Brief Biography:
Paul Dibley is
a Senior Lecturer in Music and Director of the Electroacoustic
Studios at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Paul gained a distinction
in his MA in Digital Music Technology from Keele University
in 1996 (studying with Professor Rajmil Fischman and Professor
Mike Vaughan) and in 2003 he completed a PhD in composition
with Professor Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham,
UK. His work has been performed in Europe, the Far East, Australia
and America and includes Thalis which received a mention at
the 26th International Electroacoustic Music Competition,
Bourges, France.
Programme
Notes:
Patrymau
ar y Dwr
Thalis
Back to Fore
Cradle Cry
Ciné Projector
EARequiem
Ein kleiner Klang
S.O.M.M.S (Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas)
patrymau
ar y dwr - 2004 (Duration: 5'00")
patrymau
ar y dwr (Welsh for ‘patterns on the water’) is
an electroacoustic composition and video that attempts to
capture the essence of the movement of water, using computer
generated graphics and real images of water alongside a soundtrack
containing recordings of water (recorded in Wales).
Software used:
Artmatic, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Audition, CDP and Rajmil Fischman’s
‘AL’.
Created in the
music studios at Keele University with the support of Oxford
Brookes University.
Thalis (Duration:
10'00")
Thalis, the Greek
Philosopher, identified water as the basis of all life. The
composition develops the combining of three distinct elements:
water, the voice, and pitch.
The vocal component
takes the form of a Greek text about the Philosopher. The
pitched element takes the form of sung notes and the manipulated
sounds of pitched instruments. Thalis then proceeds to explore
the relationships between these pitched sonorities and more
ambiguous sounds.
My thanks to Chloe
Kyriakou for reading the text.
Thalis (1998-9)
is a tape composition which performances have included Murmurs,
a weekend of concerts by BEAST at Birmingham, UK celebrating
50 years of musique concrète, The Ear of the Sea, an
international sound art exhibition, Helsinki, Finland, broadcast
on ArtsRadio1, Finland and Sound Box 2.0, a project on the
Internet and at Kiasma, Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki, Finland.
Thalis also received a mention at the 26th International Electroacoustic
Music Competition, Bourges, France.
Back to Fore
(Duration: 6'13"). Performed by Jos Zwaanenburg
Paul Dibley's Back
to Fore is an exploration of live performance with triggered,
prepared sounds. The juxtaposition of and movement between
these two elements allows the flute and the accompaniment
to work both independently and in tandem. Using a combination
of a MIDI interface, Apple Macintosh (running MAX) and a K2000
sampler, the notes played on the flute trigger long textures
or short gestures which after a given period become dlayed
to allow a more complex sound world to develop.
This spontaneity
affords the performer the freedom to react to the sounds and
to the acoustic of the performance space, producing an interesting
soundscape that is never reiterated.
Back to Fore was
written for flautist Jos Zwaanenburg (for flute and live electronics)
and was premiered during the 21st International Study Week
for Contemporary Music, 9 - 16 May 1999 at the Advanced Training
Center for New Music, Lüneburg, Germany. The British premiere
took place on May 27th 2000 as part of the Oxford Contemporary
Music Festival. Other performances of this work have taken
place at a Sonic Encounter in Northampton (10th February 2001)
and at the Rotterdam Music Biennial (Rotterdam Conservatoire,
27th February 2001)
Cradle Cry
The composition
can be traced back to three original sounds: the crying of
an unhappy baby, the wailing of an air raid siren, and the
firing of a gun. The aim of the piece is to create a sonic
landscape associated with these sorrowful sonorities, whilst
only revealing the original sounds for a few brief moments.
The opening of
Cradle Cry evolves slowly over time, eking out and building
upon the misery of the landscape. Brief gestural sections
punctuate the evolutions, allowing the composition to move
into different textural realms. The central section, a sudden
change of course, allows more gestural movement to be injected
into Cradle Cry.
Much of the source
material was created using CDP (Composers Desktop Project)
and filtered with CSound and was entirely mixed in Pro Tools.
Ciné
Projector (Duration: 4'44")
To me, the sound
of a ciné projector is evocative of childhood memories.
It evokes positive recollections, pleasing images of youth,
memories of happy times, but it is a sound that is ingrained
in a different era. This composition explores the physical
sonic world of the projector and the imaginary sonic images
of landscapes held within.
EARequiem
- 2002
An ElectroAcoustic Requiem (duration 23’00”)
Every single sound
heard is taken from recordings of human voices.
Voices fascinate
me. The human utterance can present an enigma in electroacoustic
music. The boundary between the recognisable utterance and
the sounds created from a vocal source but transformed into
a sonic landscape (wholly removed from the original utterance)
is an intriguing and volatile continuum.The understanding
of the human utterance can be further subdivided - whether
the language is fully understood by the listener (where the
words and context will be fully comprehended), partially understood
by the listener (in which case the listener will hear some
utterances as sonic events and some as comprehensible words
and meanings), or an utterance that is completely incomprehensible
to the listener (where the voice is mainly understood as a
sonic event).
The entire requiem
text - every single word of it - is included (in some form,
whether recognisable or not) in this composition. The form
follows the traditional structure and the text appears mainly
in a linear fashion. Sometimes the text is hidden, but often
it is brought to the fore. The languages used in this work
are Latin, English, French, Russian, Welsh and German. As
well as this text, there are also some other human utterances,
such as laughter, the sound of the breath between words and
fricatives.
Why choose a requiem?
I wanted to take a form from the classical canon - something
with an established form and immediacy - that could be used
to structure a more substantial and extended electroacoustic
composition. The structure of a requiem is comparatively prescribed,
the text being taken from the Catholic common Mass with the
exclusion of certain more joyful passages and the addition
of the long thirteenth-century hymn Dies Irae.An obvious inspiration
was the classic electroacoustic composition by Michel Chion.
His Requiem, composed in 1973, is a powerful and important
work that certainly influenced my decision when deciding what
to compose as a more substantial electroacoustic composition.
The sacred connotations
of a requiem were obviously an important basis for the choice
of the text. Great power and strong emotions are suggested
by the Latin text and lend themselves readily to an electroacoustic
composition incorporating human utterance. Whether the composition
is heard as a sacred work or not depends very much on the
ear of the listener. I chose to follow the thought process
of Chion where the ‘intention was not to deliver a message
or a manifesto whether pro- or anti-religious. Rather, the
piece is a personal testimony, in which I invite the listener
to project himself, if he should like to dwell in this music
of his experience and sensibility.’ 1
The voices heard
in EARequiem belong to:
Glenn Archibald,
Christina Bashford, Izzy Bunn, Katherine Cox, Laura Dear,
Paul Dibley, John Goto, Dai Griffiths, George Jenkinson, Antonia
King, Maria Nevins, Miles Palmer, Elena Petiaeva, Craig Prosser,
Julie Reuter, Matt Sharpe and Yoanna Talopp.
1 Chion, Michel: Requiem (CD) p 15
Ein kleiner
Klang - 2002 (duration 1'07")
Ein kleiner Klang
is a very simple minute's worth of sonic play, using just
the archetypal sound of New Zealand pottery. Taken from the
opening of Jonty Harrison's Klang, this short study allowed
me to produce an etude using a metallic, bell-like sound.
Only time stretching, equalisation, reversing and layering
of different pitches were used in this etude.
S.O.M.M.S.
(or Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas):
VCS3 + Digital Synthesis = Satan Oscillate My Metallic Sonatas
[palindrome]
Dr Paul Dibley,
Music Department, Oxford Brookes University, Headington,
Oxford, OX3 0BP, U.K.
Tel (+44) 01865 484966, Fax (+44) 01865 484952
email: Paul.Dibley@brookes.ac.uk
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