2023 has been a massive year of writing. Normally this is predominantly music, however this year, the writing of words were given considerably more attention.

With the 2023/2024 academic year being my final year of the PhD, I focused a significant amount of this time writing about my works, processes, practice, and those of other arts-based researchers within my role as editor for the CeReNeM Journal. This has culminated in a variety of written forms including zines, articles, journals, book chapters, and interviews.

  • ADSR Zine 018: notations.
    This is a short and visually rich series of statements about my notation practice, navigating the sketch and raw pencilled impulse to eventual rendered scores. This was published in May, 2023 and I sincerely thank James Hazel and Elia Bosshard for their support and ideas.
  • CeReNeM Journal, issue eight.
    In mid 2022, I put my hand up to take on the next issue of our postgraduate journal at CeReNeM, University of Huddersfield. The previous issue, edited by Colin Frank, was published in 2020, and focused upon performing stuff, object agency, the transdisciplinary, and human-entity interactions. Given the recent Covid-19 pandemic, a worsening political landscape and climate crisis, huge leaps in AI and ecological understandings, and more locally, a struggling Brexit UK, I decided to focus upon the idea of post-, afterness-, or beyondness- as an open invitation for reflection, discussion, images, and writings. Almost 15 months later, with so many lovely conversations with friends and colleagues within artistic research and a steep InDesign learning curve, issue eight is out! With contributors from the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Russia, Italy, and France, this issue focuses upon ideas of afterness, the post-human, AI, the audient, queer and femme timbre, collage-making, space, exile, mapping, corpus, movement, and improvisation.
  • Context No. 49 (2023): Navigating a Two-dimensional Field / across the plane
    This is my first peer-reviewed article, published in the University of Melbourne’s journal for music research Context. This article discusses my recent piano work Fourteen transcriptions from across the plane [plain] (2023) and it’s novel x-y axis notation. The article begins with:

Composing for the piano is beset by constant compromise. As a composer whose musical language is exemplified by glissandi, microtones, timbral transformation, and states of destabilisation and distortion, the piano—at least traditionally focused upon the keyboard—invokes feelings of frustration and constriction.

***

What might a notation that captures the entirety of the piano look like? It would need to capture the materials of the instrument’s body, the entire length of the strings, the mechanism of the keys, the hammers, the dampers, and include allowances for preparations. It would need to decentralise the keyboard without completely abandoning it as a parameter. A notation and lens that, at least for my own needs, allows for the possibility to destabilise and distort pitch, timbral transformation, manipulations of the strings, and invites new ways for thinking about piano technique.

  • Cultures of Sound, Temporary Contemporary Vol 3: Graphic and Graphite.
    This is my first book chapter, published by the University of Huddersfield Press as part of its annual ‘cultures of…’ series which includes concerts, talks, exhibitions, installations, workshops, community events, and publications. My essay builds upon the aforementioned ADSR Zine piece, and details the symbiotic relationship between the initial sketch and the final score…

…one that embraces the initial graphical representation of sound, free from a specific notational model, one raw, expressive, and immediate, capturing a multitude of musical parameters into a coherent and simple rendering.

Alongside these were a number of interviews appearing in:

Links to all of these pieces of writing are provided, all with open access. Enjoy 🙂

Unknown's avatar

Published by jakobbragg

Leave a comment