Sound waves
Waves at St Cecilia’s Hall, Tour 1: Acoustical waves. How do musical instruments work?
Tour | 11am | St Cecilia’s Hall
NEW Composer talk with Aaron Wyanski on his project Schoenberg in Hi-fi
Talk | 10:10am | Hunter Lecture Theatre, ECA Main Building
Good vibrations: Performing Alvin Lucier’s The Queen of the South
Workshop | 2pm | Reid Concert Hall
Waves at St Cecilia’s Hall, Tour 1:
Acoustical waves. How do musical instruments work?
Tour | 11am | St Cecilia’s Hall
This tour explores the galleries at St Cecilia’s Hall focussing on how sounds are made and the purposes of the different parts of musical instruments. Led by Dr Jenny Nex, Curator of the Musical Instrument Collection and Lecturer in Musical Instruments at the Reid School of Music.
Composer talk with Aaron Wyanski: Schoenberg in Hi-fi
Talk | 10:10am | Hunter Lecture Theatre, ECA Main Building
Ahead of Friday’s closing concert, which features his arrangement of the Variations for Orchestra, composer Aaron Wyanski will discuss his ongoing project Schoenberg in Hi-Fi–a series of albums and performances that posit a speculative reality in which the music of Arnold Schoenberg was marketed to a wide popular audience as part of the LP boom of mid-century America. As high-fidelity audio entered into more and more middle-class homes, countless albums were produced and sold on the basis of how new, or unique, or exotic the sounds contained on it were. Essentially: you’ve never heard this before. Though his works are from an earlier era, as far as popular culture is concerned Schoenberg’s music would have been new sounds to most. Though extremely implausible, this project explores the possibility that an imaginary 1950s record executive might have been sincerely committed to presenting this body of work to a broad audience, similar to the many other adaptations of canonical classical music from the era.
Open to all: to register your interest, email us.
Good vibrations: Performing Alvin Lucier’s The Queen of the South
Workshop | 2pm | Reid Concert Hall
Alvin Lucier’s piece The Queen of the South (1972) invites performers to a musical exploration of a technique developed by the eighteenth-centry German physicist Ernst Chladni (see image above) to study and demonstrate the action of sound vibrations on physical objects. The text score instructs performers on any suitable instrument to play in such a way that material such as sand strewn on specially arrange, responsive sheets begins to form distinctive patterns and figures, thus ‘making visible the effects of sound’. This workshop provides a chance for performers on any sustaining instrument to explore the techniques and setup necessary to realise this work and to learn about the science behind it.
While the workshop is directed primarily at staff and students of Edinburgh College of Art, members of the wider community in Edinburgh who are interested in attending are invited to contact us by email. The process and outcomes will be documented on the Week of Sound website. Staff and students should register through their university account here.
The image shows a table illustrating the results of some of Chladni’s experiments with resonant plates, from Ernst Chladni, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (1787). © Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, rightsstatements.org/page/NoC-NC/1.0/