stimulate discussion and keep things moving when needed. For example there were score clips from Hansel’s ‘Studies in Negative time’ and Bartram’s ‘The Lark Ascends'.The patterns created by sub-atomic particles in a Wilson Cloud Chamber’ provided an interesting visual cue for John Stead’s introduction to his ‘Natural Histories’ book 1 (‘Particles’) piece.
Nigel Bartram takes questions on his work ‘The Lark Ascends’ from students and co-performer David Truswell. Discussion included the nature of writing a piece for 2 pianos and the recalling of time and place with a quadraphonic speaker ‘skylark field’.
The students were asked after the event for some evaluative comments and here they are :
‘I enjoyed the discussion and found the topic areas interesting, and I probably would never have thought about writing in this way....
The music was interesting, something I wouldn’t normally listen to, but it’s always good to do something different!’
(Kate Garbutt)
‘It was great to see how different people are inspired by different things, and how creative people can write such interesting music….’
(Dan Symington)
‘I think it’s good for students to go to these events because it broadens the mind and you can understand better how compositions develop from just one idea…’
(Jess Ledger)
‘It was interesting and helpful for our own music compositions to listen to examples of music by modern composers and find out the reason they have written in this way..
(Tom Warden) (Ewan MacGregor)
I found it very interesting and helpful, although some of the concepts were rather confusing, but it was a good experience and well worth a day away from college’
I found it very interesting and helpful, although some of the concepts were rather confusing, but it was a good experience and well worth a day away from college’
It was very pleasing that the comments were so positive about a relatively simple educational event. As can see from our archive we have in the past asked students to write short compositions (e.g only using a Jen mono-synthesizer as source material for sampling) or have played excerpts from works to be performed in the classroom and then set up email correspondence with the composers/performers prior to the event. click here to view the evaluation
All three of these approaches work and will be used in future events. where distance is involved between myself as education co-ordinator and the learners it would perhaps be desirable to use the email project idea to break down barriers between all involved beforehand.