This portfolio explores a combination of acoustic performance with technology in various guises, including the use of backing tracks alongside an ensemble, the manipulation of live instruments with effects and the use of synthesizers and samplers along with an instrumental ensemble. A key feature that runs through the portfolio is the use of specific non-musical subject themes as inspiration for the music. These include the murders of five prostitutes in Ipswich in 2006 by Steve Wright, a speech by David Davis on people trafficking from 2005, the Mumbai hostage situation and bombings of 2007, drug culture and the sounds of London. A large proportion of the pieces that make up this portfolio have contributed to a fusion album entitled Opposites React. This album explores how acoustic performance can be combined with electronics and includes performances and collaborations with performers, poets, producers and visual artists.

Work which takes from elsewhere forms an important thread in European art music. There is a long tradition of music which variously borrows, thieves, pastiches, plagiarises, ironically ‘retakes’, hoaxes, impersonates and appropriates. The music I have written for Off the edge, while seeking to honour and add to this thread, also attempts to zoom in upon and make explicit the idea of an ultimate and irreversible composerly self-annihilation, a kind of one-way exit-gate from the world of authored musical works itself made of pieces of music, which so much of this tradition, I feel, points towards. (Of my nine pieces, it is perhaps Time to go—only, with its ‘à la suicide note’ texts and its music that seems to slide in from far beyond the frame that is ‘composer Luke Stoneham’, which manages to get closest to this.) I have chosen the title Off the edge, because all of my music tries to capture a sense of nocturnal peripheral vision: be content with catching glimpses of the composer Luke Stoneham, because as soon as you turn to look at him face-on, he disappears.

The focus of the compositional approach presented in this folio is the sounding environment. The term sounding environment is used in this context to refer to the whole of our living experience in the world which we might register as relating to sound. It might include everything that is sounding, seemingly sounding, imagined sounding, remembered sounding, sensed as sounding, composed to sound. It includes thus the actual sound environment, all that is sensed or interpreted as sound and imaginary sounds. This dissertation accompanies the seven acousmatic and the two sound installation works included in the folio. It is divided into two parts. In the first part relevant ideas and theories both from the literature of electroacoustic music composition and soundscape composition are discussed while in the second the compositional approach to the sounding environment is presented as applied to the works.

This thesis considers the pervasive and multifaceted influence of Richard Wagner’s music, aesthetics, and politics on British composers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on music analysis, hermeneutics, and various archival sources (composers’ writings, contemporary reviews, and unpublished music), each chapter of the thesis focusses on case studies that bring British musical Wagnerism into dialogue with a number of other prominent artistic and cultural currents during the period under consideration: notably, Celticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Arthurianism, nationalisms, mysticism, pantheism, eroticism, and ideas relating to the integration of or translatability of the arts. Despite the sometimes widely divergent aesthetic, political, and social ends for which these composers called on Wagnerian ideas and techniques, this thesis argues that all these manifestations of Wagnerism were united by their composers’ desire to regenerate or re-enchant a world that was perceived to be in a state of crisis or decay. Ultimately, by viewing these composers and works through the lens of British Wagnerism, this study enriches our understanding of British music of the period and situates it the context of a wider European phenomenon.

This thesis consists of a portfolio of nine musical compositions with accompanying recordings and commentary. The works included range from solo chamber music to large ensemble and explore the notions of mimesis, memory, and borrowed materials in musical composition. The commentary begins by providing a framework and historical context to the portfolio and in particular explores mimesis as an æsthetic device across the centuries and art forms. Music for amateurs and multiple tempi are then presented as two sub facets within the main research before a detailed exploration of the various source materials ensues. The commentary examines different approaches taken to an eclectic mix of source materials including popular music, hymns and plainchant, and music from the classical canon. Questions raised by writing music with multiple tempi or for amateurs are addressed before a general conclusion examining approaches to melody, harmony, rhythm, and form, across the portfolio.

No description available.

Technology plays a vital role in the creation of any form of art. In music this has been dominated by a stationary condition in which contemporary ‘academic music’ (new music created in institutions and descending from traditional European models) is in its majority still generated exclusively by a technology of more than a century ago. Additionally, the totality of sound as musical material is now commonly acknowledged, posing problems about the nature and efficiency of the already existing musical instruments and the development of new ones. The current situation in the creation of contemporary music offers a myriad of possibilities in which tools, controllers and instruments have an impact on the creation and conceptualization of music, giving rise to different aesthetic positions and creating new dilemmas in which present, past and future are in constant assessment. This thesis seeks to examine some of the concepts and ideas behind a number of my works in which instrumental sound exploration is essential for the development of the compositional process. As a result, a series of questions, systems and techniques are analyzed, investigating the relation between tools, technique, notation, composition and musical result. This text is intended as an illustration of my own choices and methods, hoping to offer an insight into my own compositional practice as a product of an exercise of self-analysis and rationalization of my current musical output.

This commentary details the methods and ideas involved in creating the seven portfolio works. The portfolio is comprised of stereo acousmatic works, one mixed work and a multi-channel work, forming the practice-based research completed during the PhD programme at the University of Manchester. The works explore a number of aesthetic concepts encompassing instrumental timbres, cultural sound objects, rhythm incorporation, habitual spaces (the kitchen), imaginary and real objects (jukebox), and visual art sculpture (origami). Uniting the portfolio works is the use of Denis Smalley’s spectromorphology (1997). In its intended function, this tool provides the listener of electroacoustic music with thorough and accessible sets of vocabulary to describe sound events, structures and spaces. The use of this descriptive tool need not stop here. Fortunately, and often unconsciously for the composer, it does not, since all composers create music that is spectromorphological with or without an awareness of its presence at work. In a reversal of conventional practice, my research approaches spectromorphology from an alternate angle, viewing the vocabulary as the informer upon sound material choice and creation. In this reversal, vocabulary no longer functions descriptively; instead the vocabulary precedes the composition, directing my compositional pathway in each piece. This new application, used as a method for selecting and creating sound in the creation of each portfolio work, is an attempt at systemisation and an effort to partly remedy the seemingly endless choice of possibilities we are faced with when beginning a new work.

This study is an exploration of the integration in composition of theoretical and psychoacoustic properties of pitch and duration; its aims are essentially practical in showing how cognitive research can inform composition, but it also addresses more broadly the value and role cognition can have in the current musical compositional climate. Various contexts for this exploration are discussed: the mediating role analysis has within theory and composition; constraints imposed by aesthetic positions and music theory/pedagogy templates; the role of cognitive psychology in connecting music templates and listening experiences; and the ultimately mythopoetic (Cook, 1992) rather than scientific nature of any such theory/psychology integration. Using Huovinen’s “pitch constellation” approach and Lerdahl’s theory of tonal pitch space, a hierarchical pitch-space is set up for the string piece ed erra l’armonia, developing from pc set 5-22 a non-standard octatonic scale (pc set 8-27) as the basic pitch collection of the piece. Similarly, using the works of Fraisse, Hasty and London, a hierarchical rhythm-space is set up for the orchestral piece Pneuma developing, from the indifference interval in duration, the temporal and metric envelops and the duple and triple subdivisions of the tactus, a three layered metrical structure as the generative rhythmic template of the piece. This is contextualised against the problematic notion of metre in modern art-music. General characteristic of both spaces are discussed: redundancy according to information theory, hierarchy in relation to cognitive opaqueness, salience and association; and elaborational and permutational processes. It is argued that composition needs to bridge, in practice, the gap between music theory and psychology of music, looking beyond their often absolutist positions; that cognitive constrains in music should be seen as opportunities to work compositionally along the mind’s cognitive grains in order to maximise structural and expressive communication; and that at a time of a ‘deregulated’ musical language it is necessary to re-develop cognitive heuristics to secure the connection between compositional choices and listening experiences. Three principles are given as guidelines for the alignment of theoretical and cognitive issues in composition. It is proposed that cognitive analysis should be developed as an independent discipline as well as a compositional tool, and that the connections style/cognition should be looked at more closely to gain a more unified perspective on diverse (and divisive) stylistic musical camps.

The domain of this thesis is electroacoustic computer-based music and sound art. It investigates a facet of composition which is often neglected or ill-defined: the process of composing itself and its embedding in time. Previous research mostly focused on instrumental composition or, when electronic music was included, the computer was treated as a tool which would eventually be subtracted from the equation. The aim was either to explain a resultant piece of music by reconstructing the intention of the composer, or to explain human creativity by building a model of the mind. Our aim instead is to understand composition as an irreducible unfolding of material traces which takes place in its own temporality. This understanding is formalised as a software framework that traces creation time as a version graph of transactions. The instantiation and manipulation of any musical structure implemented within this framework is thereby automatically stored in a database. Not only can it be queried ex post by an external researcher—providing a new quality for the empirical analysis of the activity of composing—but it is an integral part of the composition environment. Therefore it can recursively become a source for the ongoing composition and introduce new ways of aesthetic expression. The framework aims to unify creation and performance time, fixed and generative composition, human and algorithmic “writing”, a writing that includes indeterminate elements which condense as concurrent vertices in the version graph. The second major contribution is a critical epistemological discourse on the question of ob- servability and the function of observation. Our goal is to explore a new direction of artistic research which is characterised by a mixed methodology of theoretical writing, technological development and artistic practice. The form of the thesis is an exercise in becoming process-like itself, wherein the epistemic thing is generated by translating the gaps between these three levels. This is my idea of the new aesthetics: That through the operation of a re-entry one may establish a sort of process “form”, yielding works which go beyond a categorical either “sound-in-itself” or “conceptualism”. Exemplary processes are revealed by deconstructing a series of existing pieces, as well as through the successful application of the new framework in the creation of new pieces.