CMRC Seminar (Summer Week 2): ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ with Scott McLaughlin (composer) & Heather Roche (clarinet)
Event details
The Garden of Forking Paths project (GoFP) explores how we can compose for contingent instruments that have their own ‘material agency’. This talk situates composition as the organisation of a ‘dance of agency’ (Pickering) between instrument and player around the ‘emergent resistances and [….] strategies of accommodation’ negotiated in performance: which explores the less stable zones of sound production, grounded instead in ideas of responsiveness and ‘ongoingness’ (Haraway). This conceptual apparatus of the project is applicable to any instrument, but the clarinet was the centre of the GoFP practice laboratory so that will be the focus of this talk. I position GoFP as the vital obverse of existing research on the stable and repeatable clarinet multiphonics (e.g. Watts, Rehfeldt), instead offering ways to compose for multiply-unfolding metastable and unrepeatable paths through instrumental space.
Scott McLaughlin (b.1975) is an Irish composer and improviser based in Huddersfield (UK). He started out as a shoegaze/experimental guitarist before studying music in his 20s at University of Ulster then MA/PhD University of Huddersfield (with PA Tremblay, Bryn Harrison). Currently, Scott lectures in composition and music technology at the University of Leeds, and co-directs CePRA (Centre for Practice Research in the Arts), as well as convening the RMA Practice Research Study Group. His research focuses on composing for contingency and indeterminacy in the physical materiality of sound. Scott is currently Co-I on the AHRC SPARKLE (Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Engagement), and recently completed an AHRC Leadership Fellowship, the ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ project, on composing for contingency in clarinets.
Born in Canada, clarinetist Heather Roche lives in London. Recently referred to as ‘The Queen of Extended Techniques’ and ‘a figurehead for contemporary music performance practice’ on BBC Radio 3, she appears regularly as a soloist and chamber musician at European festivals, including the London Contemporary Music Festival, Acht Brücken (Cologne), Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik (Germany), Musica Nova (Helsinki), MusikFest (Berlin), BachFest (Leipzig), Manifeste (Paris), etc. She was a founding member the Cologne-based hand werk, and currently plays with Apartment House (London) and Mimitabu (Gothenburg). She has a longstanding duo collaboration with the German accordionist Eva Zöllner, with whom she has recently performed at the Venice Biennale and Mixtur Festival (Barcelona), as well as on tour in Mexico and Sweden. She has also worked with the Musikfabrik (Cologne), the WDR Symphony Orchestra (Cologne), the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, Alisios Camerata (Zagreb), and ensemble Proton (Bern), among others. She wrote her doctoral thesis at the University of Huddersfield. Her blog on writing for the clarinet attracts 90,000 viewers each year. In 2014 she was the recipient of a Danish International Visiting Artist’s stipendium. She is also reviews editor of TEMPO, published by Cambridge University Press, and teaches clarinet at Goldsmiths University, London. Her debut solo CD, Ptelea, is out on HCR/NMC, and her CD featuring the clarinet works of Christopher Fox, Headlong, appears on Métier. She also records regularly for the Another Timbre label.
Meeting ID: 974 1147 1887
Passcode: 030134