We’re very pleased to be hosting an associates session at the RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group conference. Our session examines Ephemeral Scores and the Work Concept. The session will include 5 works by composers who have taken different approaches to ephemeral notation and has been covered by the study group’s PhD student representative: Louis D’Heudeiers.

Read all of the details of the composers and works here.

Full details for the conference, including early bird registration details, can be found here.

Our session description:

This session explores the relationships of 5 contemporary composers with the ‘work concept’ through the medium of performative presentations of ephemeral scores. The 5 works presented in the session explore facets of notation from video to audio to objects which eventually degrade. Whilst the score of Charles Hutchins’ work Immrama is in fact a programme which generates live pages of notation that disappear after a number of seconds specified by the performers, Robert Stillman’s work The Wheel is inscribed on vinyl that is partly degraded by each performace, eventually rendering the music unperformable. In Andy Ingamells’s Waschen, the score is washed off the composer’s body as he performs it; in Louis d’Heudieres’s series Laughter Studies, it exists solely as an mp3 that is responded to in real time; in Maya Verlaak’s Supervision, it takes the form of an interactive sculpture that is physically altered by a flautist’s sound. In each case, the model of the score as a transcription of, or set of instructions for, the ‘work’ has been abandoned in favour of a concept of the score as a dynamic object that is—perhaps—more of a facet of the performance of the piece than a lasting trace of the compositional process. Taken together, the pieces presented are a statement of a number of possible positions from which the ‘work’ of music might be viewed in the present day, and offer a discussion of the relationship of the work of composition and performance with the ‘work’ of music.