Where You Are, There You Are: Relating Ruin Experience with the Creative Process
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-05-31

In line with my practice of composing ‘musical ruins’, I have previously attempted to create music that somehow is an architectural ruin; an analogy that has proved tenuous at best. However, in a recent commission, I explore ways of equating ruin experience to the compositional process itself. By recording my own reflections from a visit to the ruinous Radcliffe Tower and redirecting these toward my musical borrowing of a Philippe de Vitry motet, I hope to render the latter as a malleable heritage object. I will give a brief overview of my artistic practice before describing the creative processes undertaken with this commission, as well as the critical thinking that informed and resulted from these processes. These include issues surrounding New Materialism, creative-autoethnography, and narrative empathy. How does the musical object, via my experience of the Tower, act upon me and how do I relate this to a listener?

Mark Dyer (Royal Northern College of Music)

TAG Deva 2018
Session: ‘In the Mix’: Recalibrating Music, Heritage and Place