Weathering
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Writer: James Wilkes
Composer: Patrick Brennan
Singer: Robert Elibay-Hartog
Flute: Andre Ramos
Clarinet: Gustavo Dominguez Ojalvo
Violin: Seila Tammisola
Cello: Angelique Lihou
Harp: Murdo Macrae
Conductor and Electronics: Raymond Yiu
Listen to Weathering
Weathering imagines music as an atmospheric phenomenon, a kind of local weather whose range one might enter or leave, shared in common with other listeners and formed from “breath and droplets”, as Wilkes has written. Brennan's score explores the corruption of found material, in this case the spectra of a bell sound treated both acoustically and electronically, creating a soundworld evocative of the atmospheric noise of radio transmission. Woven into this is another play between signal and noise, with key elements of the text encoded into the German radio alphabet and sung by native German speaker Elibay-Hartog.
Atmospheric Sketches Version 1 and Atmoshperic Sketches Version 2 are initial sketches from early in the project:
Click below to download Local Weather From Breath which shows a late draft of the text that has actually been used together with Voiceworks Script which is a working copy of this text, with annotations and ideas from our meetings.
Buildings Don't Fall
is a completed poem that was not used in the end.
Local Weather From Breath (newest version)
A note about the piece:
James Wilkes, in describing how he conceived the text for this project, was particularly clear that his conception of “breath and droplets” covered both poetic and rather more prosaic interpretations of the phrase. Breath and droplets may be something refreshing and heavenly or something disgusting and infectious. I was careful from the outset to isolate musical materials that reflect both these ideas. The notion of locality, too, was never far from my mind when I began work on the piece. Unlike a lot of spectrally conceived works I felt strongly that a somewhat episodic structure was necessary to highlight this.
On writing the piece:
This piece, the first of its type that I have written (it uses microtones in an organised way rather than simply as a colouristic device), was a departure from my usual, somewhat improvisational working method. I gathered the bulk of my pitch material and attempted to organise it coherently before writing a single note. In this sense I feel “composition” is perhaps a less fitting description of the work than “distillation” although, admittedly, the process of analysing and manipulating the source sound to generate useable materials was itself quite labour intensive!
Patrick Brennan 15/5/2010
The following are a few links to ideas that influenced 'Weathering':
Blur Building by Diller & Scofidio
Pulmonary Space by Philippe Rahm
Numbers Stations: The Conet Project - also here
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