Past Projects
Music Poetics and an Ethnography of Listening
Music Poetics is the term we use for a genre of writing about sound and music. This genre is an attempt to describe evoke and share the listening experience in another medium, usually, but not always in words. There are examples below — group responses to listening to ‘In Earth’ by Errollyn Wallen, and personal reflections on listening to the cello album of Leila Bordreuil ‘Not An Elergy’. A good example of this genre can be found in ‘Ways of Hearing: Reflections on Music in 26 Pieces’ (2021. Ed. Burnham, Seltzer & Von Moltke. Princeton UP) and some of the reflections in that collection include a photographic essay, poetry as well as prose.
In HARK we developed this ‘poetics’ approach through the Listening Groups: from recording verbal responses to the music; collating the results across groups; by content analysis we identified themes, metaphor clusters, strands of imagery; and we wrote these into a script. A dialogical process of distillation was developed using the script and a single person (the ethnographer JHLR) wrote a ‘prose poem’ which was further refined into a ‘libretto’ and written into the score of the music (see the images above). This was performed as a co-procuctive art-work with a twelve string orchestra (conducted by Bede Williams) with the ‘libretto’ being spoken by two trained voice performers in a ‘conversation’ over the relevant music. This methodology was used for all 4 movements of the composition ‘Photography’ by Errollyn Wallen. Listeners’ creative output resulted in the performed Ethnography of Listening. Thos project exemplifies the practice of emphasis in create work. This a transfigurative process whereby an art-work, by reception by others, stimulates the creativity of others such that they produce another art-work . Ekphrastic practice is discussed in the longer version of the paper below: Ethnography of Listening. The project is documented in the papers below and you can replicate our method for yourself — listen to Photography first, reflect on the images, words, sensations that arise, then listen to the performance of the Ethnography of Listening. All of this you can do from the audio files below.
The Ethnography of Listening Project was written up and presented at the FASS Conference at the Open University. A short version and full version of that paper can be found below. Here is the Abstract of the paper:
This paper explores the expression of listeners’ significations after listening to a piece of orchestral music. It describes the dialogical creation and performance of an ethnographic evocation of the experience of listening to a particular pice of music – a Performance Ethnography of Listening. 40 members of 4 Listening Groups listened to a four-movement piece for string orchestra “Photography” by Errollyn Wallen and gave their responses which were taped and transcribed. A Source Text was created from the raw responses from which was written a Performance Script for two ‘voices’. The script was set within the time signature of the piece. A Listening Event was designed to enable an audience, including the Listening Group members, the composer, the conductor, the ethnographer, and the ‘voices’ (60 people) to listen to, and discuss a ‘triptych’ performance of the work – the central panel being the performed ethnography with the music the side panels being a performance of the music alone. This paper describes the ethnographic process, includes the Performance Script and audio examples of the performed ethnography. It theorises our practice in terms of the work of: Nicholas Cook (1998) on the relationship between words and music; Anthony Gritten (2017) on intermedial practice; Lawrence Kramer (2011) on criteria for ekphrastic practice; and in the light of existing explorations in the HARK Project on, listening habitus, and listening repertoire – ‘auditory play’.
The Documents and Sounds below are ordered to illustrate the subjects in this introduction.
Documents
These are papers written as Music Poetics
Music Poetics (1): Errolyn Wallen’s “In Earth” Listening Responses.
Music Poetics (2): Full Transcript of “In Earth” Responses.
Music Poetics (3): Liela Bordrieul’s “Not an Elegy”.
These are papers concerning the Project structure and the Listening groups:
Listening Groups: Structure, Composition and Program.
Listening Groups: Listening Curriculum.
Listening Research: Pilot Report.
Notes for Listening: Session 5
These are papers concerning the ethnographic work with the piece Photography:
Listening Notes for: Errollyn Wallen’s "Photography”.
Precis of Paper: An Ethnography of Listening.
Full Paper: An Ethnography of Listening.
These are papers theorising about Listening:
Repertoire of Imaginative Auditory Play.
Sounds
The audio links below provide the four movements of Errollyn Wallen’s ‘Photography’ and then the text of the ethnography of listening performed with the music. Listen to the original piece first, then listen to the images and metaphors which our listening group members used to express their responses to the movements when performed with the music.
Also below in Music Poetics (3) the original album by Leila Bordrieul ‘Not An Elegy’ can be found on Boomkat in download or vinyl versions.
Finally I reproduce here (above on a link) a schema of listening modes that we have noticed in responses in the listening groups. These listening modes are often overlapping and are not mutually exclusive but suggest that our listening repertoire is focal at times and immersive at others and that attention oscillates with reverie. These modes map onto the perceptual-cognitive framework proposed by Iain McGilchrist in his work on ‘Attending’.
Music and the Sacred
There are a series of connections between the HARK explorations and a domain of experience that we might call ‘spirituality’.
Music and the Sacred: A Quick Look.
The attention we give to the video/sound art-works that we have created draws on deep traditions of ‘attending’. These have been explored by anthropologists particularly in the context of ritual studies. The practices that we might develop in working with our materials concern those of meditation, contemplation and various postures of (in)attention. We are able also to be reflexive — we can develop and deepen our practices of attending and also notice how we have been attending in the past, and how our experience is changing.
he knowledge-practice concept of ‘transfiguration’ in the gestalt of our sound and vision is the sensory aspect of the way our assumptions, preconceptions and habits are able to be suspended. This suspension makes space for us to notice other features and qualities and these subtle changes are what I ref to as ‘transfigurations’. We can also to notice what arises in our imaginations when such (head/heart/body) spaces are created.
This space is often ‘apophatic’ that is, it enables significance, value and curiosity to thrive without the need to put the ’experience’ into words or other medium immediately, or at all. I quote mark the word ‘experience’ because formally it is moot definitional matter as to whether one can have an experience that is entirely outside/beyond language. There is a space also between what we mean by sensation and experience.
This process is also connected to a key theme of the HARK project which is the engendering of creativity and expression, particularly in improvisatory, embodied, shared ways — we have used the concept ‘ekphrasis’ to describe this creative process and outcome.
These practices radically reframe our sense of the conventional binary between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, and ‘inside’, ‘outside’, and the relationship between the disclosure of the world as it is and our constructions, imaginations and creative rendering of it. We have explored these connections in some Working Papers, Current Projects and some ideas for future work. We would be interested to respond to anyone who is interested in taking these ideas further.
The Workshop on Music and the Sacred produced some Working Notes and a playlist and they can be found here below. As an introduction to what is a long playlist that goes with the text below, you can first listen here to some initial calls to prayer, showing the simplicity of the sounded invitations to enter a meditative space:
The Beyond Babel prayer project was a sound exploration of the Lords Prayer recited by 16 different language speakers in the mother tongue in which they had learned it. This was a moving exploration for those who took part. The recitations were layered to create a sound constellation in which words themselves and the coalescing of the language timbres created a sounded ‘wordless’ prayer. One participant suggested: “So this is what God must hear!’ The title Beyond Babel, is ironic in that different deep mother tongue words when combined become ‘wordless’ sounds and yet remain a prayer. The constellation was used in the departure scene in the Opus: Hiraeth, on exile and migration. Some of the individuals languages and the constellation can be heard here:
An Ecumenical Prayer for Pentacost
Psalmody
The HARK ekphrastic methodology was used to imagine a project, designed along the lines of the later lockdown composing project, of working with the Book of Psalms. We collected many examples of poetic renditions of Psalms covering almost all of the Book of Psalms (in the King James Bible), we proposed that a new Psalter be written, the St Andrews Psalter, which would be composed of editions of groups of psalms chosen by poets who would re-imagine the Psalm and also be paired with composers who would compose a chant for that psalm. 10 -15 psalms would be completed each year for 10 years and perfumed at an Annual Event in St Salvators Chapel. The poets would have the source material already gathered by HARK which is a compendium of all the poetic re-imaginings of psalms ranging from The Venerable Bede, through Sir Philip Sydney, John Keble to Christopher Hill.
This ekphrastic approach has also been considered as a way of working with local church congregations along the lines of the HARK Listening Groups where, through listening and reflecting (and possibly performing) a piece of music (for example the Strathclyde Motets by James Macmillan) a liturgical prayer/meditation could be created and performed in the actual liturgy.
Both of these projects await initiation.