Studioforum
April / Mai 2011
Portrait Dugal McKinnon [Composer from New Zealand]
01. [o] / Acousmatic / 2001
02. Interview 1 Duglas
McKinnon/Johannes S. Sistermanns
03. Popular Archeology: Cassette, c.
1967-1994 / Sound installation (cassette players and tape
loops) / 2010
04. Interview 2 Duglas
McKinnon/Johannes S. Sistermanns
05. Strane e sconosciute vie /
Acousmatic / 2007
06. Blue Kisses Green /
Orchestra and multichannel audio/ 1999/2009
07. Catalogue with Analogues /
Acousmatic / 2005
08. Interview 3 Duglas
McKinnon/Johannes S. Sistermanns
09. Horizont im Ohr /
Acousmatic / 1998
10. Untitled (Counterfeit Readymade #1)
/ Version for Bass clarinet and marimba / 2008
11. Numena / Harp and Stereo
Audio, 2000 / Live performance, Tokyo 2003
12. Diktat, Ditty, Half-Life /
second movement, Piano duo
Work comments:
[o] / Acousmatic / 2001
eau [o] n. (F, = water) 1. ...
[o] seeks to establish a metaphorical relationship between music and
water. The meaning of this
metaphor, as is the case with all metaphors, is endlessly open to
interpretation.
Completed in Berlin, February 2001 in the Grosse Tonstudio of the
Technische Universität
Berlin, thanks to a DAAD stipendium.
Popular Archeology: Cassette, c.
1967-1994 / Sound installation (cassette players and tape
loops) / 2010
The installation plays upon the myth of totality that has emerged in
the online era, an era in which the entire world is available in
digitised form, effectively replacing the real in an enactment of
Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra. This totality is a myth, the digital
archive is imperfect, and what is left behind will be forgotten or
misrembered, later reemerging as artifacts for reconstruction and
recontextualisation by the archeologists of the future. The
installation sonically enacts this cultural-historical process by
erasing those element of pop history which are not recycled into bits
and bytes, creating a cloud of sonic dust, out of which emerge
privileged remnants: the hooks, licks and phrases that may survive the
“evolution” of pop, the vagaries of the recording industry and the
trawling net of the digital archive. These remnants are collected in an
open archive, Popular Archeology: Cassette, c. 1967-1994. [Abridged
from artist statement]
www.lettingspace.org.nz/dugal-mckinnon/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkZXtUbanao
Strane e sconosciute vie /
Acousmatic / 2007
“Strange and unfamiliar paths”, opened on to by the harp ritornello
from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo.
The piece is available on DEGEM’s Orpheus 400 compilation. Thanks to R
Humphries for the beautiful recording of a thunderstorm (rbh thunder
storm.wav), made available via the Freesound Project and licensed under
the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license.
Blue Kisses Green / Orchestra and
multichannel audio/ 1999/2009
Premiered by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, cond. Hamish McKeich
Recording courtesy of Radio New Zealand Concert
It is impossible to live in Wellington (NZ) without paying attention to
its environment, or the environment paying attention to you. Equally,
it is impossible to leave without carrying an interior imprint of its
sharp green hills, scudding clouds, dragon sea, and particularly for
me, those days when it suddenly all stops leaving the city suspended
between a hush of blue sky and a seemingly frozen harbour. Blue Kisses
Green is somehow ‘about’ this elemental ferociousness, delicacy, and
beauty.
Catalogue with Analogues /
Acousmatic / 2005
Catalogue with Analogues’ primary layer of materials – the catalogue –
is pure musique concrète, exploring the possibilities for a
music of the ‘raw’. Relationships between objects in this layer are
established analogically, by similarities both direct and indirect.
These, along with a secondary layer of materials providing soft
embellishments of the ‘catalogue’, are the analogues the title refers
to.
Horizont im Ohr / Acousmatic / 1998
Literally, ‘Horizon in the Ear’. A title intended to gently direct
attention towards the possibility of a soundscape in which the
organism, listening and/or embodied in the sounding materials of the
work, is positioned in labile relationship to a horizon.
There would appear to be a landscape whenever the mind is transported
from one sensible matter to another, but retains the sensorial
organisation of the first, or at least a memory of it. The earth seen
from the moon for a terrestrial; the city for a farmer. ESTRANGEMENT
would appear to be a necessary precondition for landscape.
— Jean François Lyotard
Untitled (Counterfeit Readymade #1)
/ Version for Bass clarinet and marimba / 2008
Premiered by clarinettist Richard Haynes (AUS) and percussionist Arnold
Marissen (NL).
Recording courtesy of Radio New Zealand Concert
The piece is derived from baritone sax improvisations by Jeff Henderson
(NZ). His improvising was recorded and edited into a six-minute audio
document, which was then transcribed. The transcription is a readymade
of sorts, as it is taken from an extant object, and a counterfeit in
that it points to a performance that never happened. Though not a risk
in this instance—given
that the piece is a forgery—a transcription should not efface its
object but rather serve as a description through which to approach the
original. Put another way, the performance of Untitled (Counterfeit
Readymade #1) can be located in relation to the original performance,
the derived audio document and the transcription, while being none of
these. The marimba part provides commentary on this mercurial object,
drawing out and setting in relief its harmonic, melodic and rhythmic
features, but rarely doubling it literally. The piece was premiered in
2005, in its original form for baritone sax and marimba, by saxophonist
Lars Mlekusch (CH) and percussionist Arnold Marissen (NL).
Numena / Harp and Stereo Audio,
2000 / Live performance, Tokyo 2003
Numena is a sonic commingling of human and nonhuman. The work's
compositional process thus focused on blurring boundaries between
instrument and audio, in seeking to create the illusion of an haecceity
(a singular material entity) or, to use a more contemporary term, a
meta-instrument. This is not a purely formal concern; regarded
figuratively, the piece is animistic, in the sense that the harp itself
can be considered as the numena (local god or presiding deity)
governing the sounding flow.
Diktat, Ditty, Half-Life / second
movement, Piano duo
Piano duo
Live Performance by Xenia Pestova and Pascal Meyer, Luxembourg 2010
An unfolding set of miniatures for the duo Pestova/Meyer, who are
premiering this “work-in-progress” as new movements are added to the
piece.
Dugal McKinnon – Biography
Dugal McKinnon’s creative output encompasses electroacoustic and
instrumental compositions, sound installations and multimedia
collaborations. His music has been performed in Asia,
Australasia, Europe and North America. Most recently, his collaborative
film with London Fieldworks, Superkingdom, was awarded an Honourary
Mention in the Hybrid Arts category of
the 2010 Prix Ars Electronica. In 2009, the New Zealand Symphony
Orchestra performed Blue Kisses Green, his work for orchestra and
multichannel audio. Other recent work includes: the sound installation
Popular Archeology: Cassette, c. 1967-1994 (2010); Diktat Ditty
Half-Life, an ongoing series of compositions for the piano duo
Pestova/Meyer; and Geophony (2008), a sound installation based on the
real-time sonification of live seismic data streams from sensors around
New Zealand.
Dugal is a writer on sonic art and contemporary music with a particular
focus on the aesthetics of sound-based art and the electroacoustic
music of New Zealand. He is also a partner in Now
Future, an organisation he co-founded with Sophie Jerram, which
realizes and instigates arts- centred projects that address key issues
in sustainability and environmentalism. He teaches sonic arts,
instrumental/vocal composition and the history and aesthetics of
sound-based art at the New Zealand School of Music where he is also
Director of the Lilburn Electroacoustic Music Studios. He holds a BA in
Literary Criticism and a BMusHons (First Class) from Victoria
University of Wellington, and a PhD in Composition from the University
of Birmingham (UK).
www.nzsm.ac.nz/people/staff/dugal-mckinnon.aspx
www.sounz.org.nz/contributor/composer/1186
Interview [Karlsruhe Decembre 2010] and production of the broadcasting
by Johannes S. Sistermanns