This tour explores the galleries at St Cecilia’s Hall focussing on the significance of water, from transporting materials by boat to using parts of marine animals in the construction and decoration of instruments. Led by Dr Jenny Nex, Curator of the Musical Instrument Collection and Lecturer in Musical Instruments at the Reid School of Music.
Jessica Leary (soprano) Phil Gault (baritone) Christopher Baxter (piano)
Students studying creative writing (School of Languages, Literatures and Culture) and students studying composition (Edinburgh College of Art) will meet one another for the first time on the Monday morning of the Week of Sound. They will work together to create a series of brand new short Operas, mentored through the process by Jane McKie and Gareth Williams. From first ideas and sketches, into the rehearsal and workshop process, through to live performances by Friday afternoon, the entire opera writing process is distilled into five short days. Come hear the results of this experiment on Friday at 4pm in the Reid Concert Hall.
Plus-Minus brings to life Martin Parker’s mirror-shift, a new work which corrals a host of AI music creation, development and performance tools together and drags them through the wringer of contemporary experimental music. The piece explores the sonic identities that form when we shift the AI mirror from reflecting us head-on, to glancing side-long across our rapidly developing landscape of human-computer entanglements.
The remainder of the concert features two works that each do arranging in a different way. Like the many chamber versions of orchestral works made for Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna from 1918, we include Mark Knoop’s intimate arrangement of Laurence Crane’s orchestral piece Cobbled Section After Cobbled Section.
The concert concludes with the premiere of American composer Aaron Wyanski’s arrangement of Arnold Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, the latest instalment in his Schoenberg in Hi-Fi series.
‘Schoenberg in Hi-Fi is an ongoing series of albums that posit an alternate reality. In my speculative universe, Schoenberg lives a little longer — into the late 1950s: a time when a new commodity was reshaping the music industry, the stereo LP. As high-fidelity audio entered the homes of more and more middle-class Americans, record companies began producing and marketing albums around how unique the sounds on it were, whether that was in the exotica of Lex Baxter, the space music of Sun Ra, or the extreme eclecticism of Esquivel. Though mostly aimed at a wide popular audience, countless liner notes spun infinite variations of the same boast: you’ve never heard this before. Schoenberg had been living in Los Angeles for many years, and had he been alive when the Capitol Records building was completed in 1956, he would have been a stone’s throw away from one of the centres of mid-century pop music. What if an executive from Capitol had become taken with the idea of presenting Schoenberg’s works in the manner of the many “jazzing up the classics” albums produced in this period?’ — Aaron Wyanski
Martin Parker’s piece has been supported by the Bridging Responsible AI Divides programme with funds received from the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/X007146/1]
