Have A Listen...An Autumnal Special

The need to be productive has been upon me somewhat this autumn. More projects announced in due course.
In the meantime, when I can, I have been gathering together some edits and material to share with you in this blog. Many people have requested I put my work together for a website. I enjoy writing directly in this way about the things that move me, blog style, and also to put short messages into the ether via Twitter.

For those of you who are new, there are links to works online for 'Contours' on this site, played at Odin's Glow in 2009 and at Illuminating York 2011, outside York Minster.

For more long standing people, here are some edits for you to hear. All of this material hasn't been heard since it was played at the relevant arts exhibitions and events.

I know some enquiries have come in this week. Answering those, yes indeed, details about the original piece we did for the Illuminating York Festival in 2008 are available for viewing and hearing online! Parts from our archive footage for 'Accendo' have been available for viewing for some time and can be seen online here. A short explanation on the inspiration behind it can be found in the same place. The theme of the relationship between art, science and the transmission of knowledge is a fascinating one. I seized on the opportunity to work with a combination of self-written scripts and original texts by Alcuin of York. The soundscape was complex and perhaps deserving of a post in its own right.

But moving on...

ROSE - ILLUMINATING YORK 2010

I should mention that as I put the extract here, there are also some very good images to be found on my fellow creator Ross Ashton's flickr photostream here: rehearsal shots and event pictures.
If you click on the title, you'll go to pages on this blog where I spoke about it at the time.
This edit contains extracts from the sections 'Yorkshire Rose' and 'The Rose Garden' where I worked with a number of local performers, many involved in the Mystery Plays cycle, to record poetry for the piece. Early music enthusiasts present at the time may have spotted the musical motif (which returned throughout in various disguises) of the medieval carol ' 'Ther is no rose'.


VIA MARIS

This is a son et lumiere seen/heard at St Andrews Festival 2009.

The first part of the edit is from 'The Dream of St. Regulus', the second part is 'Fish Tango'.

THE CURIOSITY BOX


A little something seasonal and wintry.

I was commissioned to create a piece to accompany an interactive video snow globe created by The Projection Studio in 2008. It doesn't feature on this blog, but was destined for the award-winning Enchanted Parks 2008, along with a sound installation I created for the rose garden there, called 'All My Love'.


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UPDATE: Paralympic Projections On Houses Of Parliament returning soon!

The son et lumiere on the Houses of Parliament is on a short break right now, from Monday 3rd - Thurs day 6th September. The projections were timetabled to take a break then at the request of the Houses Of Parliament.
But we are back projecting Friday 7th, Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th September.
If you want to see this celebration of the richness of the Paralympics and hear some of our greatest GB Paralympian moments of the past come on down!

Presentations run every fifteen minutes from 8.30pm with the final show beginning at 11.45pm.

It's Because I'm A Londoner: Olympic Projections on Parliament - 1908

When The Projection Studio asked me if I wanted to be involved with the Houses Of Parliament Olympic son et lumiere, I knew that I did. I have made sound pieces for many places but none for my home city before.

The piece itself has a first section in two parts. The first part is a creative visual & sound piece centred on the 1908 London Olympics.

Original audio material from 1908 is a rather limited resource. I had to rely on other types of research material to create a section which used soundscape techniques as the principle guide. 1908 then was to have great depth of layered sound, and no part of it was anything that wouldn't have been heard in 1908, from Edwardian trams to the Thames boat sirens through to music, instruments & early 20th century amplification technology!

To add human voice to the 1908 Olympics, I tracked down Patrick Stevenson, the great-grandson of the 1908 Olympics central Toastmaster, William Knightsmith. It is Knightsmith you see in probably one of the most iconic photographs of the London 1908 Olympics, with his enormous megaphone. Knightsmith is something of a toastmaster legend, adopting the red coat to wear when working to avoid being confused with waiters. A favourite of the Royal Family, he also was toastmaster for many occasions for them. With the Olympics taking place at Shepherd’s Bush and Knightsmith living nearby he was first and most obvious choice to keep the Royal Family informed as to the stadium activities.

Knightsmith’s presence highlights a critical fact – there were no public address systems as we understand them now. White City Stadium was still a full sized stadium though, so the presence of men with megaphones were essential to convey messages and crowd announcements.

The importance of this is highlighted in a section from Conan Doyle’s report from the Marathon, another text used in this section, where he describes the audience around him only being able to identify the winning swimmers by the hoisting of the relevant national flag!

Text announcements accompanying the photographs seen in the piece came from research I carried out from the official reports of the 1908 Olympics. Patrick Stevenson recorded the announcements, playing the role of his great-grandfather for the London 2012 Olympics. This had a certain ring of appropriateness around it for all involved and I was glad that I was able to find him and learn so much more from him, so my thanks go out to him.

This article shows Knightsmith and his megaphone with Patrick.

Onto megaphones.
This is the most unique aspect of the 1908 piece and is the biggest indicator of just how different a time it was. We are used to electrical technology of every kind. Acoustic amplification is surprisingly efficient but has a sound all of its own. The sound of a large aluminium megaphone was replicated by listening, in situ, to Patrick speaking through a real, 2ft long one he owned.

I analysed those recordings carefully and found that amplification took place so efficiently that he needed to be recorded a small distance away. From there I could hear how the metal affected his voice and found the best way to create that was after recording, where I could control any resonant frequencies of the metal cone to my advantage. It took a while to get that absolutely right. When heard on the embankment, it sounded precisely as if he was announcing to the crowd there.

I mentioned Conan Doyle earlier and indeed, he has a longer standing connection to British Athletics and the Olympics than many may realise, as Peter Lovesey has made clear in this article from the Journal Of Olympic History. For the 1908 Olympics, Conan Doyle wrote an enduring piece reporting the 1908 Marathon, the most iconic event of that Olympics. 
We approached Neil Oliver to ask if he would be willing to play the part of Conan Doyle and read out the key excerpts from this piece. Conan Doyle's report is a wonderful document which describes the feeling and atmosphere of what it felt like to be there, on that day, amongst that crowd and to watch Dorando Pietri stagger across the line only to subsequently be disqualified. The British love of the underdog was very much in evidence from Conan Doyle’s report as the British loved Dorando more for trying and then losing his medal than it ever thought again of the actual winner of that race!

Neil Oliver, as an historian, archaeologist and TV presenter was excellent to work with on this piece, which is both history and written artefact. We recorded Neil speaking Conan Doyle's words and he gave it a knowledgable sincerity that gave the soundscape even more weight.

In addition, the Conan Doyle report describes more than just the race, but also other events that day. This was one of most colourful texts to read through for the detail of his descriptions but also the feeling of being in the stadium, moment by moment.

Music choice was equally fascinating and included popular music of 1908 along with pieces played at the Olympics. Again, even in the absence of any 21st century amplification, the crowd still needed to be entertained. The Victorians and Edwardians were rather musically sophisticated and the brass and military band live music phenomenon of the 19th century was also present at the 1908 Olympics too. I found a program listing the music to be performed by a military band at the occasion of the gymnastics final. One of those pieces was chosen for inclusion along with the only original related recorded material I could find, a recording of "Take Me On The Flip-Flap" sung by the music hall star Ella Retford. 
The 1908 Olympics took place within the Franco-British Exhibition. The White City Stadium was built for that purpose. The main public interest initially was in the Exhibition, not the Olympics! The song commemorates the most popular part of the exhibition, the Flip Flap, a ride not dissimilar to the London Eye in principle. 
It makes verbal reference to the Olympic athletes too in one of the written verses as well as describing the multiple ways you could get to Shepherd's Bush by public transport.
The kind permission of Windyridge Records to allow us to include their transferred Retford recording was much appreciated and very generous indeed. The preservation of very early recordings is something I am enthusiastic about and it is companies such as Windyridge that help to keep such music alive and accessible to us.

That then was 1908. 
Other parts to follow!

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