Simon Emmerson - Corfu Seminars
- 26-28th June 2013
A performer is playing a piece with live
electronic transformations. Do we perceive a relationship between what the
performer does and what we hear? What should we listen out for? Simon Emmerson argues
that the listener perceives, first and foremost, effects not causes. Indeed we may not need consciously to uncover causes for the music to ‘make sense’. We risk developing
an approach to listening that reduces music to a kind of game in which the technical causes of what we hear become a distraction from the expressive
content. We need to distinguish the needs of
composer, performer and audience.
‘Memory – Theatre – Technology’
For over 35 years Simon Emmerson has
created works with instruments and live electronics. For many of these he has
used the technology somehow to extend memory –
using many approaches and meanings, from mythic time to a very personal ‘memory
theatre’ (from the ancient Greeks to the Elizabethan theatre of Shakespeare)
which he has recently used in his concert installation Memory Machine. He examines how these works have evolved and how ideas become
music.
‘Expanding
the Horizon of Electroacoustic Music Analysis’
Leigh Landy and Simon Emmerson have been
directing an AHRC-funded project ‘New Multimedia Tools for Electroacoustic
Music Analysis’ at De Montfort University (2010-2013), with Pierre Couprie (EAnalysis software development) and Michael Gatt (research student and
OREMA/eOREMA projects). This has resulted in a series of symposia and a
forthcoming book (title as above) from CUP. Simon Emmerson discusses the
project, the rich range of genres and styles examined – and assesses where we
have reached in looking at this field.